Hillary Rodham vs 12 yo rape victim
Yes, I know. She was just doing her job. But think about this: Hillary has run for President and I'll bet you've never heard about this episode.
.... In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas – using her child development background to help the defendant…In May 1975, Washington County prosecutor Mahlon Gibson called Rodham, who had taken over the law clinic months earlier, to tell her she’d been appointed to represent a hard-drinking factory worker named Thomas Alfred Taylor, who had requested a female attorney.
In her 2003 autobiography “Living History,” Clinton writes that she initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired “cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples collected by the sheriff’s office.”
However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy – attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.
Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out “older men” like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed “Hillary D. Rodham” in compact cursive…
The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.
“It’s not true, I never sought out older men – I was raped,” the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.
With all the anguish she’d felt over the case in the years since, there was one thing she never realized – that the lawyer for the man she reviles was none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I have to understand that she was representing Taylor,” she said when interviewed in prison last fall. “I’m sure Hillary was just doing her job.” …
During her first few months on the case, Rodham fired off no fewer than 19 subpoenas, affidavits and motions – almost as much paper as was typical for a capital murder case that year, according to case files on microfilm.
She successfully petitioned to obtain Taylor’s underwear for independent testing after the state medical examiner found traces of semen and blood. She also secured Taylor’s release on $5,000 bond after getting his boss at the factory to vouch for him.
But the record shows that Rodham was also intent on questioning the girl’s credibility. That line of defense crystallized in a July 28, 1975, affidavit requesting the girl undergo a psychiatric examination at the university’s clinic.
“I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,” wrote Rodham, without referring to the source of that allegation. “I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.”
Dale Gibson, the investigator, doesn’t recall seeing evidence that the girl had fabricated previous attacks. The assistant prosecutor who handled much of the case for Mahlon Gibson died several years ago. The prosecutor’s files on the case, which would have included such details, were destroyed more than decade ago when a flood swept through the county archives, Mahlon Gibson said. Those files also would have included the forensics evidence referenced in “Living History.”
The victim was visibly stunned when handed the affidavit by a reporter this fall. “It kind of shocks me – it’s not true,” she said. “I never said anybody attacked my body before, never in my life.” …
The judge granted Rodham’s request for the exam, but the results, like the other prosecution files, were apparently lost in the flood.
By the fall of 1975, the prosecution’s case was crumbling under pressure from Rodham and other factors relating to the evidence and the witnesses…
Rodham was paid a $250 retainer for her services, minus 10 percent for court costs, records show. In her book, Hillary Clinton says the case spurred her to create the first rape hotline in Arkansas…
Here, for the record, his Mrs. Clinton’s account of this case, from “ Living History” page 90:
One day the Washington County prosecuting attorney, Mahlon Gibson, called to tell me an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer. Gibson had recommended that the criminal court judge, Maupin Cummings, appoint me. I told Mahlon I really didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.
When I visited the alleged rapist in the county jail, I learned that he was an uneducated “chicken catcher.” His job was to collect chickens from the large warehouse farms for one of the local processing plants. He denied the charges against him and insisted that the girl, a distant relative, had made up her story.
I conducted a thorough investigation and obtained expert testimony from an eminent scientist from New York, who cast doubt on the evidentiary value of the blood and semen the prosecutor claimed proved the defendant’s guilt in the rape. Because of that testimony, I negotiated with the prosecutor for the defendant to plead guilty to sexual abuse.
When I appeared with my client before Judge Cummings to present that plea, he asked me to leave the courtroom while he conducted the necessary examination to determine the factual basis for the plea. I said, “Judge, I can’t leave. I’m his lawyer.” “Well,” said the judge, “I can’t talk about these things in front of a lady.” “Judge,” I reassured him, “don’t think of me as anything but a lawyer.” The judge walked the defendant through his plea and then sentenced him.
It was shortly after this experience that Ann Henry and I discussed setting up Arkansas’s first rape hot line…
(By the way, this is the only mention of “semen” in “Living History.”)
But to fully appreciate just how thoroughly Mrs. Clinton has mischaracterized her legal efforts, you have read the full Newsday article, which includes many more details of the case.
Still, even just from the excerpt you should get the drift of her actions, and perhaps also a lifetime supply of irony.
For what is Hillary Clinton but the self-proclaimed lifelong defender of children everywhere? (Though, it’s hard to come up with an instance of her ever actually helping a child.)
But sadly, this comports with the two other cases Mrs. Clinton “won,” which we have previously discussed.
In her first legal case Mrs. Clinton successfully defended evil corporate interests against a plaintiff who claimed to have found a rat’s hindquarters in a can of pork and beans.
The champion of the little guy, Mrs. Clinton argued that the rodent parts had been sterilized in the canning process and “might be considered edible” in certain parts of the world. She thereby managed to convince the jury to award the man only a token amount.
And in another case not long after, Hillary defended a three-hundred-pound man who was charged with assaulting his girlfriend.
Prosecutors had viewed the case as open and shut, as the woman had been severely beaten according to the police.
Yet somehow the great champion of women’s rights found a way to convince the judge to drop the charges — on a technicality.
So, yes, Mrs. Clinton has always been a woman of very high principles.
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/hillary-versus-the-allegedly-raped-child#.U58C57kU-if |
