I had forgotten about the Dumond case, VXR. I seem to recall one of the crucial aspects of that case being the question, as you have highlighted, of Huckabee's possibly applying inappropriate pressure to the parole board. I believe that incident is still highly contentious, with pretty good evidence supporting the accusation, but a lot of it possibly tainted by political payback and CYA.

Let me ask you a question: Given that you view as a good thing the idea that governors will significantly role back there clemency/pardon/commutation/etc decisions as a result of this incident, how do you arrrive at this "one good thing" assessment? What I mean is, how do you measure the benefits versus the downside? I assume you see the benefit as "a certain portion of these parolees/commutees/clemency cases would have reverted and committed horrible crimes, so we have prevented that happening." But given that the purpose of all these gubernatorial decisions is to even out discrepencies in sentencing between district courts, to compensate for those wierd legal situations where the idiosynchracies of the law allowed a transgression of a certain level to be punished at a much higher level, where an apparant overreach of the prosecutor appears to have resulted in overpunishment, or possilby where a convict has demonstrated extraordinary potential, how do you measure the benefit of that? Its much easier to point to a couple of cases where the worst happened and say "I told you so." Its much harder to point to the numerous cases where nothing bad happened at all and say "see the system worked, this person became a productive citezen" That just doesnt make headlines.

I guess what I'm asking is, do the thousands of cases where the clemancy "worked", (which I define as a non-recidivist case) matter? Or should we only concern ourselves with the demonstrated worst outcomes (Clemmons, Dumond), and based on those assume the worst in all of them? If there is a reasonable possibility of actual rehabilitation, rather than merely retribution for the crime, should that be considered?