Mike Huckabee - Position Change DRAFT

"I've seen interviews with people saying they'd have no trouble carrying out a death sentence on a mother. People often speak as if they would gladly conduct an execution. I seriously doubt it. And I know a little more about the subject than most of some of the tough talkers. In ten and a half years as a governor, I had to carry out the death penalty sixteen times. And no matter how you think you would react, when you pick up the pen and sign your name to a death warrant that starts in motion a decision that is going to end in the death of a human being, you think about it. And when the IV line is in the veins of the condemned person, and your verbal command results in the injection of lethal drugs, it's not so simple. In the four to ten minutes until death is pronounced, time stands still. One of the executions that I had to preside over was one of only twelve women executed in modern times. She was a mother and had killed her two children. She refused to accept any legal assistance to stop her execution. Now people can talk about how certain they are about deciding on a death sentence. It's because they've never had to do it. I don't understand how the Casey Anthony jury could find her not guilty on all the charges, including manslaughter. But I also don't understand how people could possibly think it would be easy to take a life of a mother, even one who killed her child. And, God help us all if that ever gets to be easy."

"[Mike Huckabee: T]his idea of recreational marijuana — well let's let Colorado have at it for a few years and let's see how that works out for them... The best way to determine whether this is good public policy is to do what the founders envisioned, and that's let states become laboratories of democracy.

[Host] Are you willing to change the federal law to allow that to happen?

[Huckabee] I'm willing to let states operate under the 10th Amendment, and I'm willing for the states, if they think that marijuana and the legalization of it is a great thing, you know, I'm willing for them to experiment and find out. And it if it works and it turns out that the presence of recreational marijuana makes them a more prosperous state... well heck, we may just all want to reach out there and grab that.

[Host] But you don’t think that’s going to happen. [Huckabee] I probably don’t think so.”