According to the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman, recently discovered audio recordings of Hillary Clinton from the early 1980s reveal a strangely upbeat and loose tone when telling the story of the time she defended a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
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Not only did Hillary defend Thomas Alfred Taylor and laugh about it later, she admitted she believed he was guilty.
“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton said with a chuckle.
Clinton added that a legal technicality enabled her argue the sentence down to a lesser charge than the alternative, which was 30 years to life.
Ronald D. Rotunda, professor of legal ethics at Chapman University, told the Free Beacon that the legal problem was not that Hillary Clinton defended a man that she thought was guilty, it was that she told the world he failed a polygraph to make herself look clever.
“We’re hired guns,” Ronald D. Rotunda said. “We don’t have to believe the client is innocent… our job is to represent the client in the best way we can within the bounds of the law.”
Rotunda added, however, that disclosing a client’s polygraph result is a potential violation of attorney-client privilege.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Unless the client says: ‘You’re free to tell people that you really think I’m a scumbag, and the only reason I got a lighter sentence is because you’re a really clever lawyer.’”
Goodman references a 2008 Newsday article that gives some of the background of the story:
The girl had joined Taylor and two male acquaintances, including one 15-year-old boy she had a crush on, on a late-night trip to the bowling alley, according to Newsday.
Taylor drove the group around in his truck, pouring the girl whisky and coke on the way.
The group later drove to a “weedy ravine” near the highway where Taylor raped the 12-year-old.
Around 4 a.m., the girl and her mother went to the hospital, where she was given medical tests and reported that she had been assaulted.
Clinton went on to say that the prosecutor had evidence in the form of bloody underwear, but that that evidence was lost after being cut off for testing. Even after this she attempted to get it checked out by a forensics expert in New York City, there wasn’t enough blood left to test.
“I handed it to Gibson,” the prosecutor, “and I said, ‘Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice,’” Clinton describes the event, again laughing at the tail end of it.
Taylor would plead guilty to unlawful fondling of a child and served 10 months in prison.
Goodman reports that the victim, now 52, who has battled methamphetamine addictions, divorce and solitude, “nevertheless expressed deep and abiding hostility toward the Newsday reporter who spoke to her in 2008—and toward her assailant’s defender, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
The Newsday story had said that the victim harbored “no ill will toward Clinton.”