Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, rising in the polls and drawing more scrutiny from critics, said over the weekend he's not soft on crime, and stands by a call he made years ago to isolate AIDS patients.

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As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee had a hand in twice as many pardons and commutations as his three predecessors combined. He granted 1,033 pardons and commutations in his 10½ years as governor of Arkansas, an average of about once every four days. The acts of clemency benefited the stepson of a staff member, murderers who worked at the governor's mansion, a rock star and inmates who received good words from their pastors.

His successor, Mike Beebe, has issued 40 so far this year, fewer than one a week. Bill Clinton, Frank White and Tucker granted 507 clemencies in the 17½ years they served as governor.

Whitewater figure David Hale, a government witness in the trial that forced Gov. Jim Guy Tucker's resignation and let Huckabee ascend to the office, was pardoned after being sentenced to 21 days in a state insurance case. Huckabee complained it would cost too much to hold him. The price tag: $1,200.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards received a gubernatorial pardon for a 1975 traffic offense. Huckabee prepared the paperwork to clear the rock star's good name after he met him at a North Little Rock concert.

But the most-discussed clemency case during Huckabee's tenure involved Wayne DuMond, who was castrated -- he said by masked men who attacked him at home -- while awaiting trial on charges he raped a teenager in 1984. Though Huckabee did not pardon DuMond nor commute his sentence, two members of a state parole board maintain that he pressured them to make a decision in the case.

Huckabee denies any such pressuring and notes that it was his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, who reduced DuMond's sentence, making him eligible for parole. Still, Huckabee has acknowledged his interest in gaining freedom for DuMond predated his term as governor.

Huckabee says there's nothing in his record to indicate he's soft on crime. While the number of pardons exceeded those of his predecessors, so did the size of the state prison system and so did the number of people executed.

Huckabee told reporters last week that while DuMond's file was waiting for him when he took office, his interest in the case started two years earlier after he met with DuMond's wife, Dusty. When he took office, she contacted Huckabee again. "He said if he was ever in a position to look into it he would try to remember it," said Dusty DuMond in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press.

Huckabee argues that it was Tucker's decision to reduce DuMond's sentence that made him eligible for parole, and he maintains he had little -- if any -- role in his release. Still, Huckabee had publicly questioned DuMond's guilt and met privately with the state parole board.

'Isolate' AIDS Patients

Huckabee said Sunday he won't run from his statement 15 years ago that AIDS patients should be isolated.

He acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain. He cited revelations in 1991 that a dentist had infected a patient in an extraordinary case that highlighted the risk of infection through contact with blood or bodily fluids.

"I still believe this today," he said in a broadcast interview, that "we were acting more out of political correctness" in responding to the AIDS crisis. "I don't run from it, I don't recant it," he said of his position in 1992. Yet he said he would state his view differently in retrospect.

Huckabee, as a Senate candidate that year, told The Associated Press that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague" if the federal government was going to deal with the spread of the disease effectively.

"It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents," he said then.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," the former Arkansas governor denied those words were a call to quarantine the AIDS population, although he did not explain how else isolation would be achieved. "I didn't say we should quarantine," he said. The idea was not to "lock people up."