Who Let The Scumbags Out? Jesus' BFF, The Huck!

Well a supporter's freedom is always more important than public safety.

It took a jury less than 15 minutes to convict Eugene Fields of driving while intoxicated, his fourth such conviction in less than five years. Mr. Fields, whose pickup crashed after he drank 12 beers, received the maximum sentence, six years in prison.

But the same week he arrived at a state prison in 2003, Mr. Fields, a wealthy developer and major donor to the Arkansas Republican Party, asked Gov. Mike Huckabee to commute his sentence. On his application, Mr. Fields wrote that his conviction was “seriously affecting my ability to carry on my efforts to help unfortunate children.”

The local prosecutor and sheriff each strongly objected, but Mr. Fields had a powerful ally behind the scenes. Richard Bearden, a former executive director of the state’s Republican Party with close ties to the Huckabee administration, pressed the governor’s office to free Mr. Fields.

“He called me a couple of times about it,” Cory Cox, the Huckabee aide in charge of clemency matters, disclosed in an interview. “He was somebody that was clearly on Fields’s side on this.”

On Feb. 19, 2004, Mr. Huckabee announced his intention to grant Mr. Fields clemency. The announcement led to a legally required period for public comment, and among those who weighed in was the Arkansas office of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. In a politely worded letter to the governor, Teresa Belew, MADD’s local executive director, pointed out that Mr. Fields had a record of “ignoring second chances.” She urged Mr. Huckabee not to give Mr. Fields another break.

Mr. Huckabee did not welcome MADD’s recommendation.

Days later, in a letter that he demanded be kept confidential, Mr. Huckabee sharply criticized Ms. Belew for going public with criticism about the Fields case. “I cannot understand why you sent the letter to news organizations,” he wrote. He suggested that MADD was simply trying to fan “the flames of controversy that have been stirred in this case by the unusual curiosity of certain media members.”

He also had a more political score to settle. It concerned his wife, Janet Huckabee, who in 2002 lost her campaign to unseat Arkansas’s incumbent secretary of state, Charlie Daniels.

“You’ll further have to help me understand,” he wrote to Ms. Belew, “why you have been so public with this letter when during the last campaign season, MADD refrained from public comment regarding my wife’s opponent, a public official with several D.W.I.’s, one of which was in a state-owned car.”

Mr. Huckabee’s letter, obtained by The New York Times, is one of several examples of how Mr. Huckabee bristled at public criticism of his clemency decisions.

Similarly, when the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association made public a letter arguing against clemency for a rapist, Wayne Dumond, Mr. Huckabee in a subsequent meeting with the group angrily warned that he would not be receptive to their legislative priorities if they persisted in going public with criticism, prosecutors at the meeting recalled.

The Fields case also underscores the degree to which personal and political connections sometimes played an important role in how Mr. Huckabee used his powers of clemency. Some who received clemency were recommended by Baptist preachers who had long supported Mr. Huckabee. A few had worked as trustees in the governor’s mansion. Others, like Mr. Fields, were championed by Mr. Huckabee’s political allies.

“When you have somebody that you trust and is your friend and is putting their neck out there and is asking you to do something, versus judges and prosecutors who want to look tough on crime, that would have more of an impact with him,” Mr. Cox said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Huckabee, Charmaine Yoest, said that Mr. Fields’s political donations and connections played no role in his clemency. She said the governor simply made a “tough call” — one that the Arkansas Parole Board supported — to release a model inmate at a time when the state’s prisons were overcrowded. Mr. Fields did not respond to several telephone messages left at his home. Mr. Bearden also did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages left at his office.

About two years after Mr. Fields’s sentence was cut to 11 months, he was arrested again for D.W.I.

According to the police report, Mr. Fields’s Chevy truck crossed the center line of Highway 59 in Barling, Ark., directly into the path of an oncoming police car, which he missed. Mr. Fields stumbled out of his truck, reeking of alcohol, when he was pulled over.

His blood-alcohol level measured 0.18, more than twice the legal limit. He paid a $300 fine and is on parole.

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