by David J. Sanders, "Back Down in Little Rock," National Review (12/15/07): It’s just like old times. National reporters are again scouring Arkansas. Except this time it is Republican Mike Huckabee’s record, not Democrat Bill Clinton’s, that is the subject of interest. Over the course of more than a decade as governor, Huckabee granted over 1,000 commutations and pardons, and they’re currently being examined closely by journalists. The latest to draw national attention is a commutation of Eugene Fields, who had multiple drunk-driving convictions. The question is if there was there a connection between his wife Glenda Fields’s five-figure political donations and Huckabee’s action. On April 14, 2004, then-Gov. Huckabee commuted the sentence of Mr. Fields — then a four-time driving-while-intoxicated offender — granting him early release from prison. Fields, a resident of the western Arkansas town of Van Buren, was a habitual offender. He had already been convicted of DWIs in 1996, 1998, and 2000, but his 2001 felony-DWI conviction resulted in the maximum six-year prison sentence and a $5,000 fine.
The political contributions by the Fields family — large by Arkansas standards . . . review of campaign-finance records shows that Fields’s wife, Glenda, made two $5,000 contributions to the Arkansas Republican party — one on June 26, 2003 and another on July 14, 2003. Less than two months before Glenda Fields wrote the first of those checks, the Arkansas Court of Appeals denied Eugene Fields’s petition for rehearing his 2001 felony DWI conviction. Fields did not immediately report to prison. Four days before he began serving his prison sentence on August of 2003, he applied for commutation of his sentence. In his application, he claimed that his “alcohol abuse is under control” because of anti-depression medication, counseling, and his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous.
On February 20, 2004, Huckabee announced his plan to make Fields eligible for parole. According to the Arkansas News Bureau, Huckabee “bristled” when pressed for specifics as to why he favored Fields’s being made eligible for parole only after serving such a short portion of his sentence. . . . When Huckabee granted the clemency in April, Fields had served seven and half months of his six-year sentence. . . . Field’s commutation drew the attention of Rhonda Sharp, the Post Prison Transfer Board’s spokeswoman told the Arkansas News Bureau. “I’ve never seen anything like this happen before,” she said the day Fields’s clemency was signed. “It’s very unusual.”
Several months after Huckabee’s grant of clemency, Glenda Fields capped her previous contributions with a final $500 check to the state Republican party. . . . What isn’t known is if Huckabee and the Fields family had any connection other than the clemency review. However, another large political contribution . . . suggests perhaps there was: Fields’s company, Fields Investments, made a $10,000 contribution to the state GOP on October 6, 2000 According to an Arkansas Republican who was working for the state GOP at the time, Jason Brady called him shortly thereafter inquiring about Fields’s $10,000 donation. (Brady, who was known among Arkansas politicos as one of the former governor’s most loyal aides, worked for Huckabee either formally or informally every day of Huckabee’s nearly eleven-year tenure as governor.) . . . Brady called him about the Fields donation to inform him that the donation was supposed to go to the Victory 2000 account (as opposed to the state party’s treasury, which Huckabee did not control) and told him “that the money was his” and that it was “the governor’s deal.” . . .
So was Field’s commutation normal or unusual? Public records reveal seven cases of felony DWI in which Huckabee granted a commutation. Based on these records, the Fields commutation was highly unusual in three respects. . . . Apparently, Huckabee was not swayed by the objections of law-enforcement officials, the conspicuous lack of justification on Fields’s application, or the relative rapidity with which he granted executive clemency. Perhaps the famously forgiving governor thought that Fields learned his lesson. If so, he was mistaken. In 2006, Fields was arrested for DWI after he almost crashed head-on with a police car while crossing a state highway’s center line. He pled guilty to the charge. . . . [Read More]
Tags: Arkansas, commutation of sentence, DWI, Election 2008, Eugene Fileds, Mike Huckabee, presidential candidate To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
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