Newsday: An early look at how Clinton deals with crisis BY GLENN THRUSH
Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her “35 years of experience making change” on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.
But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn’t mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. 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.
The case offers a glimpse into the way Clinton deals with crisis. Her approach, then and now, was to immerse herself in even unpleasant tasks with a will to win, an attitude captured in one of her favorite aphorisms: “Bloom where you’re planted.”
It also came at a crucial moment in her personal life, less than a year after she followed boyfriend Bill Clinton down to Arkansas — a time when she struggled to gain a foothold in a new state while maintaining her own professional identity.
“Bill was out front,” said Tim Tarvin, one of Rodham’s student assistants at the University of Arkansas Law School legal aid clinic. “But Hillary was running just as hard behind the scenes, battling just as hard for acceptance.”
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.Echoing legal experts, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson says the senator would have been committing professional misconduct if she hadn’t given Taylor the best defense possible.“As she wrote in her book, ‘Living History,’ Senator Clinton was appointed by the Circuit Court of Washington County, Arkansas to represent Mr. Taylor in this matter,” he said. “As an attorney and an officer of the court, she had an ethical and legal obligation to defend him to the fullest extent of the law. To act otherwise would have constituted a breach of her professional responsibilities.”Seen as an aggressive defense
Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child’s credibility — although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.
“She was vigorously advocating for her client. What she did was appropriate,” said Andrew Schepard, director of Hofstra Law School’s Center for Children, Families and the Law. “He was lucky to have her as a lawyer … In terms of what’s good for the little girl? It would have been hell on the victim. But that wasn’t Hillary’s problem.”
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.”
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So how does Hillary recall these events in her book, “Living History“? With the same dishonesty that you might expect from Hillary.
“Divernan” at the DemocraticUnderground notes:
There are many things ethically wrong and questionable with how she handled this case.
I’m a retired atty. who did civil trial work, taught at a law school where I was co-director of a legal aid clinic for the poor, & then went on to work for state govt. I read the entire original article (and had read Clinton’s book) and here’s my view of what happened.
The rape occurred no earlier than 2 a.m. The accused rapist (Clinton plea bargained him down to 10 months for unlawful fondling ) was described as a hard drinking man who, on the advice of his jailhouse friends, demanded a female lawyer – thinking it would get him points with a jury.
“At 4:50 a.m., the girl walked into a local emergency room, badly shaken. The doctor’s report noted that she had injuries consistent with rape. Sgt. Dale Gibson, the department’s lead investigator in the case, interviewed her as she huddled with her mother. She offered a chilling detail – a threat from Taylor and his friends. “If I did say anything about it, they would catch me out later,” she told the investigator.”
Read the entire article, please. It is chock full of details to show you how revolting Clinton’s handling of this case was. At that time Clinton was director of the Legal Aid Clinic. This is significant for a number of reasons.
1. She could have handed the case off to someone else.
2. She had no legal trial experience and was required by the code of professional conduct to either refuse to take the case, or get co-counsel with adequate criminal/rape trial experience.
3. Legal aid clinics (based at the law school) have quite limited budgets. As Director, she had to
parcel out her limited resources so that the maximum number of indigents could be represented. She invested time and funds into this case as though it were a capital murder trial.This 12 year old received a hospital examination at 4:30 a.m., a few hours after she was raped.It provided evidence of rape. At that point, an accused rapist & his attorney can CHOOSE from 2 mutually exclusive defenses. Either he can argue it was concensual sex, or deny he was the perpetrator.
Clinton, acting like a bulldog, according to other lawyers there at the time, pursued BOTH defenses, and mounted such an aggressive defense, local lawyers commented it would have been appropriate for a capital murder trial. She hired a New York based forensic expert to “cast doubt on the evidence” – imagine that. How many Arkansas indigent defendants had an expert brought all the way from New York? That must have cost thousands of dollars of the clinic’s limited budget. That kind of money would have and should have been spent on behalf of things like pursuing deadbeats for child support, or helping indigents with landlord tenant or health care issues, or paying LOCAL psychologists in child abuse cases. And any trial lawyer will tell you that when it comes to selecting an expert/hired gun for the battle of the experts, you are much better off to go with someone as local as possible – at least from the same state. This is because the judges and juries are suspicious of outsiders and partial to locals.Note all her hired gun expert could do was “cast doubt”. Even with this expensive expert witness, Clinton couldn’t get the evidence thrown out. She also went after the victim and argued that the girl “was attracted to older men” and had a history of claiming personal attacks and lying. The evidence of record does not offer any proof of those arguments.
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. (Again, more fees to be paid for by the law clinic.) She also secured Taylor’s release on $5,000 bond after getting his boss at the factory to vouch for him. (If he had run off, the Clinic would have had to pay off that bond.)
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.”
(Strange choice of language, “I have been informed”, hearsay, even with a named source and she didn’t identify her source -could have been her own client!) rather than my psychiatric expert will testify”.
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.”
Prior to this, in the early ’70’s, Clinton studied at Yale’s renowned child study center to identify physical and behavioral clues of child abuse. Her fluency on the topic is evident in the Arkansas court filings: “I have . . . been told by an expert in child psychology that children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experience and that adolescents with disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even much more prone to such behavior. . . .she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
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So here we see Clinton substituting Clinton’s own evaluation of the child’s behavior as though Clinton were an independent court appointed psychologist. This whole case just stinks!
Filed under: Hillary Clinton , attorney, Hillary Clinton, rapist
