Okay, I hate seeing Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ face. That’s not a commentary on her looks. I actually think she’s been attractive at times, and she is quite adept at dressing to flatter her figure and being creative with makeup.
But she is an ugly, ugly person. I could tell the first time I saw her lying for Donald Trump as his Press Secretary that she was doing it without compunction. The look on her face every time she fielded a question from a reporter that she’d already delivered an official lie to was one of sheer contempt.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a bad person, I think we can agree.
Why am I so worked up about her now? Well, as tradition holds among presidents and governors, it came time this year for Sanders to “pardon” a turkey — that is, to allow it to live instead of being butchered for someone’s Thanksgiving feast.
But this year, Sarah Sanders had an opportunity to do something far more meaningful.
Charlie Vaughn, a developmentally disabled, illiterate man, has spent the last three decades on death row in Arkansas for a crime that most agree — including some judges and lawyers — he very likely didn’t even commit.
He has tried for clemency for years, and there was even a chance, although slim, that it might be granted by Governor Sanders’ father, Mike Huckabee, when he was the governor of the state. I say “slim” because Vaughn is a black man, and nearly all commutations and clemency granted by Huckabee was in favor of white defendants.
Those stopped altogether when he commuted the sentence of a man who later went on to murder four police officers in Lakewood, Washington.
But as the Arkansas Times reports, Vaughn has some pretty strong evidence on his side:
- Vaughn and three other people were convicted for the 1988 murder of Myrtle Holmes, an 81-year-old woman in Fordyce.
- Despite suffering from mental illness and a severe developmental disability, Vaughn was held in jail for nearly a year, during which he repeatedly denied any involvement in the crime. There’s no record he was ever evaluated by a mental health professional to assess his competency.
- A judge did finally order an evaluation, but instead, the local sheriff sent an informant into the jail to extract a confession from Vaughn. This would not be disclosed to defense counsel for more than 20 years.
- The sheriff then publicly announced that Vaughn had confessed. To that point, there was no record of such a confession. But Vaughn was then assigned an attorney, who Vaughn says told him his only hope to avoid the death penalty was to confess and implicate the other people suspected by local officials.
- Vaughn then confessed and implicated the others. His confession contradicted several known facts about the crime. Most notably, Vaughn claimed that he and another man raped Holmes. Even back then, DNA testing on semen found in the victim excluded both Vaughn and the man he implicated.
- The judge sentenced Vaughn to life in prison, but seemed suspicious of Vaughn’s confession, saying, on the record, “I’m sure that some governor somewhere down the road will reduce the sentence or commute it to a term of years.”
- The only other evidence against Vaughn and the others were statements from various witnesses who claimed to have seen some combination of the four suspects together, or to have overheard them making inculpatory statements.
- Nearly all of these witnesses were police informants. At the time, several were addicted to drugs, suffered from mental illness, or both. All but one of these witnesses has since recanted.
- Based on all of this, the two other people convicted based on Vaughn’s confession have since had their convictions overturned and have been released. One has since passed away. Both were represented by seasoned attorneys with ample experience litigating innocence cases.
Sarah Sanders could have set a man free who likely did not commit the crime he’s accused of. Instead, she stuck with tradition and a turkey. In what must have been the worst message ever received by anyone around Thanksgiving, Sanders’ office released a statement:
“The Governor completed her review of Mr. Vaughn’s file last week. Unfortunately, she has chosen not to grant clemency at this time. He will be able to reapply in 6 years, pursuant to statute.”