I alone among my defense bar colleagues am a Republican and have occasionally toyed with the idea of running for higher office. Obviously some opposition researcher toyed with the idea of making this case of Hillary's a potential point of attack. I am glad to see that they are not taking that tack in this story.
From Newsday.com:
For Clinton, her time in Arkansas is a key component of the argument that her three decades of public service have prepared her to be president on Day One.
. . .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.
. . .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 aNewsday
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."
. . .
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."
. . .
'She was just a real bulldog'
Rodham immersed herself in the work, people involved in the case say, mounting a ferocious and exhaustively researched defense that made a strong impression on some in the male-dominated legal community in northern Arkansas.
. . .On May 21, 1975, Tom Taylor rose in court to demand that Washington County Judge Maupin Cummings allow him to fire his male court-appointed lawyer in favor of a female attorney. Taylor, who earned a meager wage at a paper bag factory and lived with relatives, had already spent 10 days in the county jail and was grasping for a way to avoid a 30 years-to-life term in the state penitentiary for rape.
Taylor, 41, figured a jury would be less hostile to a rape defendant represented by a woman, according to one of his friends. Cummings agreed to the request, scanned the list of available female attorneys (there were only a half dozen in the county at the time) and assigned Rodham, who had virtually no experience in criminal litigation.
. . .The case, she quickly learned, was hopelessly convoluted, hinging on the accounts of three people - Taylor, the girl and a 15-year-old boy - who all had reasons to withhold details.
Finding out precisely what happened in the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1975, is difficult three decades later, particularly since Taylor died in 1992 of a heart ailment. But a basic outline can be reconstructed from interviews, court documents, witnesses' statements and the Washington County sheriff's original case file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Sometime around midnight, the girl was sleeping over at a friend's house in Springdale when Taylor and his 20-year-old cousin walked in, asking if anyone wanted to take a drive. The sixth-grader, who says she was bored and wanted to buy a soda, jumped into Taylor's beat-up red 1963 Chevrolet pickup truck.
Soon after, they picked up the 15-year-old boy and drove to a liquor store, where Taylor bought a pint of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, which he mixed for the girl in a cup ofCoca-Cola
, according to the boy, now a 48-year-old Army veteran. (Newsday is withholding the boy's name because he was charged in the case as a juvenile offender.)
Allegedly drove to weedy ravine
After a few hours at a local bowling alley, the foursome crammed into Taylor's truck and drove to a weedy ravine off a busy two-lane highway connecting the sister cities of Fayetteville and Springdale, according the sheriff's department account.
Taylor and the older man went off for a walk, leaving the 12-year-old and the teenager alone in the cab. In a statement to police, the 15-year-old said he removed his pants and admitted to having sex, revealing the encounter only after being pressed by investigators.
Moments later, he said he left and Taylor approached the truck, climbing on top of the girl. The girl let out a scream, according to the police report, and he claims to have seen Taylor hitching up his pants.
The victim, the boy reported, turned to both of them and yelled, "You all planned this, didn't you?"
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.
Gibson (who is not related to prosecutor Mahlon Gibson) had no illusions about how hard the case would be to prove, because the girl seemed to have a romantic interest in the 15-year-old.
"She was kind of led into it," says Gibson, now retired and living in a Dallas suburb. "My sense was that she wanted to be part of something exciting with the young guy, but it turned out to be more than she bargained for ... Taylor, I think, had the idea he was going to make a man out of the young guy and jumped on when he had his chance."
He added, "Whatever she did, the bottom line for me was that this kid was 12 and Taylor was a grown man."
. . .
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."
. . .In December, when Clinton was campaigning in
Iowa
, the woman was being released from a state prison after serving a year for forging checks to pay for her methamphetamine addiction.
. . .
Rodham's fluency on the topic is evident in her 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 more prone to such behavior," she wrote in her July 28 affidavit. "She exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way."
Prosecution case crumbles
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.
Taylor was a tight-lipped client, never wavering from his claim that he'd driven all the passengers home that night without stopping in the ravine, according to Dale Gibson. (Taylor was less guarded around his 15-year-old companion, who recalls the older man whispering "Let's keep our stories straight" when the two met in county jail.)
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