In his latest New York Times column, Ross Douthat explains the lesson politicians can take from the tragic shooting of four police officers in Washington State:
If you’re a governor with presidential aspirations, you should never, under any circumstances, pardon a convict or reduce a sentence. That’s the lesson everyone seems to have drawn from the dreadful case of Maurice Clemmons, an Arkansas native who murdered four Lakewood, Wash., police officers over Thanksgiving weekend — nine years after Mike Huckabee, then governor, commuted his sentence and the Arkansas parole board set him free.
Indeed, I was one of those who made this very claim. Ross quoting my blog post on Huckabee in which I said, “the “prudent tactic would have been to simply refuse to grant any leniency — ever.” While this quote is accurate, it might give the impression that I condone such action. As I added after that part,
Other governors with their sights set on higher offices had learned that doing nothing—even to correct obvious instances of injustice—was unlikely to cause any long-term political damage. Keeping an innocent man in prison is less harmful to an ambitious politician than freeing someone who may commit other crimes.
A prime example is former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney who refused to pardon a decorated Iraq War veteran for a crime he had committed as a child. The veteran needed a gun permit in Massachusetts to get a promotion at his security guard job and to pursue a possible career as a police officer. As Gov. Huckabee said during the 2008 primaries, Romney chose to deny a deserving veteran a chance to improve his life just because “he wanted to brag that he never, ever gave out a pardon” when he ran for president.
This preference for bragging rights over justice, however, has broad implications for both individuals and society. It is shocking and shameful that governors will admit to shirking their duties and prejudging all cases before ever examining them to see if an injustice needs to be rectified; it is even more shocking and shameful that we let them get away with it. Unfortunately, this incident will confirm for many politicians that political cowardice is not only the best option, but the one preferred by the public. As Ross says, the Maurice Clemmons case is likely to “cast a long shadow over conservative politics, frightening politicians away from even the most sensible reforms — lest they wake up to a tragedy, and find themselves assigned the blame.”
Fortunately, not all politicians are choosing to put the safety and concerns of the public ahead of their own electoral prospects. As an article in The American Prospect notes, the types of reforms that Ross mentions in his column already being championed in some states:
In the 1980s and 1990s — the “tough on crime” era — incarceration was touted as the simple solution to our crime problem. Today, the United States imprisons 1 percent of its entire population. Including the number of people on probation and parole, one in 31 Americans is under supervision of the criminal-justice system. Mass incarceration has succeeded in reducing crime, but the strategy has diminishing returns. The offense rate of the top 20 percent of offenders is more than 10 times that of the average prisoner — a few very active criminals commit most of the crime. But under the current system, offenders who could be more cheaply deterred or rehabilitated instead incur the most expensive — and, from the perspective of its effect on the community, damaging — form of punishment possible. This is why, even as the number of incarcerated people has increased exponentially, crime hasn’t decreased at the same rate.
Fueled by the damage mass incarceration has done to state budgets, a new “smart on crime” movement has emerged to seek new ways of reducing the number of people in the system.
These are the types of reforms that should be led by conservatives. Yet instead we settle for empty sympolic gestures (e.g., executing criminals) that give the impression we are “tough on crime” while ceding real crime-reduction policy solutions to the liberals. No wonder we have presidential candidates choosing injustice when we’ve signaled that we prefer a charicature of “law and order” to the real thing.
December 14th, 2009 | 7:28 pm
“Fortunately, not all politicians are choosing to put the safety and concerns of the public ahead of their own electoral prospects.”
I’m confused by this sentence. I thought you might have simply reversed it, but that doesn’t seem to work, either.
December 14th, 2009 | 9:32 pm
I think it makes more sense to eliminate “safety” from the sentence “..not all politicians are choosing to put the safety and concerns of the public ahead of their own electoral prospects.” Sure, locking up any offender will make us safer. But, I think you were pointing out the broader concerns with justice, prudence, and fiscal responsibility that might lead to leniency.
December 15th, 2009 | 1:08 am
Mike Huckabee gave more than 1,000 pardons and commutations.
A number of the men Huckabee freed subsequently robbed, raped, and murdered women and police officers.
I will never vote for Huckabee.
December 15th, 2009 | 11:24 am
One can call executing criminals a lot of things. I don’t think an “empty symbolic gesture” is one of them.
December 15th, 2009 | 11:34 am
Mike One can call executing criminals a lot of things. I don’t think an “empty symbolic gesture” is one of them.
True, I should have worded that more carefully. What I meant was the show that some governors make of executing criminals as a show that they are “tough on crime.” (Huckabee used to use this as an excuse when people would criticize his law-and-order bona fides.)
December 15th, 2009 | 11:35 am
Executing a murderer is not an empty symbolic gesture. It is a very meaningful symbolic gesture; he beareth not the sword in vain. One may oppose capital punishment because one is in rebellion against the God whose minister the state is, or because one dislikes the symbolism of the modern secular state purporting to exercise that ministry on God’s behalf, or for other reasons that have nothing to do with the symbolism. But the symbolism isn’t empty.
More broadly, I am quite skeptical of the reforms to which Mr. Douthat and Prof. Kleiman refer. In principle, sure, it would be great to be able to rehabilitate more offenders, not to have to spend so much money on prisons, and so on. But the main suggestion — make punishment more swift and certain, and reduce its severity — seems in tension with the ancient rules of our criminal justice system, such as presumption of innocence, right to trial by jury, etc. (Different for parolees and probationers, obviously.) It also seems like a clear opportunity for further expansion of the nanny state.
And finally, if the problem is really a hardened core of the top 20% of criminals, then maybe it would be both just and prudent never to let them out of jail again, a la the reviled three-strikes laws?
December 15th, 2009 | 11:36 am
AMY: “Mike Huckabee gave more than 1,000 pardons and commutations.
A number of the men Huckabee freed subsequently robbed, raped, and murdered women and police officers.
I will never vote for Huckabee.”
It should would be nice to see of the 1,000 how many were pardons. If he gave 700 pardons and 300 cummoutations then I’d be more upset. If he gave 5 pardons and 995 commutations, not so much. I believe he made a sincere Christian effort to do the right thing, I can’t fault him for that. One certainly can’t say he did it for personal political gain.
December 15th, 2009 | 3:11 pm
I do have a comment but first want to be sure I have the facts about the earlier incidents.
Can someone remind me? How many these Huckabee pardons/commutations led to further violent crimes? On what basis did Huckabee make his decisions — did he claim the men 1) were innocent or 2) that their original sentences were too harsh or 3) that after some time in prision, they were now better (and safer) people?
“A number of the men Huckabee freed subsequently robbed, raped, and murdered women and police officers.”
December 15th, 2009 | 5:50 pm
Joe, if this was the only time that this had happened to Huckabee, I might be able to buy it. But it’s not. It wasn’t even the worst. As Amy mentioned above, he was notorious for pardoning not just criminals, but highly violent criminals, over the protests of prosecutors and victims’ families, and without even notifying the families of what he was doing.
Lydia McGrew links to a few cases here:
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2009/12/how_does_huckabee_sleep_at_nig.html
You can only explain away so much.
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