Maurice Clemmons, Seattle Cop Killer, Claimed He Was Jesus Christ (David Weiner/The Huffington Post; Dec 2)

Cop killer Maurice Clemmons drove to New York in June to see local minister Bernard Jordan, claiming that he was Jesus Christ.

According to the New York Daily News, Clemmons, who was gunned down by a Seattle police officer on Tuesday, apparently “disturbed a June 13 prayer service, trying to rush the stage and yelling, and then approached Bishop Bernard Jordan at his gala 50th birthday banquet the next day.”

Jordan, who runs a “cyber-ministry” and claims to be a prophet, says Clemmons told him he was Jesus Christ.

The Associated Press reports that Clemmons had also told Washington state investigators that he “had visions that he was Jesus Christ and the the world was on the verge of the apocalypse.”

Footage has been released of a friend of Clemmons telling Jordan that he is Jesus Christ and that God told them to come to New York.

It is believed that the killers’ friends and family hid Clemmons’ during the massive manhunt for him, helping with his wound and giving him money.

Huckabee Clemency Record Revisted After Shootings (Andrew DeMillo/The Associated Press/Yahoo News; Dec 1)

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas: As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee had a hand pardoning or commuting many more prisoners than his three immediate predecessors combined. Maurice Clemmons, the suspect in Sunday’s slaying of four Seattle-area police officers, was among them.

For a politician considering another run for the White House, Clemmons could become Huckabee’s Willie Horton….

Clemmons was among 1,033 people who were pardoned or had their sentences reduced during Huckabee’s 10 1/2 years as governor. Bill Clinton, Frank White and Jim Guy Tucker granted 507 clemencies in the 17 1/2 years they served. Beebe, Huckabee’s Democratic successor, has issued 273 commutations and pardons since taking office in January 2007 — all but one of them were pardons after the completion of the inmates’ prison terms.

Huckabee’s role in gaining the release of a convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, was the subject of an attack ad during his presidential run. While Huckabee’s predecessor, Tucker, reduced DuMond’s sentence making him eligible for parole, Huckabee took steps almost immediately after taking office to win DuMond’s release.

Two members of the state parole board said Huckabee pressured them to show DuMond mercy, while Huckabee publicly questioned whether DuMond was guilty of the rape of a teenage girl. During the presidential primaries, a conservative group aired television commercials in South Carolina featuring the mother of Carol Sue Shields, whom DuMond killed in 2000 after his release.

Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley, whose office opposed Clemmons’ parole in 2000 and 2004, said Huckabee created a flaw in the Arkansas justice system by freeing the number of prisoners he did.

“(Clemmons) should have stayed locked up like the jury wanted him and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion,” Jegley said.

“I just have been figuratively holding my breath and hoping something like this wouldn’t happen,” Jegley said. “I just think that a lot of the people that were subjects of clemency during that period of time were some very dangerous people who didn’t need to be let out.”…

Prosecutors have said Huckabee, a Southern Baptist preacher, was more inclined to release or reduce the sentences of prisoners if he had direct contact with them or was lobbied by those close to him. Clemmons’ letter perhaps appealed to Huckabee’s Christian faith.

In his application for clemency, Clemmons wrote that he prayed Huckabee would show him compassion and said at the time of his crimes he had just moved to Arkansas from Seattle. Clemmons also wrote that he had changed his life since “the angel of death has visited and taken away my dear sweet mother.”

In 1989, Clemmons, then 17, was convicted in Little Rock for aggravated robbery and other charges and sentenced to 108 years. Between 1989 and 1998, Clemmons broke prison rules more than two dozen times — sometimes violently, said state prison system spokeswoman Dina Tyler.

Clemmons didn’t stay out long. He was convicted of robbery in Ouachita County in 2001, but was released again in 2004 by the parole board. Little Rock police say Clemmons also faced charges here in 2001 but prosecutors dropped the additional charges when Clemmons was released a second time.

Huckabee said Monday that Clemmons was allowed back on the street because prosecutors “failed to file the paperwork in a timely way.” Jegley said the charges were dropped because the warrant wasn’t served in a timely manner and because there was trouble locating witnesses to the 2001 robbery.

Jegley called Huckabee’s comments “red herrings.”

“My word to Mr. Huckabee is man up and own what you did,” Jegley said Monday night.

Months after his 2004 release, Clemmons was named as a suspect in an aggravated robbery at a hotel in Little Rock but he was not charged.

Saline County Circuit Judge Robert Herzfeld, who as a prosecutor successfully sued Huckabee over clemency practices, said Huckabee’s decision to give Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards a pardon for a 1975 traffic offense after meeting him at a concert showed how lightly the ex-governor approached the practice.

“That just said volumes about how he considered this serious ultimate power over freedom as a joke,” Herzfeld said.

Mike Huckabee Killed Maurice Clemmons (PZ Myers/Pharyngula; Dec 1)

Clemmons was the Jesus-loving lunatic who murdered four police officers in Tacoma, and was shot and killed by the police. He was also the recipient of a pardon from Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas, egotistical god-walloping incompetent.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all for mercy, I reject the abuse of our penal system as a vehicle for vengeance, and I oppose the death penalty without reservation. A governor’s clemency can be a good thing, as when it should be used to correct miscarriages of justice (isn’t it odd, though, how the most Christian of governors avoid using it for that purpose?). But there are also cases where justice and mercy are best served by incarceration or mental care, not by turning killers and dangerous psychos loose on the streets.

Clemmons was a monster. He murdered people and he raped children. He was insane. He believed he was Jesus Christ. Yet Mike Huckabee pardoned him. Why? Because Huckabee did not care about the evidence. What he thought was sufficient was a profession of piety and the testimonials of religious men. Clemmons played him.

“No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. ‘I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,’ he explained in his clemency application in 2000. ‘I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.’” – Joe Conason, Salon.com, Nov 30

Mercy is not a wicked thing, and there are good people in prison who could turn their lives around if given an opportunity. There are also evil, damaged people in prison who would use freedom as an opportunity to do harm. What is necessary is the rational analysis of evidence to determine who deserves freedom in those cases, and Huckabee does not and cannot do that; his religiosity short-circuits his capacity for critical evaluation, and his ego makes the pardon a tool for feeding his own delusions of christ-hood….

Conason elaborates on these points this way in his original article, Mike Huckabee’s Fatally Bad Judgment:

Surely the most notorious instance of misplaced mercy involved Wayne Dumond, a rapist and murderer now deceased, who was originally sent to prison in Arkansas for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. During Clinton’s presidency the Dumond case became an obsession among certain right-wing pundits and politicians, who insisted that Dumond had been framed and brutalized by the “Clinton machine.” When Huckabee became governor, he supported a parole for Dumond, winning applause from the Republican right — until the former prisoner raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. Dumond later died in prison, under suspicion that he had murdered at least one other woman after his Arkansas release — a tragic outcome for which Huckabee has repeatedly tried to blame others, including his two Democratic predecessors in the statehouse.

The real engine behind Dumond’s release, however, was a Baptist minister and ultra-conservative ideologue named Jay Cole, who also happened to be a friend of Huckabee. Cole would tell the governor about his visits with the supposedly innocent Dumond, when the minister and the prisoner would read the Bible and pray together.

Perhaps the worst instance of that same syndrome, chronicled in detail by Arkansas journalists, concerned an Air Force sergeant named Glen Green, who was sentenced to prison for life after confessing that he had raped and killed a teenage girl. After beating the woman with nunchucks, he violated her almost lifeless body, ran over her with his car and buried her in a swamp. But yet another preacher friend of Huckabee’s named Rev. Johnny Jackson somehow persuaded the governor that this incredibly brutal killing had been an “accident” — and that Green had repented, come to Jesus and therefore should be freed.

Two years ago, I noted that Huckabee knew almost nothing about the Green case beyond what his preacher pal had told him. He consulted neither the prosecutor nor the victim’s family, and overruled the dissent of his own parole board. After he announced that Green would be released, the furious public reaction forced him to reverse the decision. Yet he continued to release murderers and other violent criminals despite angry dissent from local prosecutors.

Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader. Among the thugs who benefited from his mercy was a robber who beat an old man to death with a lead pipe.

During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee’s arrogance and stupidity mostly escaped the full scrutiny of the national press corps, in part because his stint as a contender was so brief. But next time, if there is a next time, he should get no such free pass — and his claims to divine guidance ought to be thoroughly debunked.