Kathy Boudin wins parole

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 21, 2003
Former Radical Granted Parole in '81 Killings
By JAMES BARRON

Kathy Boudin, the former radical fugitive who pleaded guilty for her 
role in a 1981 armored-car robbery and shootout that killed a guard and 
two police officers in Rockland County, N.Y., was granted parole 
yesterday after 22 years in prison.

Ms. Boudin, 60, had been denied parole in 2001 and again three months 
ago, when a state parole board ruled that her efforts to arrange 
programs for AIDS patients and mothers in prison as well as college 
courses for inmates did not outweigh "the serious and brutal nature" of 
her role in the crimes.

But yesterday, two parole commissioners — not the ones who presided in 
May — decided that she should be freed. She will be released by Oct. 1, 
a spokesman for the State Division of Parole said, but her lawyer said 
he expected her to leave prison far sooner, perhaps within days.

The ruling by the two commissioners, Vernon C. Manley and Daizzee D. 
Bouey, came after a 76-minute hearing at the Bedford Hills Correctional 
Facility, said Thomas P. Grant, the spokesman for the parole division. 
The session was not open to the public and a transcript was not 
immediately available, he said.

Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN) was told of the decision two hours 
after the hearing ended. Her lawyer, Leonard I. Weinglass of Manhattan, 
said, "There was a lot of crying, a lot of uncontrollable crying and 
sobbing and joy," when she called from the prison to tell him. "She was 
hysterically happy."

Her release had long been opposed by the victims' families, and as word 
of the parole decision circulated yesterday, their anger flared anew.

Officer John Hanchar, a nephew of Sgt. Edward O'Grady, one of the two 
police officers killed, noted that the decision was handed down on what 
would have been the sergeant's 55th birthday. "People say she's been 
such a great person in prison," said Officer Hanchar, who works for the 
Clarkstown Police Department in Rockland County and now patrols the 
intersection where his uncle was shot. "We don't know what great things 
these three men would have accomplished had they not been killed."

Ms. Boudin — who had graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College 
and was the daughter of Leonard B. Boudin, a civil liberties lawyer 
whose clients ranged from Julian Bond and Paul Robeson to Daniel 
Ellsberg — had belonged to the Weather Underground, one of the most 
notorious revolutionary groups from the 1960's. An offshoot of Students 
for a Democratic Society, it took responsibility for at least 20 
bombings from 1969 to 1975. Its targets included Police Headquarters in 
Manhattan in 1970, the United States Capitol in 1971 and the State 
Department in 1975.

When she was captured minutes after the murders of the police officers, 
she was a fugitive from an explosion 11 years earlier in a Greenwich 
Village town house that the Weathermen had used as a bomb factory. Three 
Weathermen died in the blast. She was also wanted on a bail-jumping 
charge in connection with the Days of Rage antiwar demonstrations in 
Chicago in 1969.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/nyregion/21PARO.html

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