New York Governor commutes sentence of Weather Underground terrorist

Joseph Klein reports in Front Page Magazine that Governor Cuomo of New York has commuted the sentence of leftist terrorist Judith Alice Clark.

On October 20, 1981, Clark joined members of the violent radical group known as the Weather Underground, who robbed a Brink’s armored truck in Nanuet, New York. Clark, who did not pull the trigger herself, was the driver of one of the getaway cars. Her partners in crime killed a Brinks guard, Peter Paige, in the course of the robbery. They also killed the two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, who had attempted to stop the getaway vehicles on the highway. Clark was captured after she crashed one of the getaway vehicles. Just before her arrest, according to the 2008 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denying Clark’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, “police saw Clark reach for a nine-millimeter pistol on the floor of the car.”

During the two years Clark waited for her trial on felony murder charges, she remained as defiant as ever. In court, she called the court officers “fascist dogs.” She described herself as an “anti-imperialist freedom fighter,” who refused to accept the legitimacy of the court. She declared that she was involved in “a just struggle for national liberation by New Afrikan forces and New Afrikan people” and was fulfilling “the responsibility of white anti-imperialists to give support to that at every level.” She and two other defendants filed a motion seeking to be accorded “prisoner of war status” because their criminal prosecution was “an international dispute” related to “the wars of liberation.”

In her closing argument that Clark delivered to the jury, she called the court “a tool of imperialist rule.” She added: “The D.A. calls what happened on October 20, 1981, a robbery and murder. We say it was an attempted expropriation because revolutionary forces must take from the powers that be to build their capabilities to struggle against this system…Revolutionary violence is necessary and it is a liberating force.”

Read more here.