Back Down in Little Rock: Eugene Fields and an Old Familiar Feeling

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I reported on this story a while back. It's now splashing across the news. David J. Sanders has the story at NRO.

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 — went unreported at the time Huckabee granted Eugene Fields executive clemency. The size of the donations places the Fields family in the top tier of the state GOP’s donors, alongside Arkansas aristocracy like the scions of the Fords and Stephens families. Both Scott Ford, CEO of Alltel, and Warren Stephens, CEO of Stephens, Inc., gave the Arkansas Republican party $10,000 in 2003.

The author then provides lots of details (read this or my earlier story to get the details) for a few pages and summarizes with this:

To be sure, all of this is merely suspicious and doesn’t prove Huckabee acted improperly. But the case will undoubtedly get even more attention, and probably get murkier rather than clearer. Welcome back to Arkansas.

Yep. This is the Clemency Huck felons learned they could count on (1 out every 4 days).