The American public is tired of hearing about Willie Horton. The case of Maurice Clemmons has given our elected leaders an opportunity to move on.
When an apparently deranged Clemmons shot to death four police officers sitting in a suburban Seattle coffee shop early one morning last November, the media zeroed in on Mike Huckabee’s decision almost 10 years earlier, as governor of Arkansas, to commute the 108-year prison sentence that Clemmons was then serving for crimes committed when he was a juvenile. The commutation made Clemmons eligible for parole after 11 years in prison, and the parole board later released him.
