CLAIM: Hillary Clinton successfully defended an accused child rapist and later laughed about the case.
MOSTLY FALSE
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.
WHAT'S FALSE: 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.
ORIGIN:In May 2016, the image macro shown above began circulating on Facebook, holding that back in 1975 a young Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) had "volunteered" to represent a 42-year-old man (Tom Taylor) who was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, that Clinton told the judge in the case that the complainant "made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about older men, that Clinton "got [the] rapist freed," and that Clinton later admitted she knew the defendant was guilty and "laughed about" the outcome of the case. Although Hillary Clinton was indeed involved in a case of this nature, the aspects of the case presented in the image were largely inaccurate or exaggerated.
As Hillary Clinton wrote in her 2003 biography Living History, she didn't volunteer to represent the defendant, but rather was appointed to the case by the judge:
[Prosecuting attorney Mahlon Gibson] called me to tell me an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer. [Prosecutor Mahlon] Gibson had recommended that the criminal court judge, Maupin Cummings, appoint me.
I told Mahlon I really didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.
That assertion was backed up by the prosecuting attorney, Mahlon Gibson, as noted in a 2008 Newsday article about the case:
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. Taylor, who earned a meager wage at a paper bag factory and lived with relatives, had already spent 10 days in the county jail and was grasping for a way to avoid a 30 years-to-life term in the state penitentiary for rape.
Taylor, 41, figured a jury would be less hostile to a rape defendant represented by a woman, according to one of his friends. Cummings agreed to the request, scanned the list of available female attorneys (there were only a half dozen in the county at the time) and assigned Rodham, who had virtually no experience in criminal litigation.
“Hillary told me she didn’t want to take that case, she made that very clear,” recalls prosecutor Gibson, who phoned her with the judge’s order.
Rodham immersed herself in Taylor’s defense as the law school’s spring semester came to an end. “She worked a lot of nights on it,” said Van Gearhart, her teaching assistant at the law clinic in 1975. “I remember her doing that because she wanted to show that she was willing to take court appointments, hoping that the bar would help us in getting established as a clinic.”
Gibson said the same thing during a 2014 CNN interview about the case, adding that Hillary had attempted unsuccessfully to get the judge to remove her from the case:
Gibson said that it is “ridiculous” for people to question how Clinton became Taylor’s representation.
“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. Clinton was on that list and helped run a legal aid clinic at the time.
Taylor was assigned a public defender in the case but Gibson said he quickly “started screaming for a woman attorney” to represent him.
Gibson said Clinton called him shortly after the judge assigned her to the case and said, “I don't want to represent this guy. I just can't stand this. I don't want to get involved. Can you get me off?”
“I told her, ‘Well contact the judge and see what he says about it,’ but I also said don't jump on him and make him mad,” Gibson said. “She contacted the judge and the judge didn't remove her and she stayed on the case.”
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