As Hillary Clinton wrote in her 2003 biography Living History, she didn’t volunteer to represent the defendant, but rather was appointed to the case by the judge:
In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later.
“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.”
In 1975, Hillary Clinton — then known as Hillary Rodham — taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law, where she founded the University of Arkansas School Legal Aid Clinic.
Clinton tried to discredit the girl by painting her as dishonest and prone to false accusations. At one point, Clinton signed an affidavit that claimed the girl often fantasized and sought out older men.
Throughout the interview, Clinton laughed after describing the polygraph results, the prosecution's lost evidence, and other aspects of the case. The repeated laughter is a particular point of contention for critics, because they say it suggests an insensitivity toward a truly terrible case.
According to Clinton's retelling in the 1980s to Arkansas reporter Roy Reed, the prosecution sent Taylor's pants to a lab to have them checked for blood and any other bodily fluids. But the lab cut out the piece of the pants that they intended to inspect, and eventually threw that piece away.
Clinton reportedly strove, according to a 2008 story from Newsday, to make a big impression with the Taylor case, perhaps as a result of her friends' warnings that she had thrown away a big-city career by moving to Arkansas to help launch her husband's congressional campaign.
After some drinking and bowling, the group ended up at a weedy ravine. There, Taylor allegedly raped the girl. After Clinton was assigned to the case in 1975, she took on a defense that, in the Newday article, legal experts characterized as quite aggressive.
Hillary Clinton's legal career is coming back to haunt her. Before the 2016 presidential race even begins, a criminal defense case from Hillary Clinton's past as a lawyer is becoming a political liability. In the case, Clinton defended an accused child rapist. Clinton was appointed to the case, and it was her job at the time to provide legal ...
Earlier this summer, the Washington Free Beacon uncovered and published an audio clip of an interview between Clinton and Arkansas reporter Roy Reed from the 1980s. In the clip, Clinton suggested she knew Taylor was guilty and only got Taylor off on a legal technicality that involved missing evidence.
“ She got appointed to represent this guy ,” he told CNN when asked about the controversy. According to Gibson, Maupin Cummings, the judge in the case, kept a list of attorneys who would represent poor clients.
What's True. In 1975, young lawyer Hillary Rodham was appointed to represent a defendant charged with raping a 12-year-old girl. Clinton reluctantly took on the case, which ended with a plea bargain for the defendant, and later chuckled about some aspects of the case when discussing it years later. What's False.
A case brought in 1975 would have been subject to much weaker legal protection for the accuser than today . As Hillary Clinton said while looking back on the case during a 2014 interview for Mumsnet: “I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did.
Hillary Clinton did not volunteer to be the defendant's lawyer, she did not laugh about the case's outcome, she did not assert that the complainant "made up the rape story," she did not claim she knew the defendant to be guilty, and she did not "free" the defendant.
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.
Finally, Hillary didn’t “free” the defendant in the case. Instead, the prosecuting attorney agreed to a plea deal involving a lesser charge that carried a five-year sentence, of which the judge suspended four years and allowed two months credit of time already served towards the remaining year: