Willie Horton

[1] Released for a weekend as the beneficiary of a Massachusetts furlough program, he failed to return, and was later recaptured and convicted of committing assault, armed robbery, and rape in Maryland, where he remains incarcerated.

[8] Horton was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and incarcerated at the Northeastern Correctional Center in Massachusetts.

On April 3, 1987, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Horton twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping, stabbing, binding, and gagging her fiancé.

The state inmate furlough program, originally signed into law by Republican governor Francis Sargent in 1972, excluded convicted first-degree murderers.

However, in 1973, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that this right extended to first-degree murderers because the law specifically did not exclude them.

Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater said: "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate.

Further information regarding the furlough came from aide Andrew Card, a Massachusetts native whom President George W. Bush later named as his Chief of Staff.

[17] Beginning on September 21, 1988, the Americans for Bush arm of the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), under the auspices of Floyd Brown, began running a campaign ad entitled "Weekend Passes," using the Horton case to attack Dukakis.

While the advertisement did not mention Horton or feature his photograph, it depicted a variety of men walking in and out of prison through a revolving door.

[23][24] Throughout most of the campaign, the Horton ad was seen as focusing on criminal justice issues, with neither the candidates nor journalists mentioning a racial component.

[25] On October 22, in an attempt to counter-attack, Dukakis's campaign ran an ad about a convicted heroin dealer named Angel Medrano who raped and killed a pregnant mother of two after escaping from a federal correctional halfway house.

The investigation by the FEC, including deposition of officials from both organizations, revealed indirect connections between McCarthy and the Bush campaign (such as his having previously worked for Ailes) but found no direct evidence of wrongdoing.

[19] Robin Toner of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that Republicans and Democrats, while disagreeing on the merits of the ad itself, agreed it was "devastating to Dukakis.

Ann Coulter described his Willie Horton ad as "the greatest campaign commercial in political history," claiming that it "clearly and forcefully highlighted the two presidential candidates' diametrically opposed views" on crime.