Kathy Boudin

Early life and family

Kathy Boudin was born on May 19, 1943, into a family with a long left-wing history, and she was raised in Greenwich Village, New York. Her family was Jewish. Her great-uncle was Louis B. Boudin, a Marxist theorist. Her father, attorney Leonard Boudin, had represented such controversial clients as Judith Coplon, the Cuban government, and Paul Robeson. A National Lawyers Guild attorney, Leonard Boudin was the law partner of Victor Rabinowitz, himself counsel to numerous left-wing organizations. Kathy Boudin attended Bryn Mawr College and is a member of the class of 1965.

Weather Underground

In the 1960s and 1970s, Boudin became heavily involved with the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground bombed The Pentagon, the United States Capitol, the New York Police Benevolent Association, the New York Board of Corrections, as well as the offices of multinational companies. Boudin, along with Cathy Wilkerson, was a survivor of the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, which occurred when a nail bomb that WU members were building and intending to detonate at a soldiers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey exploded prematurely, killing three of their members. Boudin was 27 at the time. Both women were awaiting trial, out on bond for their alleged actions in Days of Rage in Chicago several months earlier. She fled underground with other members of the WU during the 1970s, during which time she fell in love with fellow member David Gilbert and gave birth to their son Chesa in 1980.

1981 Brink's Robbery

In 1981, Boudin and several former members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink's armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York. After Boudin dropped her infant son off at a babysitter's, she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices took another vehicle to a local mall where the Brink's truck was making a pick-up. They confronted the guards and gunfire immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his partner, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rejoined Boudin.

An alert college student called the police after spotting the gang abandoning their vehicle and entering the U-Haul. Two policeman spotted and pulled over the U-Haul, but they were expecting black males, and could only see Boudin – a white female – in the driver's seat. She got out of the cab, and raised her hands. Another police car with two officers quickly arrived on the scene.

The police officers who caught them testified that Boudin, feigning innocence, pleaded with them to put down their guns and got them to drop their guard; Boudin said she remained silent, that the officers relaxed spontaneously.

After the police lowered their guns, six men armed with automatic weapons emerged from the back of the truck, and began firing upon the four police officers, one of whom, Waverly Brown, was killed instantly. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his revolver, but as he reloaded, he was shot several times with an M16 rifle. Ninety minutes later, he died in the hospital. The other two officers escaped with minor injuries.

Boudin and Gilbert allegedly acted as decoys as well as getaway drivers.

The occupants of the U-Haul scattered, some climbing into another getaway car, others carjacking a nearby motorist while Boudin attempted to flee on foot. An off-duty corrections officer, Michael J. Koch, apprehended her shortly after the shootout. When she was arrested, Boudin gave her name as Barbara Edson.

Gilbert, Samuel Brown, and Judith Alice Clark crashed their car while making a sharp turn, and were arrested by police. Three Black Liberation Army members also failed to escape that day. Two days later, Samuel Smith and Nathaniel Burns were spotted in a car in New York. After a gunfight with police that left Smith dead, Burns was captured. Three more participants were arrested several months later.

The majority of the defendants received three consecutive sentences of 25-years-to-life, making them eligible for parole in the year 2058. Boudin hired Leonard Weinglass to defend her. Weinglass, a law partner of Boudin's father, arranged for a plea bargain and Boudin pleaded guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for one 20-years-to-life sentence. By comparison, David Gilbert received 70-years-to-life and as of 2015, is still incarcerated. After the couple began their prison sentences, WU co-founder William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn adopted Chesa Boudin and raised him as their own son.

Prison

The 38-year-old Boudin was incarcerated in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York, where she worked with AIDS patients and in adult education. While there, she had a central role in creating five formal programs:

While incarcerated, Boudin published articles in the Harvard Educational Review ("Participatory Literacy Education Behind Bars: AIDS Opens the Door," Summer 1993, 63(2)), in Breaking the Rules: Women in Prison and Feminist Therapy by Judy Harden and Marcia Hill ("Lessons from a Mother's Program in Prison: A Psychosocial Approach Supports Women and Their Children," published simultaneously in Women & Therapy, 21), and in Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum-Security Prison.

She co-authored The Foster Care Handbook for Incarcerated Parents published by Bedford Hills in 1993. She co-edited Parenting from inside/out: Voices of mothers in prison, jointly published by correctional institutions and the Osborne Foundation.

Boudin also wrote and published poetry while incarcerated, publishing in books and journals including the PEN Center Prize Anthology Doing Time, Concrete Garden 4, and Aliens at the Border. She won an International PEN prize for her poetry in 1999.

Boudin continued to pursue her education as a doctoral student at the City University of New York (CUNY), which included participation in the CUNY Graduate Center research team that produced the study Changing Minds: The Impact of College in a Maximum-Security Prison.

Boudin and Gilbert's son Chesa Boudin was adopted by former Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

She and Roslyn D. Smith contributed the piece "Alive Behind the Labels: Women in Prison" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.

Parole

Three months after her 60th birthday, Boudin was granted parole on August 20, 2003, in her third parole hearing, and released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility on September 17, 2003. She accepted a job in the H.I.V./AIDS Clinic at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, meeting the work provisions of parole that required active job prospects.

In May 2004, after her parole, Boudin published in the Fellowship of Reconciliation's publication Fellowship. Subsequently, she received an Ed. D. from Columbia University Teachers College. In addition to her work at St. Luke's-Roosevelt, Dr. Boudin has worked as a consultant to the Osborne Association in the development of a Longtermers Responsibility Project taking place in the New York State Correctional Facilities, utilizing a restorative practice approach. She has also consulted for Vermont Corrections, the Women’s Prison Association, and supervises social workers.

Columbia University professor

She is presently an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, a controversial appointment due to her murder conviction and membership of a group which carried out terrorist attacks in the United States. Regardless of the controversy, Columbia School of Social Work Associate Dean Marianne Yoshioka, who hired Boudin for the adjunct-professor post in 2008, was quoted as saying that Boudin has been “an excellent teacher who gets incredible evaluations from her students each year.” In 2013, she was Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at New York University School of Law. The School of Law maintains a video of her lecture.

In popular culture

Boudin was a model for the title role in David Mamet's play The Anarchist (2012). Prior to that, she was a model for Willy Holtzman's Off Broadway Play, "Something You Did" (2008).