Having accumulated five felony convictions in Arkansas and at least eight felony charges in Washington, according to the Seattle Times, Clemmons was undoubtedly a danger to the community who ought to have been returned to prison long ago by law enforcement authorities. Only days before the police shooting, he was released on $150,000 bail from a jail in Pierce County, Wash., where he was incarcerated on charges of raping a child.

As Huckabee suggested in a statement released on Monday, courts and law enforcement agencies in Washington should probably share the blame for Sunday’s carnage. “Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, ” the statement said, referring to Clemmons, “it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.”

In short, Huckabee was arguing, the killings attributed to Clemmons were not Huckabee’s fault. Certainly they were not his fault alone. But this incident has revived memories of other decisions he made that later led to terrible consequences. The damage to his political future will hinge on how deeply news organizations now delve into those cases — and the bizarre faith-based rationale behind his use of the clemency and pardon powers of the governor.

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state’s draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. “I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” he explained in his clemency application in 2000. “I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”

Surely the most notorious instance of misplaced mercy involved Wayne Dumond, a rapist and murderer now deceased, who was originally sent to prison in Arkansas for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. During Clinton’s presidency the Dumond case became an obsession among certain right-wing pundits and politicians, who insisted that Dumond had been framed and brutalized by the “Clinton machine.” When Huckabee became governor, he supported a parole for Dumond, winning applause from the Republican right — until the former prisoner raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. Dumond later died in prison, under suspicion that he had murdered at least one other woman after his Arkansas release — a tragic outcome for which Huckabee has repeatedly tried to blame others, including his two Democratic predecessors in the statehouse.

The real engine behind Dumond’s release, however, was a Baptist minister and ultra-conservative ideologue named Jay Cole, who also happened to be a friend of Huckabee. Cole would tell the governor about his visits with the supposedly innocent Dumond, when the minister and the prisoner would read the Bible and pray together.

Perhaps the worst instance of that same syndrome, chronicled in detail by Arkansas journalists, concerned an Air Force sergeant named Glen Green, who was sentenced to prison for life after confessing that he had raped and killed a teenage girl. After beating the woman with nunchucks, he violated her almost lifeless body, ran over her with his car and buried her in a swamp. But yet another preacher friend of Huckabee’s named Rev. Johnny Jackson somehow persuaded the governor that this incredibly brutal killing had been an “accident” — and that Green had repented, come to Jesus and therefore should be freed.

Two years ago, I noted that Huckabee knew almost nothing about the Green case beyond what his preacher pal had told him. He consulted neither the prosecutor nor the victim’s family, and overruled the dissent of his own parole board. After he announced that Green would be released, the furious public reaction forced him to reverse the decision. Yet he continued to release murderers and other violent criminals despite angry dissent from local prosecutors.

Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader. Among the thugs who benefited from his mercy was a robber who beat an old man to death with a lead pipe.

During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee’s arrogance and stupidity mostly escaped the full scrutiny of the national press corps, in part because his stint as a contender was so brief. But next time, if there is a next time, he should get no such free pass — and his claims to divine guidance ought to be thoroughly debunked. 

Note: This story was updated after publication with news of Clemmons’ reported death.

Troyer said warrants for first-degree murder have been issued against Clemmons, 37, who is accused of shooting four officers from the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood on Sunday morning as they were working in the coffee house. Pierce County, where the shootings happened, is the lead agency investigating the case.

Police surrounded the house late Sunday. Before heavily armed police officers determined shortly before dawn that Clemmons was not in the house, negotiators spent hours trying to communicate with him, using loudspeakers, explosions and even a robot sent into the house. At one point, gunshots rang through the neighborhood.

Clemmons has a long criminal history, including a long prison sentence commuted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee nearly a decade ago, and a recent arrest for allegedly assaulting a police officer in Washington.

Authorities allege he killed Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39, and officers Ronald Owens, 37, Tina Griswold, 40, and Greg Richards, 42, as they worked on their laptop computers at the beginning of their shifts.

Clemmons is believed to have been in the area of the coffee shop around the time of the shooting, but Troyer declined to say what evidence might link him to the shooting.

Investigators say they know of no reason four gunning down the officers, but court documents indicate Clemmons is delusional and mentally unstable.

“We’re going to be surprised if there is a motive worth mentioning,” said Troyer, who sketched out a scene of controlled and deliberate carnage that spared the employees and other customers at the coffee shop in suburban Parkland, about 35 miles south of Seattle.

“He was very versed with the weapon,” Troyer said. “This wasn’t something where the windows were shot up and there bullets sprayed around the place. The bullets hit their targets.”

Officer Richards’ sister-in-law, Melanie Burwell, called the shooting “senseless.”

“He didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” she said. “If there were more people in the world like Greg, things like this wouldn’t happen.

Clemmons has an extensive violent criminal history from Arkansas. He was also recently charged in Washington state with assaulting a police officer, and second-degree rape of a child. Using a bail bondsman, he posted $150,000 — only $15,000 of his own money — and was released from jail last week.

Documents related to the pending charges in Washington state indicate a volatile personality. In one instance, he is accused of punching a sheriff’s deputy in the face, The Seattle Times reported. In another, he is accused of gathering his wife and young relatives and forcing them to undress, according to a Pierce County sheriff’s report.

“The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus,” the report said.

Troyer said investigators believe two of the officers were killed while sitting in the shop, and a third was shot dead after standing up. The fourth apparently “gave up a good fight.”

“We believe there was a struggle, a commotion, a fight … that he fought the guy all the way out the door,” Troyer said.

In 1989, Clemmons, then 17, was convicted in Little Rock for aggravated robbery. He was paroled in 2000 after Huckabee commuted a 95-year prison sentence.

Huckabee, who was criticized during his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 for granting many clemencies and commutations, cited Clemmons’ youth. Clemmons later violated his parole, was returned to prison and released in 2004.

On Sunday, Huckabee issued this statement on his Web site: “Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state.”

It was the second deadly ambush of police in the Seattle area in recent weeks, but the two cases aren’t related.

Authorities say a man killed a Seattle police officer on Halloween night and also firebombed four police vehicles in October as part of a “one-man war” against law enforcement. Christopher Monfort, 41, was arrested after being wounded in a firefight with police days after the Seattle shooting.

The officers killed Sunday had received no threats, Troyer said.

“We won’t know if it’s a copycat effect or what it was until we get the case solved,” he said.

——

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Gene Johnson in Seattle, Rachel La Corte in Tacoma, George Tibbits in Seattle, Jill Zeman Bleed in Little Rock, Ark., and photographers Elaine Thompson in Seattle and Ted S. Warren in Parkland.

In some sense, that’s unfair. Governors often act on someone else’s recommendation in a situation like this one — Huckabee says that’s what happened here — and a certain percentage of recidivism is unavoidable. Huckabee may just be a victim, like Mike Dukakis was with Willie Horton, of circumstance.

However, this isn’t the first time one of Huckabee’s actions in this vein has come back to haunt him. And the first case can’t really be written off to chance. When the then-governor commuted the sentence of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond, it was for political reasons — opponents of former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton believed that DuMond had been railroaded because his victim was a distant relative of Clinton’s. DuMond went on to sexually assault and murder a woman.