Boudin, Katherine (1942–)

Revolutionary Katherine Boudin was involved in a bomb explosion and was arrested and imprisoned for life for her participation in an armed robbery that left two police officers and a guard dead.

The daughter of attorney and civil rights activist Leonard Boudin, Katherine Boudin graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. While attending law school in the 1960s, she became an activist and joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a group devoted to opposing the perceived evils of capitalist America, particularly U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Boudin participated in many protests and demonstrations at the time.

In 1969, she joined Weatherman, the militant off-shoot of the SDS. Boudin was involved in the Days of Rage in Chicago and other violent protests, and also authored a handbook on the various ways to evade detection by the authorities. She was present at the townhouse in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1970 when a bomb group members were manufacturing exploded. The blast killed three members of the group, but Boudin and another, Cathy Wilkerson, managed to escape both from harm and the police.

Like many other surviving members at the time, Boudin went underground to avoid being captured by the FBI. After Weatherman (by that time rechristened as Weather Underground) disbanded as an organization at the end of the Vietnam War, Boudin turned her attention toward the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an extremely violent and radical splinter group of the Black Panthers. The group was notorious for committing armed robberies to fund their activities. Boudin was an integral component of their largest heist ever, the robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, New York, on October 20, 1981. She was to be the white, and therefore less suspicious, driver of their getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. Police stopped the vehicle on the New York Thruway because they had been alerted to look for a U-Haul. However, Boudin convinced them that hers was not the right truck. As the officers stowed their weapons, gunmen of the BLA jumped from the back of the truck and began firing with automatic weapons. Sergeant Edward O'Grady, Officer Waverly Brown, and Brinks guard Peter Paige were all killed. Boudin was apprehended. She pleaded guilty to charges of felony murder and armed robbery in exchange for a 20-years-to-life sentence.

While in prison, she earned a master's degree in adult education and has worked on AIDS prevention programs for prisons. With her own son being only one year old in 1981, she also developed a program to help mothers behind bars parent their children. In 2001, at age 58, she had served the minimum 20 years of her sentence and was eligible for parole. On August 22, 2001, she came before the New York Board of Pardons and Paroles and she was denied. Boudin will be eligible for parole again in August 2003.