Conason's Article in Salon:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/11/30/mike_huckabee/index.htmlThe author does NOT address the issue of the 91% of Pardons where the person did NOT go back to jail, but he does address them by the following statement in regards to Huckabee's pardon while Governor :
"During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state's draconian narcotics laws"
The author then goes out and finds two other cases where the pardoned person committed further crimes. One was the case of Wayne DuMond, who had served 15 years of a 20 years sentence and was then released on Probation i.e. if he violated his probation he should have gone back to jail, just like what should have happened in the case of the Murder of the Four Police officers. That DuMond sentence was reduced to probation not just released is ignored by the Author.
For more on Wayne DuMond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_DuMondhttp://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-huckabee8dec08,1,1727258.storyYes, Rape is a serious crime and should be punished severely, but do we want the Punishment for Rape to be so severe that Murder of the Victim is just a small increase in sentence? (i.e. the US Supreme Court used the fact that most Jurisdiction do NOT treat Rape the same as Murder to rule that Death Sentence for Rape were Unconstitutional but the reason most Jurisdiction did NOT treat Rape as serious as Murder was that most Jurisdiction fear that if there is no difference in punishment, Rapists would just kill their victims for the punishment would be the same if the victim survived or not. Most Jurisdictions wanted to give rapists an incentive NOT to kill their victims, thus Murder has a higher level of punishment then Rape).
I bring this up for the DuMond case was of a Rapists that had served most of his sentence and all Huckabee did was advance the start of his probationary period. I am sorry, Rapists will sooner or later be let back into the General Population, hopefully on some sort of probation (as was DuMond). Huckabee's fault as to DuMond was to advance that date, subject to a longer probation period. You may disagree with that, but you have to accept that fact you also would have kept the 91% of the people released by Huckabee in Jail when they NEVER committed another crime for which they went back to Jail.