Jailed '60s Radical Kathy Boudin Denied Parole
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010822/ts/crime_boudin_dc_2.html
By Grant McCool
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Kathy Boudin, a U.S. revolutionary
serving 20 years to life in prison for her role in a deadly
1981 security truck robbery, was denied parole on Wednesday,
officials said.
Boudin, 58, a former member of the 1960s radical Weather
Underground group, pleaded guilty to second degree murder after
the robbery in Nanuet, New York, in which a security guard and
two police officers were shot dead by gunmen.
Boudin received the ruling from the New York State parole
board after an interview. It noted her ``positive'' disciplinary
and program records -- she has been credited with helping
develop programs for AIDS victims.
But the board said ``that due to the violent nature and
circumstances of the offenses, your release at this time would
be incompatible with the welfare of society.''
New York State Division of Parole spokesman Thomas Grant
said Boudin was entitled to apply for parole again in August
2003.
Her application for parole, the first she was allowed to
make in two decades of imprisonment, was strongly opposed by
relatives of the three dead men. A letter-writing campaign
produced 35,000 objections to the possibility of parole,
officials said.
Her supporters argued that Boudin should be released
because she was a changed woman who had helped AIDS victims,
incarcerated mothers and inmates seeking college degrees.
In the Oct. 20, 1981, robbery of $1.6 million from a
Brink's truck, members of the Black Liberation Army, a splinter
group of the Black Panthers, held up the truck and killed a
guard. The money was transferred to another truck in which
Boudin was waiting.
That vehicle was stopped by police on an approach to the
New York State Thruway. Boudin, whose own group had disbanded
years earlier, surrendered, but gunmen burst out of the truck
and opened fire, killing two police officers.
Boudin grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of leftist
parents. In college, she became involved with Students for a
Democratic Society and then its militant offshoot, the Weather
Underground.
By 1970 she had gone underground, using an assumed name
after surviving an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse
where other members of the group had been making bombs.
In an interview with The New York Times last week at the
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County just
north of New York, Boudin did not minimize her crime or guilt,
the newspaper said.
The New Yorker magazine, in an article published in July,
quoted Boudin as saying, ``I was responsible for not being
responsible.''
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