Gov. Asa Hutchinson will appear at 7 p.m. tonight on AETN’s “Arkansans Ask” program.
Mara Leveritt suggests a question:
“Will you commute the life sentence given Rolf Kaestel in 1981 for robbing $264 from a Fort Smith taco stand?”
Kaestel has been recommended for parole by boards in both Arkansas and Utah, where he was transferred under mysterious circumstances in 1999. Kaestel’s backers think his transfer was done as retribution for his contributing information to reporting about a scandal over sale of tainted plasma drawn from prison inmates. His story has been told periodically, recently in reporting by a Utah newspaper.
Kaestel got the maximum sentence for the robbery thinks to work of then-Prosecutor Ron Fields, who happens to have once been a top assistant to Asa Hutchinson at the Department of Homeland Security.