One of the last spooky echoes of the violent elements of the ’60s Radical Left was the armed robbery of a Brinks truck in suburban New York in 1981. The crime went from bad to worse, with two police officers being murdered. Judith Clark, a 31-year-old veteran political activist who was the getaway driver, was arrested and has remained in prison ever since, despite transforming herself from violent activist to model prisoner. I think it’s great when a prisoner reforms, but it’s difficult for me to accept that she should be released considering the nature of the crime. In all fairness, many people, including Clark’s former warden, disagree. The opening of Tom Robbins’ new article about the longtime prisoner in the New York Times Magazine:
“On Oct. 20, 1981, a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y. Before it was over, two armored-car guards were shot and two police officers — one black and one white — were gunned down at a roadblock. The crime was one of the last spasms of ’60s-style, left-wing violence. To the militants, it was an ‘expropriation’ for something they called the Republic of New Afrika, a place that existed mainly in their fevered dreams.
Judith Clark was one of four people arrested that day for armed robbery and murder. She was 31, a veteran of the white left who traveled the radical arc from student protest to the Weathermen to the fringes beyond. A new single mother, she kissed her infant daughter goodbye that morning, promising to be home soon.
No one ever accused Clark of holding or firing a gun that deadly afternoon. But she was there, a willing participant, at the wheel of a tan Honda getaway car. Over the next two years while she awaited trial in jail, Clark became a fiercer warrior than she was on the day of the robbery. During court hearings, she told the judge she was a ‘freedom fighter’ who didn’t recognize the right of imperialist courts to try her. She called court officers ‘fascist dogs!’ when they clashed with her supporters.
Her better-known co-defendant, Kathy Boudin, arrested at the scene of the shootings after having been a fugitive since a 1970 bomb blast in a Greenwich Village town house killed three of her Weather Underground comrades, sat mutely beside her. At trial, Clark and two other defendants — David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a former Black Panther — boycotted the courtroom, listening to the piped-in testimony from their basement cells. The defendants insisted on representing themselves; no one cross-examined witnesses on their behalf. When Clark appeared in court to make a closing argument, she merely confirmed her guilt. ‘Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,’ she told the jury.”
