Maurice Clemmons would have been the first to say that a man needs
to be held accountable for his actions.
“There is absolutely no excuse/justification for my past
criminal behavior,” he wrote 10 years ago in a clemency application to
then–Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, pleading for “mercy”
regarding the 108-year sentence he was serving at the time for two
robberies and other crimes he’d committed when he was 16.
This was back when Clemmons was purportedly a God-fearing man. Back
before he allegedly came to believe, sometime this summer, that he
himself was God—Jesus Christ, to be exact, with an ability to
fly. (“He reportedly thinks he can fly away and at one point was found
in the backyard jumping,” says a Pierce County police report from
July.) It was back before authorities suspected Clemmons of shooting
four Lakewood police officers at a coffee shop on November 29,
execution-style, in the worst police killing in Washington State
history. Before Clemmons was the subject of a sprawling, chaotic,
nearly two-day-long manhunt that consumed SWAT teams and patrol
officers all over Seattle and the surrounding region. Before several of
Clemmons’s family members and friends were rounded up and accused of
helping him elude authorities. Before the manhunt finally ended, in the
early morning hours of December 1, with Clemmons being shot dead by a
lone Seattle officer on patrol in Rainier Valley.
In that old plea to Huckabee, Clemmons cast himself as a young man
who had been raised in “a good Christian family,” made the mistake of
falling in with a bad crowd when he moved to Arkansas from Seattle as a
teenager, and received an excessively harsh sentence for his youthful
errors—a man who now found himself sitting in prison lamenting
that he’d “never done anything good for God” and sincerely wanted a
chance to make “a brand-new start.”
Huckabee believed him. The Republican governor—who went on to
run for president in 2008 and remains a potential 2012 presidential
contender—offered clemency to Clemmons in May of 2000, setting
him on the path to parole and, Huckabee hoped, a life redeemed by
executive leniency.
It wasn’t unusual for Huckabee to do this; during his time in
office, he granted more than 1,000 clemencies—more than twice as
many as the three previous Arkansas governors combined. But almost
immediately after Huckabee granted this clemency, Clemmons violated his
parole and was sent back to an Arkansas jail for involvement in a
robbery.
He was paroled again in 2003, and this time was allowed to move to
Washington, where he ran a landscaping business near Tacoma and lived a
life free of major run-ins with the law until this summer—when,
according to allegations in court records and recent police statements,
he began a steep slide into criminal violence, throwing rocks at
neighbors and their property, punching a sheriff’s deputy in the face,
raping a 12-year-old girl, and, finally, on November 29, shooting four
police officers at Lakewood’s Forza Coffee, near his home.
Two days later, at around 2:45 a.m., a Seattle police officer
happened upon Clemmons while checking out an unoccupied stolen car in
South Seattle. Authorities say Clemmons snuck up behind the cop,
carrying a gun he’d stolen from one of the officers he’d killed two
days earlier, and, after being spotted, refused commands to
surrender.
The hunt for Clemmons is now over, but a huge question—as
important to the local criminal-justice and mental-health systems as it
is to the political future of Huckabee—remains: Who is
responsible for the destruction wreaked by Clemmons this year?
Naturally, everyone involved is pointing in a different
direction.
If you ask Huckabee, the responsibility lies with “a series of
failures in the criminal-justice system in both Arkansas and Washington
State.” If you ask Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who on November 30 gently
interviewed Huckabee (who is also working as a Fox News commentator
these days), the responsibility falls on two Washington judges who
earlier this month allowed Clemmons to be released on $190,000 bail
(not, as O’Reilly falsely said on air, $15,000 bail).
“They will be held accountable,” O’Reilly said of the
judges. “It’s not your fault, Governor.”
If you were able to ask Clemmons’s Federal Way lawyer, Daniel
Murphy, you would presumably hear that blame lies with his client’s
temporary insanity. Murphy, reached by phone, declined to talk to
The Stranger, but court records show that on July 30, he
informed a Pierce County superior court judge that Clemmons intended to
plead not guilty to the child rape and assault charges “by reason of
insanity and/or temporarily experiencing diminished capacity at the
time of the offense.”
If you ask psychiatrists at Western State Hospital, who earlier this
year were tasked by the court with evaluating Clemmons’s competency to
stand trial, it all might just have been a result of the normal
difficulties of life. According to their October 19 report, first
obtained by the Tacoma News Tribune and later described in
further detail by the Seattle Times, Clemmons said
that around the time of his alleged child rape and officer assault in
early May, he had been having visions of “people drinking blood and
people eating babies.” But when the Western State psychiatrists
interviewed Clemmons in October, they saw “no evidence of disturbance,”
deemed him competent to stand trial, and had no formal diagnosis for
him “other than stress,” as the Seattle Times put it.
If you ask people close to Clemmons, it would probably all come back
to the fact that in May he suddenly appeared to be “having a mental
breakdown” and going “crazy” and was clearly “not in his right mind,”
according to statements his family members and friends made in police
reports at the time.
If you ask some local law-enforcement officials, responsibility lies
with Arkansas authorities, who on July 22 dropped a “no-bail warrant”
that could have prevented Clemmons from being released on bail just
days before the November 29 cop killings.
Clearly, there was no shortage of human and systemic failures that
ultimately allowed Clemmons to go free when he should have been locked
up. Consider this simple distillation: A man set free nearly 10 years
ago by Huckabee, dragging around a criminal record dating back to his
teenage years, had appeared in a Pierce County court in July and
announced that he intended to claim he’d been out of his mind when he
raped a young girl and assaulted a police officer in May. After which,
two Western State psychiatrists—despite their inability to see
any signs of disturbance in this man in October—said he
represented an “increased risk for future dangerous behavior and for
committing future criminal acts.” Nevertheless, he was released on
bail, and soon thereafter allegedly wandered into a coffee shop and
began firing off rounds at four police officers.
But beneath all the failure-exposing and blame-shuffling are more
difficult, ultimately unanswerable questions. Was Clemmons a
fundamentally decent man who made some childhood mistakes, had the book
thrown at him for them, received a generous second chance from
Huckabee, and did the best he could with it until, in his 37th year of
life, he suddenly snapped? Or was Clemmons always closer to being “the
Beast,” as he reportedly described himself this summer, a dark-hearted
manipulator benefiting from criminal assistance by his friends and
family, and running an extremely long con that variously tricked
Huckabee, his own lawyer, and multiple Washington State officials into
repeatedly promoting his reentry into society? Or was he a combination
of unstable psychic elements in need of smart psychiatric intervention
that he simply never received?
The paradox of his death at the hands of the Seattle police officer
is that, while the community may now feel safer, it will never know the
answer—will never know for sure who it really was that was
terrorizing them. 
1. huge blame shifting to Arkansas. We had him, we let him go.
2. the fault is (A) the prosecutor, only asking for $200K, (b) that judge feldnagle whoever, he’s sure hiding behind his black robe, mmm? and (C) we must have the most stupid bail laws in the world if you don’t like at priors and we maintain the system of 10$ down and EZ credit financing.
3. WE are to blame because no one pays attention to these things until there is a tragedy, then we forget and will reelect this judge again, we will laud the pierce county prosecutor and probably elect him to pierce county exec becuz we so adroitly shifted all blame to arkansas, and we will continue without looking at or taking responsibility for or getting our legislators to revise these bail laws because obviously someone who got a 98 year sentence who committed assaults here who punched cops here who faced child rape here and who is unstable shouldn’t fucking have been let out on bail and our system allowed it and we’re in charge of out system.
Since you asked who’s at fault.
well, one huge unknown, with Clemmons being killed and not standing trial is whether or not he actually is guilty of killing the officers. The public will never know, to the standard of necessary guilt at a criminal trial, that this person is the real murderer. Now that he is out of the picture, dead and no case has to be proven, the prosecution and police will offer evidence and state, matter of fact like, that he is the one, but the fact will always remain that we will never know whether or not he had a legally acceptable defence.
@23: Let’s hear it for sarah68!!!!!
You NAILED it!!!!!
I think Huckabee did what he felt was right at the time given the information he had. Now, that’s more in the legal sense of things, where legally I don’t see any reason to think we should take some kind of action against him.
However politically this is absolutely devastating. It’s clear to me that if this now cop-killer wasn’t previously given a second chance on what seems to be faith Huckabee falls into the Sarah Palin category of political figures. Sure they want to get elected, but I’d rather vote in a centrist democrat than ‘let’ another ring wing extremist who cares more about their faith than the American people (and I understand, to them the 2 separate topics are the exact same thing) get elected. Little progress is better than getting blasted back to the stone age, though honestly, considering all the circumstances in his previous case, I might have made the same choice too.
Why was Washington taking so long to process (or whatever) the 8 felonies he’d committed in MAY that they had to release him in July????? I don’t see how they can blame arkansas for that.
@42 &43: Good points!
The original grant of clemmency was reasonable-108 years for crimes committed at 16 is unjustifiable. It is unreasonable to expect anyone to guess that a decade later this guy would go on a violent rampage.
And, while he may have been sowing signs of metal instability, he may well have been competent to stand trail. The laws regarding competence are written to prevent defendants using an “insanity claim” without being seriously mentally ill.
A 90 year sentence for a 16 year old is a harsh sentence. The liberals on these pages and at this esteemed news outlet are quick to blame Huckabee for releasing a cop killer… Sure is easy to blame people using Hindsight!
The same people on here calling for Huckabee’s head are also most likely in favor of reforming Draconian prison sentences such as a 90 yr robbery sentence for a 16 yr old.
The only person to blame for this act is Maruice Clemons, and thankfully due to the quick action of a SPD officer got pumped full of lead.
I wasn’t trying to be rude, cocky, or dismissive of other issues when I repeated myself @47.
It just REALLY FREAKS ME OUT that Huckabee, as the executive entrusted with complete discretion over clemency matters, was making life-altering decisions (for those who would be released or rot in jail, AND for the potential victims of an unwise grant of clemecy) based SOLELY ON HIS OWN RELIGIOUS BIAS (Christians worthy, others not), flouting both the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause, and that no one seems to bat an eye at this.
you people are all stupid.
people commit crimes. that’s what they do. they always have, always will and there’s nothing you can do about it. any attempt to plug the failing damn of human existence is masturbation and i hope you brought some kleenex because this is going to be a painful decline.
Q: Who’s fault is it?
A: President Ronald Reagan and all those who support his idiotic ideology.
Reagan is responsible for reducing public mental health services and releasing the mentally ill onto the streets. He also came up with the “War On Drugs” and “Just Say No” which unfairly targeted Black crack addicts with harsh mandatory sentences while allowing white cocaine users off the hook.
They knew it was Clemmons immediatly. They had him on camera,Witnesses identified his mug shot, and friends and family were coming out of the woodwork to cover their collective asses. His name was not pulled out of thin air. They were even told exactly who helped and how. I’m a conservative democrat and I think the far right conservatives and the far left liberals are equally guilty for this turn of events.
@59: see, I think a fatal bullet wound is a harsh sentence too, especially outside the Old West frontier-time.
Once the innocent have been proven guilty, I’ll firmly blame the person who committed the crimes… for the crimes.
Because I expect as much if I’M shot by the cops.
Funny thing, that.
I’m with @22 I guess: Though I’m happy to place a small slice of ‘blame’ on parents & his friends/community for bringing him up so completely detached from right & wrong.
Blame the taxpayer-paid “system”? Fuck no, I own that, and I know *I* ain’t to blame for this. I’d have to, you know, er, blame Myself for complacency or somethin.
Won’t see anyone doing that.
Ever.
@29 – I’ll accept your foolish racism IF you can do something about the violent sexual crimes, 92% perpetrated by ‘whites’…
No? Then address the real tangible problems, not the skin pigment problems you’ve cooked up in your imagin-nation.
@19 nails the point about bail.
On the subject of ole Huck: I think y’all er wrong: he shoulda Reduced Sent’nce, not applied clemency. Happy medium: Clemmons’d still be in jail, but not for life.
@49: I’m hoping for Huckabee/Palin to run, myself. 😉
@61: don’t you have a street corner and a cardboard placard to occupy?
Its just the way it is and its wrong if you freak out and go insane and homeless in Washington the cops will hound you till you snap. Then they blow you away.That is the extent of our mental health care…
He was given multiple second chances and blew them all, but was not held accountable. As for the “visions” of people drinking blood and killing babies, that is not mental illness, it is just malingering, as the psychiatrists told the court; he was a danger because he was a manipulative, lying psychopath. It’s (somewhat) understandable that his family aided in his escape, but why did the justice system let him get away with everything short of the murder of multiple cops?
comment from #1-
good point.
appeal to christianity could have gotten him out, but very unlikely appeal to anything else (including, and especially, islam)
Could we please cease using the word “snuck” [“Authorities say Clemmons snuck up behind the cop…”] in formal English? Granted, it may seem appropriate within the context of a story closely related to an Evangelical Christian Governor of a state in the Deep South. Unless you want to seem as unsophisticated as Governor Huckabee’s sense of judgment, “snuck” is best reserved for use as a colloquialism.
Wait a minute.
We have a system were a 17 year old can be sentenced to life in prison for a robbery, and then we wonder why when people like this get out, they want to kill police officers? If you believe that the US actions in the middle east are helping to create terrorist, then you should see the connection here. Would a sane criminal justice system [where police misbehavior was not tolerated, and sentences that fit crimes] produce such animosity towards the police and other symbols of state authority?
huckabee should be held accountable for his religious beliefs playing a role in his gift of clemency. however, the state of arkansas can be held responsible for not bitch-slapping clemmons once he was granted clemency and THEN violated his parole shortly there-after. then, they first agreed to, then took back an offer to issue a warrant that would keep clemmons in jail to await trial for rape and assault. regardless of all that, it’s solely clemmons fault (with a little WTF thrown to his family for not, say, alerting the authorities when he promised to kill cops and kids at thanksgiving dinner) that those officers are dead.
How many soldiers die every day? And we have parades and 24/7 coverage in the media aobut this. PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE.
huckster granted a reduction in sentence from 107+ years to 47 years, making the guy eligible for parole. understandable given the minor was sentenced for two small robberies without a weapon.
are you folks even sure clemmons had anything to do with the forza shooting? what makes you so sure? it looks like a black op to me intended to sell gun control and police crackdowns. clemmons was probably just another patsy.