My must read of the day is "The Hillary Tapes," by Alana Goodman, in the Washington Free Beacon:
Newly discovered audio recordings of Hillary Clinton from the early 1980s include the former first lady’s frank and detailed assessment of the most significant criminal case of her legal career: defending a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
In 1975, the same year she married Bill, Hillary Clinton agreed to serve as the court-appointed attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old accused of raping the child after luring her into a car.
The recordings, which date from 1983-1987 and have never before been reported, include Clinton’s suggestion that she knew Taylor was guilty at the time. She says she used a legal technicality to plead her client, who faced 30 years to life in prison, down to a lesser charge. The recording and transcript, along with court documents pertaining to the case, are embedded below. […]
Describing the events almost a decade after they had occurred, Clinton’s struck a casual and complacent attitude toward her client and the trial for rape of a minor.
"I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs," she added with a laugh.
Clinton can also be heard laughing at several points when discussing the crime lab’s accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied Taylor to the crime.
As soon as I read this piece I knew an argument would be made against it suggesting that it’s all a moot point because the crux of the story is a defense attorney just doing her job—and leave it to twitter to never let me down.
Shortly after the story was published I saw this tweet:
@GlennThrush The implication behind piece you linked & of Free Beacon is clearly that defense attorneys are responsible for clients.
— Teresa Kopec (@TeresaKopec) June 16, 2014
That’s not the implication at all. If it were I would say that’s an unfair and irrelevant criticism, but this outlook misses the real point, and significance, of the story.
I do not fault Clinton for doing her job, and I don’t think that’s what the article is suggesting either, but I do think it’s problematic that she subsequently spoke about a rape with absolute callousness.
In college, I spent the end of my senior year interning in the public defenders office—I have a great respect for defense attorneys and the vital role they play in our justice system. It is not an easy job, but it is an important one—and regardless of what someone’s done I think every person deserves to have their story told. That ideal, and the lessons I learned in that office, is what made me increasingly interested in journalism.
There are some cases I will never forget because I think the justice system failed and someone is serving time when they shouldn’t be, and there’s a case that to this day makes me sick because I think someone walked out of the court house when they were guilty of molesting their own child.
I was just an intern. I didn’t get that person off. I made copies of the discovery, went with the investigator to subpoena the victim and watched the trial. My presence was largely irrelevant, but never in my life will I forget any of their faces or the things I read in that discovery, and never in my life will I recollect that case with anything other than disgust and guilt.
I cannot comprehend how someone could talk about a case of a man forcefully raping a sixth grader like it was an amusing old memory.
Yet here is Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, doing exactly that. That should raise more eyebrows than just mine.