In recently discovered tapes of interviews with Hillary Clinton from the 1980s, the expected 2016 Democratic presidential contender talks about how she defended a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Clinton on the tapes suggests she didn't believe 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor was innocent of raping the girl but attacked the girl's character in court anyway. Clinton ended up getting Taylor a lesser charge because of a legal technicality.
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Clinton took the case in 1975, when she had first moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she ran the University of Arkansas' legal aid clinic. Prosecutor Mahlon Gibson asked if she would be willing to serve as Taylor's court-appointed attorney. He had been assigned a male lawyer, but said he wanted a woman to represent him. Clinton agreed.
Clinton has written about her ethical dilemma of representing Taylor in her book, "Living History," but she gave fewer details than she did in the tapes, the Free Beacon reported.
"I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs," Clinton says.
The tapes were recorded between 1983 and 1987, when her husband Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. They were intended to be used for an Esquire magazine article that was never published and are archived at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ronald D. Rotunda, a legal ethics professor at Chapman University, told the Free Beacon that Clinton did nothing wrong in her representation of the client but that for her to talk about the results of his polygraph and belief of his guilt may violate attorney-client privilege.
"You can’t do that," he told the website. "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.'"
The case was based on two male witnesses, the girl and the DNA evidence on Taylor's underwear. The crime lab cut a hole out of the underwear to test, then sent the rest of the underwear back to investigators and threw away the portion they tested.
Clinton used that mistake to get Taylor a plea bargain of two months time served. He could have faced 30 years to life in prison on the first-degree rape charge, the Free Beacon reported, though Clinton in the audio suggests the prosecutor may have been willing to plea down to five years.
Taylor died in in 1992. The victim, now 52, is divorced and blames her troubled life on the attack, the Free Beacon reported.
The victim declined an interview with the website but said she was angry at a Newsday reporter who in 2008 said she bore no ill-will toward Clinton. She indicated to the Free Beacon that she is angry at the former first lady.