Jul 01, 2014 · In 1975, the year in which Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton, she took on the defense of 41-year-old Thomas Taylor, who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
Jun 20, 2014 · In an interview with The Daily Beast, the victim of Hillary Clinton’s first criminal client, an alleged rapist whom she successfully defended, spoke out against the 2016 hopeful’s …
Jun 20, 2014 · In 1975, at the age of 27, she took the case representing Thomas Alfred Taylor, 41, who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. Taylor, who was charged with first degree rape, …
Jun 17, 2016 · In her book “Living History,” Clinton recalls that Mahlon Gibson, a Washington County prosecutor, told her that the accused rapist “wanted a woman lawyer” to defend him, …
Hillary Clinton wrote about the trial in her 2003 autobiography, "Living History.". In the book, Clinton defended taking on the client, saying that while at first she "didn't feel comfortable," she realized that as an attorney she had "an ethical and legal obligation to defend him to the fullest extent of the law.".
Clinton graduated from Yale Law School in 1973. The following year she moved with her then-boyfriend Bill Clinton to Little Rock, Ark., where she took a job at the University of Arkansas Law School. In 1975, at the age of 27, she took the case representing Thomas Alfred Taylor, 41, who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
1. Q: Did Hillary Clinton volunteer in 1975 to defend a rapist, who was found not guilty, and laugh about it in an interview in 1980? A: Clinton defended an accused rapist, but she did not volunteer. He pleaded guilty to a lesser offense.
FULL ANSWER. 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. It was during this time that she defended Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
Clinton also cited an expert in child psychology who said that “children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents with disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even more prone to such behavior,” Clinton wrote in her affidavit.
Before the second debate, Donald Trump held a brief news conference with three women who claim they were abused by Bill Clinton– and one woman, Kathy Shelton, who says Hillary Clinton ruined her life when she was appointed by the court to defend the man who raped Shelton in 1975. Advertisement.
While the cases of three women connected to Bill Clinton have been well-litigated in the media, the Kathy Shelton case has attracted much less attention. Until a Newsday reporter informed her in 2007 that Clinton was the lawyer in the case, Shelton had no idea that Hillary Clinton had been involved.
As part of her handling of the case, Clinton filed an affidavit July 28, 1975 , requesting that the girl go through a psychiatric examination. “I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,” Clinton said.
As a court-appointed defense lawyer, Clinton was required to look out for her client’s interests. The prosecutor was supposed to look out for Shelton’s interests. The judge in the case was to hear the facts and decide what could be permitted. In this case, he rejected Clinton’s request.
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.
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:
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.
“ 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.
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.
When the presidential candidates debated last month for the second time, Donald Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton once laughed at a victim of rape. The allegation stems from a case that Clinton worked as a young lawyer in 1975 — she defended one of two men accused of raping then-12-year-old Kathy Shelton.
Shelton's lawyer today is Candice Jackson. She argues that Clinton went too far, by questioning the victim's reliability. "And I think that's what Kathy was expressing, too, that she understands that Hillary Rodham at the time was doing her job as an attorney.
Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight.". Trump's claim was that Clinton laughed at Shelton in an interview in the 1980s in which she talked about the case. Clinton replied that Trump was just changing the subject from his treatment of women.