Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Republican rivals are calling him soft on crime because of a law he signed that gave some methamphetamine offenders more credit for good behavior, reports the Associated Press. “Mike Huckabee’s solution? Early releases for meth dealers,” says Fred Thompson’s campaign. Huckabee’s home state passed a law restricting access to the principal ingredient in methamphetamine. It said that some meth offenders, instead of serving 70 percent of their sentences, would have to serve at least half if they behaved.
Huckabee discussed the issue today, singling out former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Sentences “for meth dealers in my state are more than twice as harsh as they were in his state,” Huckabee told an audience in Iowa. “When people get desperate, they say desperate things, and sometimes dishonest things.” Romney pledged in Des Moines today to stop a “plague of meth” in the U.S. “I want to make sure that we do everything in our power to keep kids off this terrible, pernicious, captivating drug,” he said. This year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration called meth the principal drug of concern in Iowa.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122000251.html