Judith Clark’s clemency
Just before the new year, Gov. Cuomo showed wisdom and mercy in using his extraordinary clemency powers to lift the stigma of long-ago offenses from 101 non-violent offenders. All of these 101, convicted at age 16 or 17, served out their sentences and lived crime-free for at least 10 years. Thanks to Cuomo, they will now have their records cleared by pardon. If they are convicted of another crime, the pardon will be revoked.
But the governor, acting with misplaced moral conviction, erred in moving up by 40 years the parole date of Judy Clark, a woman convicted of the felony murder of two police officers and an armored truck guard in the 1981 Brink’s robbery in Rockland County.
Because of Cuomo’s actions — meeting personally with Clark, speaking powerfully of her transformation and sending her case almost immediately to a Parole Board whose members he appoints and are sure to heed his wishes — Clark seems all but certain to walk out of prison in the coming weeks. That would be wrong. Unlike most in prison, Clark had every advantage growing up in, as she said in an affidavit, a “Jewish intellectual family” in Brooklyn. At Midwood High, she was in the Arista honor society and on the math team. Then she headed to the University of Chicago.
But this very smart woman rejected all that and became a terrorist in the Weather Underground. On Oct. 20, 1981, she and her machine gun-armed comrades set upon a Brink’s truck in Nanuet to finance revolution in league with the cop-killing Black Liberation Army.
They murdered armored car guard Peter Paige and Police Officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown.
Clark and several other participants in the act were not trigger pullers but getaway car drivers. That may not sound inherently violent, but they intentionally facilitated a murderous act. Because of felony murder laws, in which all participants are legally responsible for the stolen life, the courts came down on them with proper ferocity.
One driver pled guilty and got 20 years and was later released on parole. A sentence equivalent to life without parole was handed down for Clark and two accomplices — none of them trigger-pullers either — after all three rejected the authority of the justice system and insisted upon representing themselves at trial.
One of those accomplices died in prison; another is still locked away. Others wound up in federal court, where they were convicted of other crimes and given shorter sentences.
Incarcerated now for 35 years, Clark has made a remarkable transformation. In compelling and convincing language, she repents her crime.
She has done many good works, from creating an AIDS counseling program to training police service dogs to spearheading an education effort that has led many to college degrees.
Her well-connected advocates, Cuomo now among them, see a gentle soul, one completely transformed.
The governor explains his decision with sincerity and admirable forthrightness, stating that he took what is obviously a politically risky step because he met with Clark and was moved by her honest reckoning with her terrible act.
“The zealotry, the ideology, how it filled the vacuum of a young mind,” Cuomo told the New York Times’ Jim Dwyer. “It wasn’t just, ‘I drove the car’ — it was how she got to that place. The psychological underpinnings and immaturity. The zealotry that answers all questions. It was purpose, it was heaven, it was hell, it was God.”
Cuomo asks, “The older I get, the correction system — what are we accomplishing in the first place? Lock a person up for 10 years, and you have accomplished what?” It is a fair, searching question. Indeed, it is difficult to watch video of Clark and not feel pangs of sympathy for the fact that a series of terrible decisions ruined what might have been a life lived well.
The answer is that equal justice under law is a core American principle, without which our society cannot healthily function.
Thousands of New Yorkers are imprisoned for decades for violent crimes. Many of them have rehabilitated themselves behind bars — some after 10 years, or 20, or 30. Many are deeply remorseful. Many would strike observers as good people.
When time for parole under a sentence arrives, some inmates are granted it consistent with the law. Until then, ongoing incarceration carries out society’s special obligation to mete out punishment to convey the severity of criminal offenses that offend the common moral code, most serious among them, the taking of human life.
Society has an inextricably linked obligation to deliver its punishment as objectively as possible, similarly imprisoning those guilty of similar crimes. In New York, those convicted in multiplecop killings and terrorism rarely if ever leave prison. Those eligible for parole are routinely denied freedom every two years by the board. Those of Clark’s accomplices who followed her path in state court have yet to walk free.
Before he granted clemency to Clark on Dec. 30, during six years as governor, Cuomo had never advanced anyone’s parole date. He never freed anyone from prison.
He granted Clark a private audience. He did not meet with the loved ones of those killed by her and her accomplices. Paige, O’Grady and Brown long ago left behind three wives and nine children.
The fact that Judy Clark is white, female, able to explain her conversation in elevated language, and aided by a bevy of influential friends should not work against her. But neither should it be a ticket to special mercy.