Last week saw three bizarre law-and-order stories. Two were funny, the third
unbearably sad and infuriating. All had their origins in that delusional state I call Clintonmania.

    First, ace prosecutor Hickman Ewing proudly told the Arkansas Times that
he'd created a chart matching Bill Clinton's sexual exploits as chronicled in the
so-called Starr Report to events in the Whitewater investigation.

Seeking a pattern, you see.
Yo, Hick, here's your pattern: sun rises, rooster's ready.

    Meanwhile, The New York Times solemnly reported the suspicions of
"congressional investigators" probing presidential pardons Clinton didn't give.
Supposedly, Roger Clinton cashed a $50,000 check from an associate of the
Gambino crime family. That's no scandal, it's the premise of a Steve Martin picture.

    There was nothing amusing, however, about the Kansas City arrest of
Wayne DuMond for the murder of a 39 year-old strangulation victim. Almost
needless to say, the victim was a woman. Police say they found DuMond's DNA
under her fingernails. He's also suspected in another woman's murder.

    Also not funny were Gov. Mike Huckabee's efforts to rescue himself from
the consequences of his own folly by blaming somebody, anybody, else for
DuMond's release from the Arkansas penitentiary.

    "I think you guys are being played like a cheap fiddle by the Democrats," he whined to reporters.
"They want to make a Willie Horton out of it. And if anybody needs to get a Willie Horton out of it,
it's Jim Guy Tucker and the Democrat Party and it ain't me."

    Horton was the convicted murderer who raped a woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.
GOP operatives pinned the blame on then-Gov. Michael Dukakis during his 1988 presidential campaign.
DuMond was Arkansas' celebrity inmate of the 1990s, a convicted rapist with a long record who conned
some reporters and other gullible souls into seeing him as an innocent victim of the "Clinton machine."

    Initially, two things contributed to DuMond's celebrity status: the fact that he was castrated at his home
while awaiting trial and that St. Francis County Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, who died while doing time for
gambling-related corruption, displayed his testicles in a jar. Notice the passive verb, "was castrated."
That's because nobody knows who did it. A urologist who'd studied the topic told the Forrest City
Times-Herald that self-mutilation isn't that rare among psychologically disturbed sex offenders.
It's a sympathy ploy, among other things.

    Something else that excited DuMond's supporters was his victim's identity. A 17-year-old Forrest City
cheerleader when DuMond kidnapped, raped and threatened to kill her, Ashley Stevens also had the
misfortune to be a distant cousin of Bill Clinton's. Now 34, she told the Kansas City Star that when she heard
the news of DuMond's murder arrest on her car radio last week, "I had to pull over, I was crying so hard. I just lost it."

    "I kind of got shoved aside when all the politics got involved," Stevens told me. "My testimony, my identification
of DuMond, the jury trial--all that meant nothing. That whole process meant nothing. At least now I don't feel like
I'm on trial every day anymore. So yes, it was awful. But my overall view is I kept him in jail for 14 years.
Think of all the lives I may have saved."

    One of Huckabee's first acts as governor was to announce his intention to pardon DuMond. According to
the Democrat-Gazette on Sept. 21, 1996, Huckabee cited "serious questions as to the legitimacy of his guilt."
He also noted DuMond's "incredibly savage" castration, which he said was more punishment than was necessary
"for a crime that is very questionable that he may have committed."

    Huckabee did all that without consulting Prosecutor Fletcher Long, who describes the DuMond case as one
of the strongest he's ever tried; without reading the trial transcript; and without talking to Stevens or her family.
He acted on blind faith. If Clinton was on one side, Huckabee was on the other, period.

    Huckabee appeared startled, Long told me, when the veteran prosecutor informed him that contrary to
Clinton-hating Web sites, no DNA evidence existed. After Stevens came courageously forward, sacrificing
her anonymity for the sake of protecting others and drawing the support of legislators from both parties,
Huckabee backed off a bit, but not very far.

    Today, the governor claims his only action was to deny DuMond clemency. That's simply false.
As the Democrat-Gazette reported, he held a highly irregular closed-door meeting with the Post-Prison
Transfer Board at which the DuMond case was discussed.

    Afterward, the board reversed itself and voted to parole DuMond to another state.

    Huckabee's office issued a press release stating that "the action of the board accomplishes what I sought
to do in considering an earlier request for a commutation." He denied clemency in a same-day "Dear Wayne"
letter stating, "My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel now that parole is the best way for your
reintroduction into society to take place."

    Now Huckabee says, "I'm very glad that I didn't have anything to do with his release."
He suggests that Clinton and Tucker, who commuted DuMond's term to 39 years, should be quizzed,
because "the real question is why, not just did Tucker do it, but . . . did he do that with or without Bill
Clinton's knowledge or permission."
 

    That's pathetic.
 

If it weren't for Mike Huckabee, Wayne DuMond would still be inside.
 

    Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.