Governor: Listen to experts
GARRICK FELDMAN - Leader editor and publisher

__Gov. Huckabee has lost a protracted, unnecessary fight with county prosecutors, who warned him a long time ago that he would get in trouble if he kept issuing clemencies at a furious pace and without explanation.
__ At first he accused them of playing politics, but he has now agreed to prosecutors' demands that he open up the process, and he has even withdrawn several clemencies that he had considered issuing for a group of killers.
__ Prosecutors have announced their own guidelines that Huckabee should follow, and whether he does or not, the Legislature next year will vote those guidelines into law. +++ This was a fight he couldn't win, but apparently no one on his staff could convince him of that until prosecutors and victims' families fought an all-out public relations battle and forced him to retreat.
__ They won because Huckabee couldn't explain why he was freeing one group of brutal killers while he was executing others.
__ Talk about playing God.
__ Before his about-face, he talked vaguely about rehabilitation and redemption, but how could he be sure he wasn't taken for a sucker after he fell for rapist-murderer Wayne DuMond's protestations of innocence? Soon after he was paroled, DuMond killed two women in Missouri and is serving life for one of the murders.
__ You'd think after that experience, Huckabee would no longer consider himself a qualified judge of criminals deserving their freedom, but for the longest time, he kept issuing clemencies.
__ It's no wonder more and more convicts sought clemencies since they heard the governor was a soft touch, especially if they told him what he wanted to hear.
__ Huckabee could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had consulted some bright Republican women for outside advice, particularly Lonoke County Prosecuting Attorney Lona McCastlain and California attorney Bilenda Harris-Ritter. The former has put a lot of bad people behind bars, and the latter's parents were murdered in north Arkansas.
__ They know their subject.
__ Huckabee has belatedly consulted McCastlain and other prosecutors he considers friendly on the clemency issue. He even wrote her a letter recently asking for suggestions on improving the process. Better late than never.
__ As far as we know, he has not consulted Harris-Ritter or any victims' groups. That's too bad. Harris-Ritter, who opposes clemency for her parents' killer, would have given Huckabee some sound advice a long time ago.
__ "If Gov. Huckabee were interested in getting the ideas from victims' families, I would be very happy to work with his administration," Harris-Ritter says.
__ "I would think that he, as the chief executive of the state, would want input from all viewpoints on changing this process. Working towards consensus is done all the time. It is important. The last governor of California did not do that and lost in a recall," says Harris-Ritter, who was recently named legal counsel of a large state agency by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
__ "I think it is very good that Gov. Huckabee is finally addressing the serious problems associated with the way his administration has been dealing with clemencies in Arkansas," she added. "I do not agree that he should just look to Œfriendly prosecutors' for input. Is that someone who agrees with him or is lax in being tough on crime? Second, I think that if you only listen to viewpoints that complement your own, you never get the whole picture."
__ She gets the whole picture, while Huckabee doesn't: The clemency process is a mess and too often excludes victims' families, who depend on local prosecutors to tell them about the latest clemency petitions. But prosecutors come and go, and they're not familiar with old cases, or they don't care, or they're crooks themselves, so families are often left in the dark.
__ "In my particular case, both of the county prosecutors in office in the last 23 years in Stone County have been next to worthless at best," Harris-Ritter says. "They have not helped me. It has been like pulling teeth to even get them to write letters opposing clemency petitions. Don McSpadden didn't want to write a letter in 2003 apparently because he wrote one in 2002. T. J. Hively was the other prosecutor, and he is facing sentencing in a federal (fraud and racketeering) case."
__ She thinks the state Post-Prison Transfer Board, not the county prosecutors, should keep families informed about upcoming clemencies.
__ "The prosecutors do not still have the files years after a murderer has gone to prison, but the Post-Prison Transfer Board has a file, and it would be easier for them to keep track of correspondence related to the clemency petition.
__ "That change would mean more families who have sent notice that they want to be notified would actually be notified. It could be done on a computer. The additional input of data would make up for a lot of phone calls and letters later trying to coordinate with the prosecutor to find out whom to notify so it should not create any significant amount of additional work for staff."
__ Harris-Ritter agrees with Huck-abee that most clemency petitions are frivolous, and it takes a long time to sort out genuine cases that deserve his attention.
__ "Every petition filed by the man who murdered my parents is frivolous because his grounds for asking for clemency is that he has an excessive sentence," she says, referring to Francis Nolan Holland, who is serving a life sentence without parole for the double murders.
__ "As a matter of law, he does not have an excessive sentence because he received the lesser of the two sentences available for capital murder.
__ "There ought to be a way that petitions like that can be separated out and not left in to clog the system. If a person has a legitimate complaint that he or she has an excessive sentence, that needs to be completely investigated and treated very seriously. By finding a way to separate those that have wrong legal information or even wrong factual information, you would free staff to concentrate on the petitions that really need to be considered.
__ "I have spent years and thousands of dollars opposing frivolous clemency petitions. I should never have had to do that. Each time old wounds are torn open, and the emotional toll on my other family members and me is immeasurable.
__ "We should not be continuously subjected to that just because someone who did not even know our family felt like murdering innocent people and has been held accountable by the judicial system.
__ "I am a strong supporter of protecting constitutional rights of those charged and convicted. I do not support harassing victims under the guise of criminal justice, and that is what has been going on with the Arkansas clemency process."