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Judith Clark, who, in her youth, took part in a murderous robbery attempt against Brink's armored car, one of the last hiccups of violent left-wing extremism of the 1960s and 1970s, was released Wednesday after having has been jailed in New York for 37 years, said his lawyer.
Mrs. Clark, aged 69, was the escort driver during the 1981 failed flight to a suburb of New York in which two police officers and a guard were killed.
During her trial, Clark clung to her revolutionary convictions and maintained that the violence was justified. But she underwent a transformation during her decades in prison, apologizing for the pain she had caused, doing good deeds and becoming a model of reeducation.
"I had to deal with what happened to my humanity," Ms. Clark said in an interview in 2017.
Many Liberal elected officials viewed Mrs. Clark as a symbol of the need for clemency and forgiveness, claiming that she needed to be released from prison so that the state's correctional system would live up to her ideals even in affairs politically involving the death of police officers.
"We are grateful to the Parole Board for asserting that everyone who has interacted with Judy already knows that she is a rehabilitated woman who remembers herself and poses no risk to society," she said. a statement Michael Cardozo, one of Mrs. Clark's lawyers.
But for the forces of order and many elected Republicans, she was the face of terrorism and deserved no mercy.
Ed Day, the executive of Rockland County, where the killings took place, called the parole board's decision to slap the families of the victims.
"This perversion of justice is the sad continuation of the deadly aggression against police in our country," said Day, a former New York police officer, in a statement.
The decision to release Ms. Clark came after a lobbying campaign involving 11 state senators, the former district attorney of Manhattan, a former chief justice, four former commissioners of the parole board and a former director of the prison where she was staying.
His supporters, including 70 elected officials, sent a letter to the Parole Board, in which they said that the state's correctional system should not only exist to punish them, but also for rehabilitation, and that Ms. Clark had served a long sentence, had accepted responsibility for her crime and showed real remorse.
Mrs. Clark, then 31, drove a car away during the attempted robbery in Rockland County in 1981. The burglary was part of a ploy organized by a radical organization of the leftist militant group Weather Underground. , known as the communist organization of May 19, to steal $ 1.6 million to fund a guerrilla uprising.
Two policemen from Nyack, the sergeant. Edward O'Grady and Officer Waverly Brown, as well as Brink Security Officer Peter Paige, were shot during the flight and, although Ms. Clark was not at the scene, she was charged with second degree murder and robbery.
Ms. Clark herself is represented at her trial. Always fueled by the beliefs that made her a volunteer participant in the theft, she was deeply uncooperative and provocative in the courts.
Ms. Clark expressed no remorse for her actions, telling the jury that revolutionary violence was a "liberating force." She described herself as a "fighter of anti-imperialist freedom" when selecting the jury and described the judicial proceedings as "fascist" and "racist". . "
She was found guilty of both counts and the sentencing judge declared that she was in rehabilitation.
But her opinions evolved over the years while she was imprisoned at the Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility in Westchester County. Ms. Clark stated that in the process of establishing a relationship with her daughter, Harriet, who was a baby when Ms. Clark was incarcerated, she abandoned her political views and began to think about the pain that his actions had caused.
After a prolonged public silence, she finally made several public apologies for her role in the robbery. In 1994, she wrote that she felt "tremendous regret, sorrow and remorse" about her actions. Eight years later, she apologized publicly to the Brink robbery victims and their families.
"For the rest of my life, I will be confronted with the belief that my inability to tolerate ambiguity and assume responsibility has led to my participation in the death and destruction of October 20, 1981," she writes. in a letter published in Newspaper News in Westchester County.
Faced with the prospect of spending her life in jail, Ms. Clark worked to build a new life behind bars. She has a Bachelor's and Master's degree, directed education programs for women prisoners, and launched programs to fight AIDS and improve prenatal care in prison. She participated in a training program for assistance dogs, some of whom went to work with the forces of the order.
In late 2016, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo recognized his "outstanding progress in personal development," commuting his sentence to age 35 and making it eligible for parole.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo attributed this decision in part to an hour-long meeting he had with Ms. Clark at the prison earlier that year.
"When you meet her, you have an idea of her soul," Cuomo said. "Her honesty makes her almost transparent as a personality. She assumes full responsibility. There are no excuses. There is no justification. "
But law enforcement, conservative judges and Republican elected officials fought against his release, and in 2017, the parole board voted to keep her in prison, claiming that she was "always a symbol of a terrorist crime."
At least two other people linked to Brink's robbery are still in jail. Mutulu Shakur, whom prosecutors described as the brain behind the robbery, is incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Victorville, California, according to the records of the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Mr. Shakur, the stepfather of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, has been denied parole in 2018. He is expected to be released in 2024, according to federal prison records.
David Gilbert, who has been convicted of second-degree murder and robbery, is still being held at Wende's maximum security detention center in Alden, New York. He was sentenced to 75 years in prison for life, like Mrs. Clark. He will only be eligible for parole in 2056.
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