Hillary Clinton, Children and the Law

Updated July 29, 2016

In this brief update, I want to add a quote from Hillary Clinton's speech of July 28, 2016 where she accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party:

"My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She ended up on her own at 14 working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others. Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch, and brought extra food to share the entire year.

The lessons she passed on to me years later stuck with me. No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up. And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: Do all the good you can for all the people you can in all the ways you can as long as ever you can.

(APPLAUSE)

So I went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Massachusetts… 

(APPLAUSE)

…on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school. I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school. It just didn’t seem possible in those days. And I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother and what she’d gone through as a child.

It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action."

With that as background, now let's go on to see how Hillary Clinton really treated children and her "win at any cost" personality.

In this posting, you will see a very little-mentioned side of Hillary Clinton's long career as both a lawyer and politician.  The story which took place in 1975 has received relatively little coverage by the mainstream media since it broke in June 2014 but is an interesting look into the real person behind the current Democratic presidential candidate.  At the very least, it speaks to the moral fibre of the person who could be the leader of the free world.

Let's open this posting with quotes from Hillary Rodham's postgraduate scholarly article "Children Under the Law" which was published in the Harvard Education Review in the Winter 1973 edition:

"Child citizens, although their needs and interests may be greater than those of adults, have far fewer legal rights (and duties). Indeed, the special needs and interests which distinguish them from adults have served as the basis for not granting them rights and duties, and for entrusting enforcement of the few rights they have to institutional decision-makers....The needs and interests of a powerless individual must be asserted as rights if they are to be considered and eventually accepted as enforceable claims against other persons or institutions. The advocacy of rights for children, coming as it does on the heels of adult rights movements, highlights the political nature of questions about children's status. That children's issues are political may seem obvious. Political theorists from Plato onward have sought to specify proper child-rearing practices and  have discussed the proper position of children within society, often coming to conclusions inconsistent with the prevailing American ones. In the United States, the problems of children have usually been explained without any consideration of children's proper political status. Accordingly, the obstructionist role of the unstated consensus and the law reflecting it has seldom been appreciated. The pretense that children's issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children. There is also an abiding belief that any official's failure to do what is best by a child is the exception, not the rule, and is due solely to occasional errors of judgment. Moreover, nothing countervails against this pattern, since children are almost powerless to articulate their own interests or to organize themselves into a self-interested constituency and adults allied with them have seldom exerted an appreciable influence within the political system." (my bold)

Please keep these points in mind as you read the remainder of this posting.

  

In 1975, a young lawyer in Arkansas by the name of Hillary Rodham received a call from Washington County prosecutor Mahlon Gibson, requesting a lawyer for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker that had been accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of a family friend.  Mr. Taylor picked up the girl and she willingly went for a ride with him, a ride that ended up with Mr. Taylor raping the young girl in his pickup truck.  According to the victim, she spent five days after the rape in a coma and spent months recovering from the beating.  Additionally, she spent over ten years in therapy.  At his court hearing, Mr. Taylor requested that a female lawyer represent him and the judge in the case, Maupin Cummings, appointed Ms. Rodham who was looking to establish a new legal aid clinic at the University of Arkansas    Here is the original document from the case:

Here is the arraignment document signed by his court-appointed attorney, Hillary Rodham:

Here is the motion for discovery and inspection of any evidence that the prosecution has against Mr. Taylor:

Here is Ms. Rodham's Motion to Dismiss based on the grounds that probable cause is not sufficient to allow a neutral and detached judge to find probable cause that a crime was committed or that her client actually committed the crime that he was accused of committing:

Here is Ms. Rodham's Motion to Modify Bail, filed because Mr. Taylor's incarceration was causing him "severe economic hardship":

Here is Ms. Rodham's Motion to Suppress Purported Statements that were made by Mr. Taylor because they were "obtained in violation of the defendant's privilege against self-incrimination and his rights to counsel as guaranteed by the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution":

When all other legal avenues  failed, as would be expected, Ms. Rodham went to the next level to defend her client.  Keeping in mind that the victim in this crime was a 12-year-old girl and that Ms. Rodham claimed to be an expert on childhood legal matters, as you will see in this document, she went to extremes, including using the "blame the victim" strategy, famous in sexual assault cases:

In case you can't read the original affidavit, here is the text, keeping in mind that the complainant was a 12-year-old girl:

"I have made an investigation of the facts and circumstances in this case and verily believe that a psychiatric examination of the complainant (name redacted) is necessary and vital in this case.

I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing.  I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming that they had attacked her body.  Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.

I have also been told by an expert in child psychology that children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents in disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even more prone to exaggerate behaviour." 

And, after all of that, here's how the case ended:

Mr. Taylor pled guilty to Unlawful Fondling of a Child under the Age of Fourteen and received a sentence of five years; 4 years of which was suspended and 1 year of which was served in county jail (after getting credit for the two months he spent in custody after he was arrested).  So much for the 12-year-old girl's complicity in the crime and so much for Ms. Clintons musings in her published "Children Under the Law" article from just two years earlier. 

In June 2014, five plus hours of audio recordings which were made during a mid-1980s interview by Arkansas reporter/author Roy Reed were found in the Special Collections Department at the University of Arkansas Libraries.   In one part of the interview, Ms. Clinton discusses the most significant criminal case of her relatively short legal career that took place in 1975, the same year that she married her current husband and reached her 28th birthday.  Here is the key part of the interview:

Here's a quote:

"I had some really tough clients.  I had one appear, a prosecutor called me years ago, said he had a guy who was accused of rape and the guy wanted a woman lawyer.... This guy was accused of raping a 12 year old who was the daughter of the family he was living with in Springdale, the other side of the tracks in Springdale.... And was one of those rootless folks who wasn't going to make a living on the land and he was kind of around....ended up in Springdale.  Of course he claimed that he didn't.  All this stuff.  He took a lie detector test.  I had him take a polygraph which he passed which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs. (Ms. Clinton laughs)."  

So much for attorney - client privilege!  Apparently, Ms. Clinton must have missed that day in law school.

In a 2014 interview with the now 52-year-old victim, the victim told Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast that "Hillary Clinton took me through Hell.  I would say, "You took at case of mine in 1975, 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 also denied that she had ever accused anyone else of attacking her before her rape by Mr. Taylor.  According to the victim, she spent five days after the rape in a coma and spent months recovering from the beating.  Additionally, she spent over ten years in therapy.   

While Ms. Clinton keeps reassuring the American public that she has "evolved", one has to wonder whether her "evolution" has been bred by political necessity to make her more palatable to her liberal base.  Can we say "political opportunist"?  

Let's close with an additional quote from the victim of the rapist that Hillary Rodham defended:

"I think she wants to be a role model being who she is, to look good, but I don’t think she’s a role model at all… If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.  She did that to look good and she told lies on that. How many other lies has she told to get where she’s at today? If she becomes president, is she gonna be telling the world the truth?  No.  She’s going to be telling lies out there, what the world wants to hear.”

Other References:

Politifact - Did Hillary Clinton asked to be "relieved"....

Daily Beast - Hillary Clinton Took Me Through Hell....