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.
(Full disclosure: I write a column that is distributed by Stephens Media.) A
review of campaign-finance records shows that Fields’s wife, Glenda, made two $5,000 contributions to the Arkansas Republican party — one on June 26, 2003 and another on July 14, 2003. Less than two months before Glenda Fields wrote the first of those checks, the Arkansas Court of Appeals denied Eugene Fields’s petition for rehearing his
2001 felony DWI conviction.Fields did not immediately report to prison. Four days before he began serving his prison sentence on August of 2003,
he applied for commutation of his sentence. In his application, he claimed that his “alcohol abuse is under control” because of anti-depression medication, counseling, and his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Political contributions weren’t the only donations made by the Fields family. Also contained in his application (along with a character reference from his Southern Baptist pastor) were copies of thank-you notes and tax receipts for financial contributions from charitable causes and organizations he’d supported: The Salvation Army, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the First Baptist Church of Van Buren’s “Women’s Mission Ministry.” The scope of his charitable donations, which began around the time of his second DWI conviction, expanded as his DWI rap sheet grew.
On February 20, 2004, Huckabee announced his plan to make Fields eligible for parole.
According to the Arkansas News Bureau, Huckabee “bristled” when pressed for specifics as to why he favored Fields’s being made eligible for parole only after serving such a short portion of his sentence. Huckabee claimed that he had a reason: “Board recommended it. Sentence was within two months. That’s the reason. What’s hard about that?”
When Huckabee granted the clemency in April, Fields had served seven and half months of his six-year sentence. Fields had already appeared before the parole board, which voted 5-0 to grant parole, making him eligible for parole on June 1 of that year.
Huckabee’s April 14 action accelerated the process, making Fields immediately eligible for parole and releasing him from prison. Field’s commutation drew the attention of Rhonda Sharp, the Post Prison Transfer Board’s spokeswoman
told the Arkansas News Bureau. “I’ve never seen anything like this happen before,” she said the day Fields’s clemency was signed. “It’s very unusual.”
CONTINUED 1 2 Next > 
