Kathy Boudin was one of the country’s most-wanted outlaws. She was arrested in 1981 in a botched $1.6 million robbery of a Brink's armored truck in suburban New York. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to murder and robbery charges in the incident, was paroled in 2003 and later became a criminal justice scholar at Columbia University. She died May 1 in New York at 78, the cause of her death was cancer, a spokeswoman for her son, Chesa Boudins' spokeswoman says. She is a descendant of prominent leftist intellectuals and attended progressive Greenwich Village schools and dined at home with noted writers and political activists in the city's leftist schools. Her father was a civil-liberties lawyer whose client roster included entertainer
Ms. Boudin helped organize and participated in the October 1969 Days of Rage action. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in 1981 robbery of an armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y. She and boyfriend David Gilbert had a 14-month-old son, Chesa, and turned Chesa over to Weather leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. She declined for years to surface after the Weatherman movement imploded after the Vietnam War ended; she declined to surface in the 1980s. Her attorneys successfully argued that she surrendered before the two police officers were killed and thus could be considered responsible only in the death of the Brink’s guard, she said in the New Yorker in 2001. For more from this article click here.
In prison, Ms. Boudin received a master’s degree in adult education and taught in a prisoner literacy program. After her parole, she received a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College. She co-founded the Center for Justice, the whose goals included developing ways to ease inmate transition to life outside prison. Her brother is a lawyer who, breaking with family tradition, is an outspoken conservative.
