jan_brewerThe Times today has a story about a legal case from Arizona.

There’s a guy in prison the state’s clemency board says is there because of a “miscarriage of justice.” Jan Brewer could accept the board’s recommendation but hasn’t—and according to the Times, won’t say why.

… Ms. Brewer rejected the board’s recommendation without explanation in November. It is possible that politics played a role in her decision; Ms. Brewer, a Republican who became governor last year, is running for a full term in November.

“She denied the application right after she announced that she was running for governor,” said Katherine Puzauskas, a lawyer with the Arizona Justice Project at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. […]

There is little political upside to granting clemency, but there is a substantial risk, as Mike Huckabee learned when a man whose sentence he commuted as governor of Arkansas in 2000 killed four police officers last year.

P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., has been fuming about Ms. Brewer’s handling of the Macumber case. “I have been following state clemency for 30 years,” Mr. Ruckman said, “and this is easily, easily, the most disturbing. It’s borderline despicable.”

Emphases added.

The case is a doozy—the man’s son says his mother framed the father. She testified originally he had said he’d killed two people in the desert outside Scottsdale in 1962. Macumber was sentenced to life without parole.

In the story, the Times talks to the wife:

In the course of a half-hour conversation, Ms. Kempfert accused Mr. Macumber of terrible and disturbing crimes beyond the killings in the desert. Asked if he deserved clemency, she said, “Absolutely not.”