As faithful readers of this blog know, for my sins no doubt, for the past 32 years I have been a member of the bar. In that time I have defended hundreds of people accused of misdemeanors and felonies. Criminal law is not a major portion of my practice, but like most small town attorneys I do take on criminal defense work both from private clients and by appointment by the Court. Criminal defense work is not for the faint of heart, as it involves often defending people de facto guilty of the crimes they are accused of, even if the State is not eventually able to prove them de jure guilty. Everyone is entitled to a defense, and not just the innocent, and my conscience has never been bothered by giving the best defense I can under the Law. Having said all that, even I am shocked by recent revelations of the defense by Hillary Clinton of a man accused of raping a 12 year old child back in 1975:
The prosecutor called me a few years ago, he said he had a guy who had been accused of rape, and the guy wanted a woman lawyer,” said Clinton in the interview. “Would I do it as a favor for him?”
The case was not easy. In the early hours of May 10, 1975, the Springdale, Arkansas police department received a call from a nearby hospital. It was treating a 12-year-old girl who said she had been raped.
The suspect was identified as Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker and friend of the girl’s family.
And though the former first lady mentioned the ethical difficulties of the case in Living History, her written account some three decades later is short on details and has a far different tone than the tapes.
“It was a fascinating case, it was a very interesting case,” Clinton says in the recording. “This guy was accused of raping a 12-year-old. Course he claimed that he didn’t, and all this stuff” (LISTEN HERE).
Describing the events almost a decade after they had occurred, Clinton’s struck a casual and complacent attitude toward her client and the trial for rape of a minor.
“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she added with a laugh.
Clinton can also be heard laughing at several points when discussing the crime lab’s accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied Taylor to the crime.
From a legal ethics perspective, once she agreed to take the case, Clinton was required to defend her client to the fullest even if she did believe he was guilty.
“We’re hired guns,” Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor of legal ethics at Chapman University, told the Washington Free Beacon. “We don’t have to believe the client is innocent…our job is to represent the client in the best way we can within the bounds of the law.”
However, Rotunda said, for a lawyer to disclose the results of a client’s polygraph and guilt is a potential violation of attorney-client privilege.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Unless the client says: ‘You’re free to tell people that you really think I’m a scumbag, and the only reason I got a lighter sentence is because you’re a really clever lawyer.’”
Go here to read the rest at The Washington Free Beacon. Ron Rotunda was my legal ethics, insert lawyer joke here, professor at the University of Illinois back when Dinosaurs ruled the earth before global warming dried up their watering holes. He is absolutely correct that attorneys are forbidden from revealing client confidences. However, that is something for the bar association of Arkansas to deal with. More troubling from a decent human stand point is the glee with which Clinton retells her getting a rapist off through legal legerdemain. Would I have tried to get my client off even though I knew he was guilty? You bet, because that is my duty, and it is for the judge or the jury to answer the question of whether the accused is guilty under the law. Would I have boasted of it later? Absolutely not. I would have regarded it as an unpleasant duty I had to perform as an attorney.
Here is what the victim thinks about Clinton’s role in that case:
“Hillary Clinton took me through Hell,” the victim said. The Daily Beast agreed to withhold her name out of concern for her privacy as a victim of sexual assault.
The victim said if she saw Clinton today, she would call her out for what she sees as the hypocrisy of Clinton’s current campaign to fight for women’s rights compared to her actions regarding this rape case so long ago.
“I would say [to Clinton], ‘You took a case of mine in ’75, you lied on me… I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing.”
The victim’s allegation that Clinton smeared her following her rape is based on a May 1975 court affidavit written by Clinton on behalf of Thomas Alfred Taylor, one of the two alleged attackers, whom Clinton agreed to defend after being asked by the prosecutor. Taylor had specifically requested a female attorney.
“I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing,” Clinton, then named Hillary D. Rodham, wrote in the affidavit. “I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body. Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
Clinton also wrote that a child psychologist told her that children in early adolescence “tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences,” especially when they come from “disorganized families, such as the complainant.”
The victim vigorously denied Clinton’s accusations and said there has never been any explanation of what Clinton was referring to in that affidavit. She claims she never accused anyone of attacking her before her rape.
Go here to The Daily Beast to read the rest.
The leftist in the White House has gravely wounded this country. And the leftist who says, “What difference does it make!”, will finish us off.
We all know that Hill and Bill having been waging a “war on women” for a long time. I read the full length articles. The 12 year old girl besides being raped was beaten so badly she was in a coma for 5 days. Hillary’s actions are despicable. I hope and pray that the victim will not be dragged through the mud which is the usual m.o. of that pair. She needs a good representative to preclude that. Yes, Hillary, she does matter.
Off topic: I unsubscribed and then resubscribed with a new email address, but am not receiving the blog. Help! I miss the faith and reason.
Please advise me what is immoderate about my comment. The Clintons, directly and indirectly have trashed any woman who has made an accusation about the former governor’s and president’s improper sexual behavior.
I have two words for Hellary: “Ben Gazi!”
http://www.politisite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Hillary2016WhatDiff.jpg
“Please advise me what is immoderate about my comment.”
Your comment was placed in moderation CAM because you were using a new e-mail address. Any comment using a new e-mail address is placed in moderation until one of the blog contributors approves it. Then further comments may be used using that e-mail address without being placed in moderation. Automatic moderation for a new e-mail address has nothing to do with the substance of the comment.
Suck it up, CAM. The Clintons are starving in Chappaqua!
You mean you’ve dropped your “never say anything bad about the Clintons” comment policy? 🙂
In good will for the common good, Hillary Rodham might have counseled the rapists, there were two, to turn state’s evidence, confess their crimes and beg for mercy from the court. A merciful court would have heard their plea and their promise of conversion, if in fact, it was sincere. Rodham might have counseled the criminal in sincerity.
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Instead Rodham bashed the victim. Yes, the victim was guilty of existing, of having been born a woman and of becoming a victim. All this trouble and cost to the state. If the victim had not been born, or had the victim been aborted, the rapist would not have committed his rapes.
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It is incumbent upon every man, woman and child, as American citizens, “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our (constitutional) posterity.” From The Preamble.
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The victim of these rapes is, at the age of twelve years, at the time of the crime, our constitutional posterity. Were the victim possessed by the devil himself, the child had not yet reached adulthood, the victim ought to have been exorcized and provided for in body and soul and restored to her civil rights. A minor child’s civil rights are held in trust for her by God (In God we trust), by her parents and finally by the state. The child must be compensated by the state for its failure to protect her, body and soul, in her civil rights to her bodily integrity.
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Rodham’s ridiculing and slandering of the minor child, the victim, is only evidence of Rodham’s ignorance concerning human rights and privileges.
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Rodham Clinton has sold her soul to the devil and she means to take us with her.
“We’re hired guns,” Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor of legal ethics at Chapman University, told the Washington Free Beacon. “We don’t have to believe the client is innocent…our job is to represent the client in the best way we can within the bounds of the law.”
However, Rotunda said, for a lawyer to disclose the results of a client’s polygraph and guilt is a potential violation of attorney-client privilege.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Unless the client says: ‘You’re free to tell people that you really think I’m a scumbag, and the only reason I got a lighter sentence is because you’re a really clever lawyer.’”
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Ronald D Rotunda seems to be OK with condoning the fact that Rodham slandered the victim and portrayed the victim as a calloused whore. Winning in a court of law cannot be done with disregard for human rights.
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In psychiatry (I am not a psychiatrist) but I know that in psychiatry this is known as projection.
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In the Old Testament, the rapist had to support his victim for the rest of her life. If the victim’s father gave the victim to the man, he could not divorce her. The rapist had to support his victim for the rest of her life.
I guess the tapes are going to disappear.
I wrote off the Clintons after the Rwandan genocide. I was sure I did the right thing after the Canadian press covered their Arkansas campaign donors’ collection of HIV and HEP-C tainted blood from Arkansas prisons and subsequent sale to the Canadian Red Cross, which led to 1,100 and 20,000 infections respectively (funny how that didn’t make the news in the U.S.). After than who needs Benghazi and the rest to make a judgment?
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“By their fruits you shall know them”. Yes, indeed.
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“Winning in a court of law cannot be done with disregard for human rights.”
Incorrect. Winning in court cannot be done in disregard of the Law. I can tell you with precision what is allowed in a court of law in a criminal trial in Illinois. I really don’t have the foggiest notion how a trial would be conducted according to “human rights”, or whose definition of “human rights” would form the basis of trial procedure. Clinton had a job to do and she did it. I have no problem with that. My problem is in her boasting and cavalier attitude about it, along with her hypocritical refrain of war on women. This case, along with the way in which she aided her husband in treating women like pieces of meat demonstrates that her talk about the rights of women is so much cant.
Tom D. said “by their fruits you shall know them.”
The frightening aspect of this culture is the acquired taste for the rotton.
Rotten fruit is a delicacy for many Hill-Billies!
The “unfinished business of the 21st Century” will not be what old Hillary expects. I’m hopeful the enema conservative voters are preparing will flush the bugs out of Washington.
She could have defended him without demeaning the victim.
Donald: You have been admitted to the bar. I am a lay person. “Human rights” for me means human decency.
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“Clinton had a job to do and she did it. I have no problem with that.” Clinton would not be laughing at us if she had not been cutthroat.
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TomD. “I wrote off the Clintons after the Rwandan genocide. I was sure I did the right thing after the Canadian press covered their Arkansas campaign donors’ collection of HIV and HEP-C tainted blood from Arkansas prisons and subsequent sale to the Canadian Red Cross, which led to 1,100 and 20,000 infections respectively (funny how that didn’t make the news in the U.S.). After than who needs Benghazi and the rest to make a judgment?”
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TomD. I wanted to report on this crime too but I had no link. It is worse than anyone can imagine.
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Anzlyne: “She could have defended him without demeaning the victim.”
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I am with you on this.
The full account of this matter was detailed in a News Review that I also read, and worse, there is a taste of her talking about it. It is exceedingly disturbing that Mrs Clinton would chortle about the attack upon a 12-year-old girl, moreover that she would make the child as though she were enticing the fully adult man in this matter. I always have thought that Mrs.Clinton is unscrupulous. But after Ben-ghazi and this account, I think she truly has, in the imagery of Joseph Conrad, a heart of darkness.
I am very glad that, in Scotland, advocates operate on the cab-rank principle. If a solicitor instructs an advocate to represent his client, the advocate can only refuse, if otherwise engaged.
The acts 1537 c 61 and 1587 c 91 oblige an advocate to plead causes whether he chooses or not if, in the one case a client and, in the other the court, pleases to insist on it
There is thus a convention that, if the Lord Advocate prosecutes in person, the Dean of Faculty (the head of the bar) always makes himself available for the defence.
It is a great safeguard, both to the profession itself and to the liberties of the subject.
I was told a delightful story that during WWI there were no advocates available at a sitting of the High Court in the Borders (Dumfires, I think), except two Advocates Depute (prosecutors) The court ordered each of them to defend the cases conducted by the other and they fought them with great tenacity. Of course, ADs are only appointed for 3 years, before returning to private practice.
Questioning a victim about her past or alleged past sexual behavior, or attempting to paint her as a trollop, was a fairly common defense tactic in rape cases before the enactment of “shield” laws in the late 1970s and early 1980s that forbade the practice. It’s possible that in 1975, falling back on the “she’s a hussy and she asked for it” defense was still accepted in Arkansas (as it was in most other states) and not unusual. However, that does not excuse her dismissive attitude about it to this day. I would think she would approach this episode with an attitude of “That kind of approach to rape cases is, gladly, no longer acceptable and I regret having done it.”
By “her” I mean Mrs. Clinton, of course. If I remember correctly, Roman Polanski used a similar “but the girl was hardly an innocent virgin” defense in his case as well.
Elaine Krewer
Evidence of the complainer’s sexual history has always been much more restricted in Scotland than in England, but i do recall one curious case in which it was admitted.
A young woman alleged that a respectable stockbroker in his sixties had indecently assaulted her, when she was alone with him in a railway compartment.
The complainer, a sturdy young woman, succeeded in pulling the communication cord. Both parties were discovered with their clothes were in tatters and she had defended her honour to such good effect, with a spray of hair lacquer and a wedge-heeled shoe that he had to be stretchered off.
Well, on the trial for assault with intent to ravish, indecent assault &c, after debate before a bench of three judges, the defence were allowed to lead a proof that the complainer was the kept mistress of a rather shady financier whom the pannel had been instrumental in bringing to justice for falsehood, fraud and wilful imposition. At that point the Crown gave up the case.
The Chinese merchant brought a man before the judge. “He stands outside my market and smells the delicious food every day. I want you to make him pay me for smelling my food”. The judge asked the man if he had any money. The man said “yes” he had a few coins. The judge said to the man: “Take your coins and drop them from one hand to the other.” The man did so. The judge asked the merchant if he had heard the coins dropping from one hand to the other. The merchant said: “Yes” he had heard the coins dropping from one hand to the other. The judge said: “For the smell of fresh food, you are hearing the sound of money.”
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The penalty must fit the crime. The Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the word “commensurate”. The individual guilty of rape and beating the victim into a five day coma must be raped and beaten into a five day coma, for Justice to be served.
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The victim must be vindicated. Instead the victim was found guilty of existing at the age of twelve years old. Rodham’s chuckles are contempt of court.
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Ghandi said that with “an eye for an eye” the whole world will be blind. “An eye for an eye” means that the criminal cannot be put to death for taking a man’s eye. (With transplants, soon the criminal will repay the eye.)
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In the Old Testament the king replied: “The man shall be put to death” but it was the judges who really decided how the penalty must fit the crime.
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Hillary Rodham’s duty under the law was to defend the rapist, the attempted murderer, from being sentenced to death for his crimes or being given a life sentence. A life sentence would, I believe, have been “commensurate.”
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Thank God for being God.
My dad, RIP, used to say: “God’s Justice is as fine as gold. The longer it takes the finer it gets.”
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Elaine: “If I remember correctly, Roman Polanski used a similar “but the girl was hardly an innocent virgin” defense in his case as well.” Roman Polanski’s victim was a minor child.
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Michael Patterson-Seymour: “At that point the Crown gave up the case.”
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The victim is not on trial. Whatever her life was, the ciminal had no freedom to assault her, to lay hands on her. If he did, he is guilty of intended sexual assault. With this legal mind, Jack the Ripper might be found not guilty.
Michael” I am glad that the assailant had to be “strechered off”. The court must have figured that the assailant had suffered punishment enough for his attempted rape. The court ought to have at least given the assailant a criminal record for life, to warn other innocents off. Nobody, but nobody lays hands on another person without that person’s informed sexual consent, and that at legal emancipation. This supports the law of protection for minor children and subordinates and employees.
Mary De Voe
The Crown believed that it could not rebut the contention of the defence that it was the complainer who had attacked him, in revenge for the part he had played in the prosecution of her lover and her loss of the income with which he could no longer provide her.
Michael Patterson-Seymour: Then this was not about rape.
Mary De Voe: Yes, I know Polanski’s victim was only 13 years old at the time, but that didn’t stop Polanski from claiming in a “60 Minutes” interview later (after he had fled the U.S. to escape a jail sentence) that she “testified” to having had “previous sexual experience”. Why would she “testify” to that (assuming that she did) unless asked as part of a deposition or some other official proceeding, with an eye to introducing that as evidence that she wasn’t (to paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg) “raped” raped?
I cite it NOT as any kind of justification for Polanski’s acts, but simply as evidence that the “she’s a tramp” defense was still being actively used, or at least considered, in rape cases involving girls of nearly the same age as Taylor’s victim in the 1970s before rape shield laws limited its use; and therefore it might not have been unusual or shocking for Mrs. Clinton, as an appointed attorney for an accused rapist, to resort to it if it seemed like the best or only way to obtain an acquittal for her client. Her attitude since then is, of course, another story.
Mary De Voe wrote “Then this was not about rape.”
It was about attempted rape, or, rather, with assault with intent to ravish. That was the charge in the indictment.
He claimed the woman attacked him for no reason and that her allegation was false in fact. Once it was established that she was not some stranger, but someone with an existing grudge against the man, no jury would believe her.
Every witness must be “purged of malice and partial counsel,” as we say, if they are to be held credible and reliable.
Elaine: The victim was not on trial and the Fifth Amendment allows people to avoid incriminating themselves, even as plaintiffs, witnesses and victims. This probably underpinned the shield laws.
My point is simply that anyone, especially Hillary Clinton, who presents him/herself as representing the people ought to know these principles instinctively.
Michael Paterson-Seymour: “It was about attempted rape, or, rather, with assault with intent to ravish. That was the charge in the indictment.”
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Did the accused deny the charge or was the accuser denied Justice because of her past?
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“Every witness must be “purged of malice and partial counsel,” as we say, if they are to be held credible and reliable.”
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As stated above. “With this legal mind, Jack the Ripper might be found not guilty.” …or the case dismissed. In America, we have the Green River serial killer who murdered 50 prostitutes. Prostitution is not a death penalty, capital one, crime. Even a protitute is due vindication.
The question still remains. Did the accused attempt to rape the woman? As far as other motives, the accused seems to have his full share of malice.
Elaine Krewer: I would think she would approach this episode with an attitude of “That kind of approach to rape cases is, gladly, no longer acceptable and I regret having done it.”
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I fully agree with you. And I believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not fit to represent decent people.
Mary de Voe asked, “Did the accused deny the charge?”
Oh! He denied it all right; denied it to the detectives, as soon as he could speak, denied it when he was judicially examined, pleaded not guilty on the first diet. Said he was reading the paper and this woman squirted him in the face with hair-lacquer and then began laying about him with her shoe.
It was an odd story either way. Why would a respectable stock-broker, with no history of mental trouble, attack a woman in a railway compartment, when he was certain to be arrested at the next station? On the other hand, why would a woman attack a perfect stranger like that, even if she hoped to talk her way out of it with a bogus rape charge?
Now, once it became clear that she had a motive, the fact that he had brought her boyfriend to justice, something she had never mentioned to the police or the Fiscal, his version becomes a lot more believable.