headline:

Whole Show | << Previous Story | Next Story >>
December 20, 2007

"He Should Have Known"-Mother of Woman Murdered by Rapist Says
Huckabee Should Not Have Ordered His Release from Jail
We speak with Lois Davidson. Her daughter Carol Sue Shields was
murdered by Wayne Dumond in 2000 after he was released by Mike
Huckabee. As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee aggressively pushed for
the early release of Dumond, a convicted rapist, in 1999. Huckabee
made the decision despite being warned by numerous women that Dumond
had sexually assaulted them or their family members and would likely
strike again. [includes rush transcript]

Lois Davidson, her daughter Carol Sue Shields was murdered by Wayne
Dumond after he was released by Mike Huckabee.

Nico Pitney, national editor for HuffingtonPost.com.

Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help
us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our
TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...
Related Links
Documents Expose Huckabee's Role In Serial Rapist's Release
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to turn to another controversy from Mike
Huckabee's past. Earlier this month, The Huffington Post revealed that
as governor of Arkansas, he aggressively pushed for the early release
of Wayne Dumond in 1999. Huckabee made the decision, despite being
warned by numerous women that Dumond had sexually assaulted them or
their family members and would likely strike again.

After Dumond was released, he went on to rape and murder at least one
other woman. This short video about Dumond was recently posted online
on a newly created website called huckabeefacts.com.

LOIS DAVIDSON: My name is Lois Davidson. My daughter won't be home for
Christmas this year.

NARRATOR: Carol Sue Shields won't be home for Christmas, because she
was brutally murdered by Wayne Dumond. Dumond was in an Arkansas
prison for raping a seventeen-year-old high school cheerleader, until
Governor Mike Huckabee helped him get out. Thanks to Mike Huckabee,
Dumond was released from his Arkansas prison twenty-five years before
his sentence was to end. Then, less than one year later, he raped and
murdered Carol Sue Shields.

LOIS DAVIDSON: If not for Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dumond would have been
in prison, and Carol Sue would have been with us this year for
Christmas.

AMY GOODMAN: That online video was produced by a Republican operative
in Arkansas who says he made the video independently of any of
Huckabee's opponents.

Lois Davidson joins us on the phone now from Missouri, her daughter
Carol Sue Shields, murdered by Wayne Dumond after he was released by
Governor Huckabee. We're also joined by Nico Pitney, the national
editor for HuffingtonPost.com. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

Lois Davidson, this story about Mike Huckabee--the question of how
involved was he with the release of Wayne Dumond, who then got out and
murdered your daughter?

LOIS DAVIDSON: Well, he went to the school--or to the parole board, and
he encouraged them to let him out. He thought that he had served
enough time, which was only--he only served, I think, twelve years. He
was in the pen for life-plus-twenty-years. And to my understanding, he
only served twelve years.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's put this in some context with Nico Pitney. You're
national editor of The Huffington Post. Murray Waas wrote an extensive
piece called "Documents Expose Huckabee's Role in Serial Rapist's
Release." Can you give this the chronology of what happened here and
also respond to the governor's response to this story, this expose,
saying he wasn't the one; it was the Democrats on the parole board
that actually released him; he didn't weigh in with heavy pressure?

LOIS DAVIDSON: Well--

AMY GOODMAN: Let's put that to Nico Pitney.

NICO PITNEY: Thanks for having me, Amy. The chronology--Dumond was
first imprisoned in the '80s, given a life sentence plus twenty years.
What Huckabee says about him being made parole-eligible by Jim Guy
Tucker is true, but it's basically irrelevant to the controversy of
Dumond actually being released from prison. Under Bill Clinton,
Dumond's sentence was reduced from life-plus-twenty-years down to 39.5
years. It was under Huckabee in the 1990s, in 1996, that this parole
board was pressured to actually release Dumond, and that's when it
took place.

Now, four members of the parole board have gone on record saying that
Huckabee came in. The recording secretary was removed from the room so
no transcription exists, which was virtually unprecedented. Huckabee
told them that he favored this man's release, and within a few months,
the parole board, which had previously voted several times against
releasing Dumond, then switched and voted in favor of releasing him.

Huckabee insists that he has no control over the parole board's
decision, and he doesn't decide whether prisoners are paroled. But the
power he does have is to appoint these members of the parole board,
which obviously weighs massively over their minds, as he decides
whether they keep a high-paying position in the state government. And
so, clearly he had the potential to influence their minds.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Nico Pitney, the article by Murray Waas raises
some startling information in terms of--we normally think of these
campaigns to get leniency for people convicted of crimes as being
pressure from civil libertarians or from liberals, but that this was a
campaign developed around the country by very conservative groups,
including Steve Dunleavy, the extreme conservative columnist of the
New York Post, that were pressuring the Arkansas officials to free
this man.

NICO PITNEY: That's right. You read Dunleavy's columns today, and
they're just vile, I mean, basically accusing this woman who was raped
when she was seventeen years old by Dumond of making the whole thing
up. He claims no rape happened. It's really vile. His line was echoed
in Arkansas by a fellow Baptist minister who had a major talk radio
show there. He was a--this talk radio host was a friend of Huckabee's,
was pressing him to release Dumond.

The reason was--the reason Dumond was in prison, because he had raped a
distant relative of Bill Clinton, and the perception among
conservatives, who were ardently opposed to Clinton, was that he was--
this man had been falsely imprisoned, had been--even if he was guilty,
he had been punished too harshly. And so, they pressured Huckabee to
release him and to, you know, reverse this perceived injustice at the
hands of Bill Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: Then the issue that you released for the first time in
The Huffington Post in Murray Waas's piece of the numerous letters
that were sent to, well, Governor Huckabee at the time, pleading with
him not to release Dumond. They were letters of women who had been
raped or family members of those who had been. Can you talk about why
these haven't been seen, what they said, who were these women?

NICO PITNEY: That's exactly right. Murray Waas has been reporting this
from 2002. He was the one who first reported that Huckabee had
pressured the parole board. What the public didn't know until this
past month was that while Huckabee was considering and pressing for
this man's release, he had privately been receiving letters from women
who had also been raped or sexually assaulted by this man. So even if
Huckabee had doubted whether this original crime for which the man was
in prison hadn't taken place, or was in doubt, there were these other
women, the tragic stories that they told.

One described being raped by this man while her three-year-old
daughter was in the bed. He held a butcher knife to her throat.
Another woman described a very similar incident, him arriving in her
room with a butcher knife only to discover that her boyfriend was also
in the room, and he--and this man Wayne Dumond ran off.

But Huckabee had in his possession--he read these letters, in fact, and
ended up meeting this woman who had been raped with her three-year-
old. In person, he met her and still pushed forward, you know, still
bowed to this rightwing campaign to release this man from prison. He
ended up going on, of course, to rape and murder two other women.

AMY GOODMAN: Nico Pitney, the other issue--are the people that Murray
Waas spoke to within the governor's office, his aides who came out,
who had these letters and talked about Governor Huckabee wanting to
silence this issue, sequester the information, get letters from other
agencies to ensure that under Arkansas's liberal FOIA, Freedom of
Information Act, request, reporters wouldn't be able to get these
letters from other agencies.

NICO PITNEY: Exactly. You know, these letters were provided to us by a
member of Huckabee's gubernatorial staff, who saw all this take place.
And this person not only, of course, was alarmed that he had known of
other women who had been raped by this man, but when Huckabee was
running for governor in 2002, he feared that these documents would
come out and made an effort to keep them secret, so he pulled all the--
he tried to get copies, all the copies that other government agencies
had of these letters and bring them into the governor's office, where
they couldn't be requested by ordinary citizens seeking information
about the case--basically tried to cover up the back--you know, the
information he had known about this man before he was set free.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask Lois Davidson, when you hear about this
information, especially in light of the comments that Governor
Huckabee made in a debate on CNN when he was asked about this, and he
said, "None of us could have predicted what Dumond could have done
when he got out." And, of course, he did get out, and he ended up
murdering your daughter. Your reaction to the remarks of Governor
Huckabee now about this?

LOIS DAVIDSON: Well, if you go back to Mr. Dumond's back history, he
should have known that there's something else would happened, because
Mr. Dumond has been in trouble ever since the early 1980s, and you
just don't change somebody like that.