I'm surprised I don't see any diaries about this yet (maybe I missed some earlier today) but Newsday has a remarkable story from Hillary's early days as a lawyer, when she defended a rapist by attacking the credibility of his 12-year-old victim.
From the article:
Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her "35 years of experience making change" on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.
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.
She has talked about the case before, but left out an important detail:
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 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.
Some may argue that, as a court-appointed defense lawyer, it was her duty to provide the best defense possible. To me, her attacks on that little girl go beyond zealous representation and raise some serious ethical questions. Many reasonable lines of defense are clearly within bounds, but accusing a child rape victim of essentially wanting it is far beyond what the law required her to do. Some experts aren't terribly troubled:
Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child's credibility - although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.
"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."
Apparently it was hell on the victim:
The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.
"It's not true, I never sought out older men - I was raped," the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.
That may be what passes for ethics in legal circles, but it's certainly far beyond what ordinary Americans would consider to be decent.
People may hold a wide variety of opinions about whether Hillary did something wrong here. Some think, apparently, that anything a defense attorney does is in bounds. Others disagree. Wee Mama points out in the comments,
The right to a vigorous defense does not embrace the right to a deceptive defense.
But what I think we can all agree on is that this particular incident isn't exactly a case of working for positive change in peoples' lives. It isn't exactly something that would qualify someone to be President. Yet this case (and others like it) is part of those "35 years" Hillary won't shut up about. The same 35 years that supposedly make her more qualified than Barack Obama.
Her tactics in this case may be right or wrong, but using her work on cases like this one to claim she has superior experience is indisputably wrong.