David Gilbert Released, at Last

David Gilbert was released from jail this month after serving 40 years and 15 days for driving the get away vehicle in the 1981 Brinks Armory botched robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed. The Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million in cash from an armored car outside the Nanuet Mall near the Hudson River community of Nyack. Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground, was unarmed but charged with murder, along with his partner, Kathy Boudin, who was in the car with him. Boudin pleaded guilty and was paroled in 2003. She’s now a professor at Columbia University.


Friends of David Gilbert emailed this photo after he was released. That’s his son, Chesa Boudin, on the left, who is currently the District Attorney in San Francisco, and Kathy Boudin, in the middle. Chesa was fourteen months old when his parents were arrested and was raised by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two other well-known former Weather Underground members.

Much has been written about Gilbert’s time in jail, by his son and by other reporters who documented the work he did on AIDs education and prevention. Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced Gilbert’s 75 years to life sentence so that he would be eligible for parole, which was granted in October. This is what Cuomo tweeted about Gilbert: “He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer.”


Gilbert’s sentence was an obviously politically motivated one. He refused to plead guilty and was disruptive in court. And what he participated in was, like much of the Weather Underground and other radical groups’ activities of the 1960s, strategically stupid and ultimately a failure. But Gilbert represents far more than an unjust political sentencing. We are the only Western developed country in the world that keeps people in jail for 40, 50, 60 years, for life. According to a New York Times article “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences of 50 years or more. In Germany, fewer than 100 people have prison terms longer than 15 years. In the Netherlands, they seldom serve more than four years.


But that doesn’t stop people calling for more blood. In the ABC online report of Gilbert’s release, they quote Rockland County Executive Ed Day: “Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Parole Board should be ashamed for allowing this domestic terrorist to walk free on our streets. There’s no reason that David Gilbert should not have to face the full consequences of his heinous crimes, no matter how much time has passed.”


So once “a domestic terrorist” always a domestic terrorist. Once an 18-year old gang member at the scene of a murder, always an 18-year old gang member despite the fact that you’re now 60 years old. In the NYT’s article, one of the authors was a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council report that “recommends a return to a principle of parsimony, the sensible idea that a punishment should be only as severe as is required to prevent future offending.”


Mark Rudd, another former Weather Underground member who has repeatedly abjured his participation in the group, wrote a memoir some years ago that talked about meeting David Gilbert at Columbia University when he enrolled there as a freshman. Gilbert was several years older, already heavily involved in political organizing, who Mark described as one of the smartest and gentlest men he’d ever met. So, ironically enough, maybe the twenty-something David Gilbert, who made a tragic mistake when he was 36, is essentially the same David Gilbert who’s now 76 years old, free to walk down the streets of New York for the first time in 40 years.