Reposted from http://bfeldman68.blogspot.com
Originally posted: July 9, 2007
by Bob Feldman
“If Justice travels for ten years, she will never find shelter in the castles of the powerful.” (an old Russian proverb)
On
October 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin, Sam Brown, Judy Clark, and David
Gilbert were arrested in Rockland County, New York, following a robbery
of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet in which an armed guard was killed, and a
shootout near the New York State Thruway entrance in Nyack which left
two local policemen dead.
The following day, evidence began to
emerge that the robbery was a politically-motivated expropriation
involving New York City radicals who had been activists in the 1960s
Civil Rights and antiwar movements.
In a 1991 telephone
interview, Downtown asked Susan Tipograph, one of the attorneys for the
people arrested on Oct. 20, 1981, whether their civil liberties were
respected following their arrest.
“No. Their civil liberties were
grossly violated. Some were beaten and tortured and were denied proper
medical treatment. They were denied access to attorneys. They were
denied access to family and friends. They were held in intolerable jail
conditions. It was only through lawsuits that some access to family and
friends was secured,” Tipograph recalled.
At the Oct. 23, 1981
preliminary hearing in Nyack (from which the public was excluded),
then-Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz claimed Tipograph
was “imagining things” when she charged that people arrested on Oct.
20th had been beaten. Outside the hearing room, Gribetz said “there were
no beatings by Rockland County authorities.”
According to David Gilbert, however, there were beatings by Rockland County authorities of himself and Sam Brown:“I
think the arrest was around 4 or 5. And we were arraigned around
midnight. And I think for about 5 hours, I guess, I was being beaten.
And then they tried to make me talk. When that didn’t work, they took
out a shotgun and jammed it into my neck and tried to make me talk.
“There was a call made for lawyers. But there were hours before lawyers either got to us or were allowed to see us.
“In
Brown’s case, they broke two vertebrae in his neck during that beating.
And he was in excruciating pain after that. And for 11 weeks he did not
get proper medical care, until he agreed to be an informant for the
F.B.I. This is a medically-documented atrocity that went on that the
courts didn’t want to hear and the media didn’t want to talk about.”
The
pro-Establishment former Rockland Journal-News reporter, John
Castellucci, supports Tipograph and Gilbert’s contention that pretrial
beatings took place. In his gossipy 1986 book, The Big Dance, Castellucci wrote that “the results of the beatings were documented in Brown’s medical records.”
Gilbert
feels that whereas he was just beaten, the African-American defendant
Brown was tortured. “I think it is a political distinction between
beatings and threats on the one hand—which are brutal and can’t be
justified—and torture on the other hand, which goes further. It’s a more
scientific, intense infliction of pain. What happened with Brown—maybe
not consciously that night, but when he was left with two broken
vertebrae in his neck and then not given proper treatment—that’s a real
form of torture,” Gilbert said.
According to Tipograph, at the
Oct. 23rd preliminary hearing, Nyack Judge Robert Lewis was not willing
to listen to any legal arguments with respect to the civil liberties of
the people arrested being violated, and he “pooh-poohed” her request
that medical attention be given to Sam Brown. Tipograph was also not
allowed to consult with her clients during the proceedings of the
preliminary hearing.
Asked by Downtown in 1991 if it was unusual
that the public was excluded from the preliminary hearing, Tipograph
replied: “It was highly unusual. Nyack police headquarters was in the
same building in which the hearing was held. And for five blocks around
the courthouse, sharpshooters were on roofs of buildings. Blocks were
cordoned off by armed police, so the public couldn’t even approach the
hearing.”
Downtown asked Tipograph how she would describe the
atmosphere in Rockland County in the days following the October 20, 1981
arrest.
“Hostile. One felt unmistakably in a police-state,”
Tipograph recalled. She also noted that she felt personally threatened
by the hostility in Nyack.
The now-deceased Civil Rights Attorney
William Kunstler, in a 1991 telephone interview, also recalled the
post-Oct. 20th atmosphere in Nyack: “The atmosphere was so tense, you
could cut it with a knife. Sheriff’s deputies on horseback were all
around the courthouse and sharpshooters were on building roofs. It was
an armed camp,” Kunstler said.
Kunstler had received a late-night
phone call on October 20th from the Rockland County Jail from a woman
whose name he didn’t recognize, so she was told to call back in the
morning. When the woman called Kunstler back, he realized she was Kathy
Boudin when she mentioned that her father’s first name was “Leonard.”
(In reference to Civil Liberties Attorney Leonard Boudin, who died in
November 1989). On Oct. 21st, Kunstler went to Nyack with Kathy Boudin’s
parents and experienced the post-arrest atmosphere.
Gilbert also
recalled the atmosphere: “There was massive hysteria. I guess partly
understandable because it was an intense event. Police forces in those
areas hadn’t been challenged like that before. It was completely
blown-up into this tremendous thing. Not only because of the intensity
of the incident, but because it became a tremendous propaganda vehicle
to scare people to build up police forces to attack civil liberties.”
Boudin,
Clark, and Gilbert had all been political activists in the Students for
a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) radical youth organization of the 1960s.
Gilbert co-founded the S.D.S. chapter at Columbia which helped lead the
1968 Columbia Student Revolt. In order to more militantly resist the
Vietnam War and racism, all three joined the Weatherman political group
in June 1969.
Since the March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion at 18
West 11th Street, which claimed the lives of three Weatherman activists,
Boudin had been a Weather Underground fugitive. Clark and Gilbert had
also been members of the Weather Underground. After being arrested by
the F.B.I. in late 1970 and jailed for six months for participating in
an antiwar protest, Clark became active in above-ground political groups
in New York City. Gilbert and Boudin were lovers and had a child
together. They would be married in jail after Gilbert’s 1983 sentencing.
[Boudin was eventually released on parole in 2003, while Gilbert and
Clark are still imprisoned, despite a lower court eventually ruling that
there were legal irregularities in the way their trial was conducted].
