Clark, 69, was the getaway driver in the bungled 1981 heist in a suburb of New York City in which two police officers and a guard were killed. She had originally been sentenced to 75 years to life, but became a model of rehabilitation in prison, expressing deep remorse for her crime and doing good works.
Many liberal elected officials viewed her as a symbol of the need for clemency and forgiveness, maintaining that she had to be released from prison if the state correctional system was to live up to its ideals, even in politically charged cases involving the deaths of police officers.
But for law enforcement groups and many Republican elected officials, she was the face of terrorism and deserved no mercy.
The decision to release Clark came after a lobbying campaign involving 11 state senators, the former Manhattan district attorney, a former chief judge, four former parole board commissioners and a former superintendent of the prison where she was housed.
Her supporters, including 70 elected officials, sent a letter to the parole board arguing that the state’s correctional system should not exist solely for retribution, but also for rehabilitation, and that Clark had served a long sentence, accepted responsibility for her crime and shown genuine remorse.
Clark, then 31, drove a getaway car during the attempted robbery in Rockland County in 1981. The heist was part of a scheme by a radical offshoot of militant leftist group Weather Underground, known as the May 19th Communist Organization, to steal $1.6 million for financing a guerrilla uprising.
Two Nyack police officers, Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown, and a Brink’s security guard, Peter Paige, were shot and killed during the robbery, and though Clark was not at the scene of the shooting, she was charged with second-degree murder and robbery.
Clark represented herself at her trial. Still fueled by the beliefs that made her a willing participant in the robbery, she was deeply uncooperative and defiant in court.
Clark expressed no remorse for her actions, telling the jury that revolutionary violence was a “liberating force.” She described herself as an “anti-imperialist freedom fighter” during jury selection and decried the court proceedings as “fascist” and “racist.”
She was found guilty of both charges, and the sentencing judge said she was beyond rehabilitation.
But she evolved over the years while imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County. Clark has said that in the process of building a relationship with her daughter, Harriet, who was an infant when Clark was incarcerated, she jettisoned her political views and began to reflect on the harm her actions had caused. “I had to grapple with what happened to my humanity,” she said in a 2017 interview.
After a prolonged public silence, she eventually issued several public apologies for her role in the robbery. In 1994, she wrote that she felt “enormous regret, sorrow and remorse” about her actions. Eight years later, she apologized publicly to the victims of the Brink’s robbery and their families.
“For the rest of my life, I will be faced with the knowledge that my inability to tolerate ambiguity and face responsibility led to my participation in the death and destruction of Oct. 20, 1981,” she wrote in a letter that was published in the Journal News in Westchester County.
Faced with the prospect of spending her life in prison, Clark worked to build a new life behind bars. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, led educational programs for inmates, and started programs to fight AIDS and improve prenatal care in prison. She participated in a program that trained service dogs, some of whom went to work with law enforcement.
In late 2016, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recognized her “exceptional strides in self-development,” commuted her sentence to 35 years and made her eligible for parole.
Cuomo at the time attributed the decision in part to an hourlong meeting he had with Clark at the prison earlier that year.
“When you meet her you get a sense of her soul,” Cuomo said then. “Her honesty makes her almost transparent as a personality. She takes full responsibility. There are no excuses. There are no justifications.”
But law enforcement groups, conservative judges and Republican elected officials fought against her release, and in 2017, the parole board voted to keep her in prison, saying she was “still a symbol of a terroristic crime.”
At least two others connected to the Brink’s robbery remain in prison. Mutulu Shakur, who prosecutors described as the mastermind behind the heist, is incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Victorville, California, according to federal Bureau of Prisons records.
Shakur, stepfather of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur, was denied parole in 2018. He is scheduled to be released in 2024, federal prison records show.
David Gilbert, who was convicted on second-degree murder and robbery charges, is still being held at the maximum-security Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York. He, like Clark, was sentenced to 75 years to life. He will not be eligible for parole until 2056.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.