Posted on 02/26/2008 6:01:21 AM PST by TexasCajun
Newsday's Glenn Thrush has that rarest of things: A new chapter to the Hillary's biography, and one that cuts sharply against a central part of her image: that she's spent her whole career fighting for children:
[T]here 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]
[Clinton's] 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.
Clinton's aides point out, accurately, that she was bound to present her indigent client the best defense available, which she did: He was able to plead down to a much lesser offense.
But read the whole story. Thrush reconstructs the crime, Clinton's role as a legal "bulldog," and her defense through court and police documents, and interviews a range of parties, including the alleged victim.
It's really an astonishingly good piece of reporting.
Sounds about right. No, seriously, she keeps blabbing about 35 years of experience, so it is perfectly legitimate to point out what that vaunted experience means, especially for the woman who does everything for "the children". Not "off with her head" but it's worth noting just one more example of hypocrisy in this woman's already Olympian record of lies.
BTW, for those who are mentioning that she was just a lawyer doing her job: I have been court appointed attorney in about 20 cases, mostly minor stuff. Once, I was sent a notice of appointment by the assignment judge. I reviewed the facts in the file: the State child welfare agency proposed terminating my client's parental rights to the 11 children she had in 13 years by 7 different men. The allegations included children found with cigarette burns, babies left in the same diaper so long they needed hospitalization, beatings of every kind, neglect, drug abuse, etc. They asked me to defend her right to continue to be their mother. I wrote back to the judge and said words to the effect that, in all honesty, I cannot represent this person, because my conscience could not abide the record of her behavior. I simply could not be an advocate for such a person. I was released without a problem.
There is a great principal of being allowed to mount a defense, but every lawyer has a choice to exercise their conscience or to go along with the phony idea that they have no choice but to represent the scum. Like the OJ case. Not one of those lawyers was there for any great principle. People kidded me at the time: wouldn't you want to take that case and make all that money, etc. I said, I'd like to make the money, but not that way. If I was a high profile defense lawyer and he called me there is no way I would have represented him once I saw the state's evidence.
While I am no fan of the fraud that Hillary is, she was a court appointed attorney for the defendant, she, like it or not, was doing her job.
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