Mike Huckabee took a beating from his conservative brethren last month after Maurice Clemmons, a man whose sentence the former Arkansas governor commuted in 2000, shot and killed four police officers in Lakewood, Wash. The scuttlebutt on the right suggested that Clemmons' release may doom Huckabee's chances of winning the Republican nomination for president in 2012. I happen to think Huckabee's getting a raw deal on the Clemmons case; instead, we should be talking about the truly bizarre pardon record of one of Huckabee's possible competitors for the nomination, Haley Barbour. The governor of Mississippi has simultaneously ignored increasing evidence that there may be a disturbingly high number of innocent people in prison in Mississippi and handed out pardons to the convicted murderers who just happen to do work on his house.

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Barbour took some heat in 2006 when he refused to issue a posthumous pardon to Clyde Kennard, a civil rights worker framed for stealing chicken feed in 1960—a false accusation that prevented him from integrating Mississippi Southern College. The school, now the University of Southern Mississippi, has a building named for Kennard, and Barbour had acknowledged his innocence. But there was no precedent for a posthumous pardon in Mississippi, even though there are plenty of examples elsewhere. A Barbour spokesman put it bluntly and broadly, "The governor hasn't pardoned anyone, be it alive or deceased. The governor isn't going to issue a pardon here."

And then he started to. Over the last two years, as reported by the Jackson Free Press, Barbour has pardoned, granted clemency to, or suspended the sentences of at least five convicted murderers, four of whom killed their wives or girlfriends.

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None of these men were pardoned because of concerns that they didn't receive a fair trial or could be innocent. Instead, all five were enrolled in a prison trusty program that had them doing odd jobs around the Mississippi governor's mansion.

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Whether a man who shot his ex-wife point-blank with a shotgun deserves a chance to start a new life, and whether giving him that chance is a proper use of the clemency power is, I suppose, something GOP primary voters will mull over should Barbour decide to run for president in 2012. What's perverse is that while Barbour's been generously dispensing mercy to convicted murderers fortunate enough to get face time with him in Jackson, he's been utterly uninterested in a crisis unfolding in his state's criminal justice system, and the very real possibility that there are a number of innocent people at Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary, including on death row.

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