She defended him because she was appointed by the Judge to defend him. According to the prosecuting attorney she contacted him saying she did not want the case. He goes on to say
Quote:I told her "Well contact the judge and see what he says about it,"but I also said don't jump on him and make him mad", Gibson said. “She contacted the judge and the judge didn't remove her and she stayed on the case."
Documents from the 1975 case include an affidavit (p. 34) sworn by Clinton, from which the "in court, Hillary told the judge that I made up the rape story" portion of the claims was derived. That affidavit doesn't show, as claimed, that Hillary Clinton asserted the defendant "made up the rape story because [she] enjoyed fantasizing about men"; rather, it shows that other people, including an expert in child psychology, had said that the complainant was "emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing about persons, claiming they had attacked her body," and that "children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences." Clinton therefore asked the court to have the complainant undergo a psychiatric exam (at the defense's expense) to determine the validity of that information.
What she did do was her job. She was legally and ethically required to provide her client with the best defence she could.
She did audibly laugh or chuckle at points, not about "knowing that the defendant was guilty" or "getting a guilty guy off" (which makes little sense, given that the defendant pled guilty) but rather while musing about how elements of the case that might ordinarily have supported the prosecution worked in the defendant's favor (i.e., observing that the defendant's passing a polygraph test had "forever destroyed her faith" in that technology)