Hall and Lambert examined the records of everyone originally charged in St. Francis County with rape or other sex offenses and all murder cases in the 1980s to see what was done in each. ” The results of this analysis are shocking and a disgrace to the American system of criminal justice,” they wrote. They concluded:

If Dumond’s life sentence were computed at 100 years, as some states do, his total sentence of 120 years exceeded the total of all other sentences in sex crimes during the 10 years.

Of all persons originally charged with rape and sentenced to jail, the average term was 6.57 years.

Considering all persons charged with rape the average term was 2.01 years.

The average term of all persons sentenced for first degree murder was 3.81 years.

” Life is cheap in St. Francis County; life is cheaper than one’s sexual integrity,” Hall and Lambert said. ” On a relative scale of societal values,” they said, “one would think that murder in the first degree is a relatively more serious crime than rape since a life is lost. In St. Francis County in 1980-89, one was far better off to commit a cold blooded murder than to force a woman to submit to sexual intercourse.”

http://www.arkansasleader.com/…..abee8.html

I suspect that Huckabee is about as analytical of the stories he’s told by the families and froend of the criminals as he is of weighing Scientific Evidence. After all, here’s a guy that ignores almost two centuries of cumulative Scientific evidence from fields like genetics, paleontology, molecular biology, comparative anatomy, embryology, geology, biogeography, cytology, comparative physiology, and individual fields studying the taxonomic groups in Biology (entomology, ichthyology, mammology, biological anthropology, botany, etc.).

He responds, “I’ll believe what my Bible seems to say…’cause I wasn’t there”…and ignore all the Scientific evidence. Kind of like how he will free criminals…”I wasn’t there…sure the evidence might indicate they were guilty…but I got this ‘feelin’”

In addition, Dumond did get a disproportionately high sentence. According to his lawyer, John Wesley Hall, Dumond was the only person charged with rape or murder who was sentenced to more than 10 years in the five years before and after the Stevens rape.

Is this really TRUE? In a ten year span there were no murders or rapists sentenced to more than ten years? That’s pretty incredible.

What about this case in 1986.
http://florida-issues.blogspot…..e-for.html
Or the Billy Gale Williams murder of a sheriff in 1981. Or Anthony Ford convicted in 1981 of killing a highway patrolman. All received the death penalty.

Here’s another http://www.clarkprosecutor.org…..ton887.htm

And that was only looking at a couple of pages of Google searches.

Something is utterly wrong with that statement.

1) They were against parole before they were for it!
2) This is not a WIllie Horton situation. Dukakis supported a policy, quite arguably flawed, that allowed Willie Horton out on furlough where he committed heinous crimes. Dukakis had no personal connection with Horton. Moreover, parole or furlough are not in themselves bad ideas although they can only be executed with wisdom; Charles Manson comes up for parole every few years in CA and he is routinely denied-that is wise.
In this case, Huckabee personally intervened for purely political reasons, ignoring the pleas of Dumond’s victims. This is not a Willie Horton situation of arguably flawed but well intentioned policy with no specific intervention; this is deeply flawed and craven politicking on Huckabee’s part, and he deserves whatever firestorm he gets for not protecting those women in Missouri from this man who would not likely have been paroled without Huckabee’s interventions.

where’s upstairs? how do you get there?

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