The attorney for a 22-year-old loner accused of trying to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the same attorney who helped defend a white supremacist who shot up a JCC in Southern California in 1999.
Judy Clarke was on a team that negotiated a plea that avoided death for white supremacist Buford Furrow Jr., who stormed a packed North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and fired 70 bullets. He injured five people and then killed a Filipino-American letter carrier by shooting him nine times.
In reaching a plea deal that spared him the death penalty, Clarke highlighted Furrow’s history of mental problems and how he tried to get help without success.
Clarke, 58, also worked on plea agreements that spared “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in the late 1990s and Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. She also helped persuade a jury to spare the life of Susan Smith, who strapped her sons in their car seats and let her car roll into a lake in 1994, carrying the boys to their deaths.
Jared Lee Loughner potentially faces the death penalty on charges of trying to kill Giffords. In total, six died and 14 were injured or wounded in the assault. — ap