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One of the murderers let out under Dukakis' program was a career violent criminal, Willie Horton. In 1974, Horton sliced up a 17-year-old convenience store clerk, Joey Fournier, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after Fournier had already handed over all the money. He then stuffed the boy's corpse in a garbage can. That wasn't Horton's first offense: Years earlier, he'd been convicted of attempted murder for stabbing a man in South Carolina.
No sane person would have allowed Horton to take a breath of free air again.
Horton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which was the maximum possible penalty, inasmuch as Gov. Dukakis had vetoed the death penalty. The whole idea of sentencing first-degree murderers to life without parole is that they are never supposed to be let out of prison. But under the weekend furlough program lustily promoted by Dukakis, Horton was released.
On April 3, 1987, months after running away from his most recent furlough, Horton broke into the Maryland home of Cliff Barnes and his fiancee, Angela Miller, and waited for them to return. When Barnes got home, Horton lunged at him, dragged him to the basement, tied him up, and spent hours torturing him, slashing him and jamming a pistol butt in his mouth and eyes. He told Barnes he planned to hang him and watch him die.
Five hours later, Barnes' fiancee came home. Horton left Barnes bound and gagged in the basement, went upstairs and repeatedly raped and beat Miller, as Barnes listened helplessly from the basement.
What could be more central to a presidential campaign than an ad highlighting how Bush would handle criminal justice issues versus how the elected governor of Massachusetts was at that moment handling them?
Ann Coulter - December 5, 2018 - BUSH'S FINEST 30 SECONDS: THE WILLIE HORTON AD
Precisely what political ads are meant to do. Reveal the truth. This did. It exposed Dukakis and his moronic ideas about dealing with criminals.