Posted on 02/24/2008 10:04:10 AM PST by markomalley
In a presidential campaign focused on the future, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama spend a lot of time talking about their pasts.
Both lean heavily on tales of early, formative experiences - she running a law clinic inArkansas, he as a community organizer in Chicago - to show they understand the problems of average people.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Wonderful experience...attacking a 12-year old to defend a child rapist.
What about H!’s Black Panther defense activities?
Has Hillary's client gone on to inflict anymore pain upon innocent folks?
And thus began her life's vocation in handling "Bimbo Eruptions" which would come to serve her so well in the future.
-—well, nonetheless, thanks to those slave owning property owners that wrote the Constitution, even rapists are allowed to have lawyers—
RON ROSENBAUM, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK - I covered the impeachment hearings to the bitter end when Nixon resigned in August 1974. . . I have no memory of seeing young Hillary Rodham in the hearing room, but I remember thinking at the time of the Impeachment Committee staff as heroic seekers of truth.
But Hillary's boss on the staff, Jerome Zeifman, asserts now that one reason she's downplayed her Impeachment Committee service is that she has something to hide.
He accuses her of "unethical" conduct, says that "Hillary . . . lied to me" and that she was a pawn in a Kennedy-orchestrated conspiracy to manipulate the impeachment hearings. And he claims he has a witness to corroborate this characterization: "After President Nixon's resignation," Zeifman writes, "a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel - as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:
'John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me' [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics]. Labovitz said, "That came from Yale." I said, "You mean Burke Marshall [Sen. Ted Kennedy's chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules]. Labovitz said, "Yes." His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition.' "
The "dilatory tactics" Zeifman alleges were part of what he portrays as a Kennedy clan strategy to stretch out the impeachment hearings (which ended in August '74, when the so-called "smoking gun" tape - which revealed Nixon attempting to use the CIA to cover up a White House connection to the break-in—caused Nixon to lose even hard-core GOP loyalist support and resign). Zeifman claims the Kennedy strategy was to keep Richard Nixon in office so a liberal (perhaps a Kennedy) could run in 1976 against a damaged president Nixon rather than the relatively unblemished GOP Vice President Gerald Ford.
Zeifman claims that to implement this strategy, Hillary attempted to revise the procedural rules for the Impeachment Committee, potentially opening up divisive delays. Zeifman also asserts that a "second objective of the strategy of delay was to avoid a Senate impeachment trial, in which as a defense Nixon might assert that Kennedy had authorized far worse abuses of power than Nixon's effort to 'cover up' the Watergate burglary (which Nixon had not authorized or known about in advance). In short, the crimes of Kennedy included the use of the Mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro, as well as the successful assassinations of Diem in Vietnam and Lumumba in the Congo."...
Hillary Rodham's 1974 Watergate "Procedures were Ethically Flawed"
If a rapist is to be defended, the credibility of the “victim” has to be challenged. It A concession that the victim is telling the truth is equivalent to a guilty plea.
Here’s another piece of hillary’s legal work..
While working on the Whitewater scam, she authored a clause in the contract of the worthless land parcels that were sold that stated that if the buyers were so much as 1 day late on their payments the previous payments reverted to rent and title reverted back to the seller who, of course lost any down payment and equity.
They scammed many retired couples out of their savings with that little stunt.
Seems to me that in a way they are excusing her because this is what lawyers are trained to do - defend the guilty as if they were innocent. This is why I could never be a lawyer - I’d have put up a weak defense and let the guy pay and pay for this.
I just don’t think that the law is being used properly when it’s used to get the guilty off so the attorney can look good. To Hillary, winning is more important than what is right. This is why I crossed over and voted for Obama and why I’ll vote for McCain in November - despite not being happy about it.
I think we already know how she functions under pressure.
How many times did she say "I can't remember", "I can't recall", or make some other evasive statement during her Whitewater testimony in 1996.
I think I saw a document stating she used tactics like that 250 times.
.
The first of her many serial attacks on rape victims ... most raped by one ‘Bent Willie’ Clinton.
It is just one more piece of evidence that once a liar, always a liar if your name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has staked her entire career(?) on it. And it is the way of the larger part of Congress.
No, how she decided to defend the client was her choice. She could of had the moral, and intellectual courage to say " No, find someone else, I will not defend this man because I believe him guilty"
I had a lawyer once who did just that. A person he had been assigned to defend laughed while he told the lawyer how the elderly couple had begged for their lives but he killed them anyway. My lawyer somehow got the judge to let him out of defending the murderer.
A lawyer with a conscience...they do exist.
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