When asked whether the U.S. should take any action to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Huckabee replied: “The U.S. should not kill Saddam Hussein or anyone else.” The U.S. military captured Saddam, an Iraqi court convicted him and he was hanged last December.
As Arkansas governor, he believed a rapist was “saved” and pushed for his release, officials say. The man then killed.
By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
Pastor Jay D. Cole had two close friends. One was an inmate in the Arkansas state penitentiary. There, the minister would sit with Wayne DuMond “and pray and read the Bible.” For a while, the prisoner’s wife even lived in Cole’s home.
Cole’s friendship with Mike Huckabee ran deeper, back to when Huckabee was the youngest-ever head of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The two men produced Bible lessons on videotape. “We worked heavily with him when he got politically involved too,” Cole said.
A little over 10 years ago, the paths of these three men merged in Little Rock, the state capital, when Huckabee was the new governor. With Cole’s urging, and with DuMond insisting he was “born again,” Huckabee played a key role in setting free a rapist who was supposed to serve many more years, say three of seven members of the state board that paroled DuMond.
After being released, DuMond moved to Missouri, where less than a year later he suffocated the (sic) mother of three in a Kansas City suburb. Police suspect that he killed another woman there as well.