After completing a Minneapolis-to-Maine summer tour with the Grateful Dead in 1988, I settled in for a few weeks at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, at a place owned by my then-girlfriend’s family. This week, I was comforted to see that ex-girlfriend posting some beautiful pictures of the lake on Facebook, so the place is still in good hands.
During my July 1988 stay there, I had a routine. I’d grab a copy of the New York Times and a cup of coffee and sit on the dock in front of the boathouse reading the latest on the presidential campaign. At the beginning of my visit, Michael Dukakis was ahead by a healthy 17 points in the polls, and I was feeling great about the country repudiating Ronald Reagan’s radical two-terms in office. What I didn’t know was that at the same time Poppy Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater was crafting the Willie Horton ad campaign. Watching Dukakis’s lead slip away in the face of that attack was one of the transformative events of my life. I remember calculating how many millions of Americans must have changed their minds about who they intended to vote for to account for the change in the polls, and I lost a lot of my youthful faith in people. In the end, Dukakis was trounced, and we still have Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court as our reward.
The Willie Horton ads were classic examples of dog whistle racist politics and, on his deathbed, Atwater apologized to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty” in running them. But they did at least pertain to a truly stupid policy that served as a good example of liberal wrongheadedness.
It all started in 1972 under the administration of Republican Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent. The idea was to create a state inmate furlough program as a way of preparing inmates for eventual release. Prisoners would be released over the weekend and then return to prison. The practice wasn’t limited to Massachusetts and participants had lower levels of recidivism, but inevitably some prisoners would not return, and some would commit new crimes. In practice, first-degree murderers like William Horton (he never actually used the nickname “Willie”) were not part of the program. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the law as written did not exclude them, and they were therefore eligible.
This happens all the time where a law isn’t written with enough rigor, and the Massachusetts legislature quickly passed a revision that explicitly excluded first degree murderers from the program. At that point, Dukakis was the governor, and he vetoed the bill, arguing it would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation.”
That’s a decision worthy of criticism, and it’s especially ridiculous for an inmate like Horton who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole after stabbing a 17 year-old gas station attendant 19 times and stuffing him in a trash can. There was no reason to prepare Horton for life on the outside and there should have been no reason to worry about him re-offending. If the state had any real interest in Horton’s rehabilitation at all, it was vastly outweighed by the risk of him using the furlough program to escape. Why wouldn’t he at least try? What did he have to lose?
And, of course, that’s exactly what he did. He then traveled to Maryland where things did not go well.
Angela and Clifford Barnes, a young couple who live in a picture-book home in a suburb of Washington, say they had no desire to become an issue in the 1988 Presidential campaign.
But what happened to the Barneses on the night of April 3, 1987, is now at the center of the effort by Vice President Bush’s campaign to portray Gov. Michael S. Dukakis as soft on crime. On that night William R. Horton, a convicted murderer who had been furloughed from the Massachusetts prison system for a weekend and did not go back, broke into the couple’s home, bound and stabbed Mr. Barnes and raped his wife.
It was only after this crime that Dukakis decided that he’d made a mistake and agreed to change the policy. So, even if the ads were abhorrent, the issue was a legitimate criticism of Dukakis’s judgment.
Having said that, Dukakis didn’t come up with the idea of weekend furloughs or create the program in Massachusetts, and he did not specifically intervene in Horton’s case to see that he was released.
We can’t say the same for the case of Donald Trump and Jaime A. Davidson. Davidson was a major drug dealer who decided that he’d rather rob a customer than sell him four pounds of cocaine for $42,000. He instructed three members of his gang to handle the robbery, and provided one of them, a teenager, with a .357 revolver. The problem was that the customer was an undercover federal agent named Wallie Howard Jr., and the teenager shot him in the back of the head and killed him. Davidson wasn’t present for the murder but was nonetheless held accountable and sentenced to life without parole. In one of Trump’s last acts as president, he pardoned Davidson. The New York Times said it was a decision that “left some law enforcement officials reeling.”
Cop killers serving life sentences are not obvious or common recipients of pardons or commutations, and I doubt any other president in the history of the country besides Trump would have even considered the idea. In fact, Davidson applied for a pardon during Barack Obama’s presidency and was turned down. His first application with Trump’s administration was turned down, too.
But in 2020, Davidson decided to try a different approach.
In the waning days of Trump’s presidency, Davidson eschewed the Office of the Pardon Attorney and sought relief directly from Trump. Davidson’s attorney Betty Schein, had deep connections to the Trump White House. Schein and her husband, Alan Futerfas, represented people associated with the Trump Organization, including Donald Trump Jr.
Davidson’s request for commutation also won the support of Alice Johnson, a woman whose life sentence was commuted by Trump after reality star Kim Kardashian championed her case. Johnson appeared in a 2020 Super Bowl ad supporting Trump’s reelection and her support of Davidson was highlighted in the White House press release announcing the commutation of Davidson’s sentence. According to Johnson, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner assisted her in winning Trump’s support for Davidson and others.
The prosecutor in Davidson’s 1990 conviction, John Duncan, was never contacted and was dumbfounded by the decision. “If you ask me for a list of people who nobody should give a presidential commutation to,” Duncan told the New York Times in 2021, “Davidson would pretty much be at the top of the list.”
In this case, Trump is responsible for Davidson’s release in a very direct way. The system that was in place, run by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, had already rejected him once and surely would have rejected him again. I don’t know whether money exchanged hands, but I suspect it did considering Jared and Ivanka’s involvement and Trump’s avaricious and transactional nature. Either way, this wasn’t like Dukakis’s role in Horton’s release at all. Dukakis did not know who Horton was or that he was being given a weekend furlough. What’s more, Dukakis never pardoned Horton or commuted his sentence. If we have two examples of egregiously bad judgment, Trump’s is clearly worse.
And what did Davidson do after he was released?
Now, the man set free by Trump, Jaime A. Davidson, was accused by authorities of strangling his wife during a 2023 dispute, convicted by a jury of domestic violence, and, in July 2024, sentenced to three months in jail, according to court records obtained by Popular Information.
His wife survived, but it’s a wonder she even reported the crime.
Chang testified that Davidson told her “she couldn’t call the police” because, if she did, she would be deported, and they would take away her son. According to Chang, Davidson also advised her that “he is the government.” She called the police anyway.
What Davidson meant when he said he “is the government” became clearer in a lengthy letter he provided to the court in which he wrote, that prosecutors should have “taken a step back and looked up how Mr. Davidson was released from federal prison by Former President Donald J. Trump.”
The Democrats could make this a major issue in the campaign. I don’t think things have changed that much since 1988 in terms of people thinking it’s a bad idea to free people who are serving life sentences for murder. Of course, like Horton, Davidson is black, but the Democrats should not and will not make it all about race. Unfortunately that might limit how effective the attack would be in changing minds. But if Dukakis was hammered for a lesser lapse in judgment, Trump should not be immune. And it says more about his corruption and poor decision making than it does about some alleged weakness on crime. With Trump, the problem is that he’s a criminal himself, arrested four times alone this year, and convicted of 34 felonies and civil sexual assault. He should be the one asking for a commutation rather than asking for a job that allows him to provide them.
