The right wing has dug up some tapes of Hillary Clinton talking about representing accused child rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor. This is akin to the Tony Rezko case they tried to smear Barack Obama with during the 2008 presidential campaign or even his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Remember how the Republicans smeared Mike Dukakis with Willie Horton? I wish the Republican Party would spend some time telling us how they would make life better for the average American and not their rich buddies, than dredging up crap. Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Free Beacon’s ‘bombshell’ article:
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.
The full story of the Taylor defense calls into question Clinton’s narrative of her early years as a devoted women and children’s advocate in Arkansas—a narrative the 2016 presidential frontrunner continues to promote on her current book tour.
[…]
From a legal ethics perspective, once she agreed to take the case, Clinton was required to defend her client to the fullest even if she did believe he was guilty.
“We’re hired guns,” Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor of legal ethics at Chapman University, told the Washington Free Beacon. “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.”
However, Rotunda said, for a lawyer to disclose the results of a client’s polygraph and guilt 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.’”
Yes, this is the beginning of the attacks on Hillary Clinton. Public defenders and defense attorneys are called on to represent people they know could be guilty of crimes they are charged with. Jodi Arias murdered Travis Alexander in cold blood, but she was afforded a lawyer, wasn’t she? We could go on and on….
This was cross-posted from The Hinterland Gazette.