surprise to me. He pushed for Wayne DuMond's parole. A serial rapist. After his release Dumond raped and killed a woman. Now Huckabee denies that he pushed to get him paroled. Remember the rape victim that he was serving time for is Clinton's 3rd cousin. The religious right took on his case a a cause celebre, claiming that Clinton and his team framed and railroaded him into prison.
from wiki: Yeah I know it is wiki, but a lot of pertinent info is there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_DuMond
When Clinton was campaigning for president in 1992, his lieutenant governor Jim Guy Tucker became the acting governor of Arkansas. Tucker reviewed DuMond's life-plus-20-years sentence. Because the jury had not been allowed to take DuMond's castration into consideration, Tucker commuted the sentence down to slightly over 39 years. This clemency meant that DuMond would eventually be considered for parole. When Huckabee became governor, he supported the release of DuMond, with one state official stating "The problem with the governor is that he listens to Jay Cole and reads Steve Dunleavy and believes them ... without doing other substantiative work." Huckabee, addressing DuMond as "Dear Wayne," wrote to DuMond in January 1997: "My desire is that you be released from prison." The letter explained why the governor had denied commutation but instead was recommending parole on the grounds that parole would result in supervision, which Huckabee was said to have felt was important.
The details of how much assistance Huckabee provided to DuMond remain uncertain, in part because the governor met in "executive session" with five of the seven parole board members to discuss the issue, and the administrator who normally took notes was removed from the room. This is a violation of Arkansas law as such secret executive sessions are limited by statute to discussions regarding personnel decisions, specifically to avoid the appearance of undue influence from the Governor's office.
"The board’s executive session appears to have been a violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which says state boards may meet privately only for the “specific purpose of considering employment, appointment, promotion, demotion, disciplining or resignation of any public officer or employee."
Although minutes would normally be kept of even executive sessions, the office administrator was asked to leave the room, and no record of that session was kept.
"Despite the fact that the meeting was closed, there still should have been a record of it, four former board members and a former staffer say. They say that Sharon Hansberry, the board’s office administrator, ordinarily attends the meeting and takes notes. It was also a common practice around that time, they say, for her to tape record the meetings as well, even though the tapes were often destroyed once the minutes were formalized. Former members of the board say that Hansberry was asked to leave the room when the board went into executive session. A spokesman for the board says that there is no record of what occurred in the executive session – no tape recording of the executive session, or notes, or minutes."
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