N.Y. Panel Rejects Dohrn as Lawyer Candidate

After at least two private hearings, a New York Bar Assn. Character Committee has rejected the application of former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn to become a lawyer.

Dohrn, who reappeared in 1980 after more than a decade as a fugitive and pleaded guilty to reduced charges of aggravated battery and bail-jumping stemming from Chicago’s anti-Vietnam War “Days of Rage” riot in 1969, passed the New York state bar exam last year.

She was graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967. But members of the character committee were reluctant to allow her to practice. Sources said lawyers on the committee were particularly concerned that Dohrn had refused to cooperate in 1982 with a federal grand jury investigating the robbery of a Brink’s armored truck that left two policemen and a Brink’s guard dead. She served seven months in prison before U.S. Judge Gerard L. Goettel ruled in January, 1983, that she “might have been an unwilling facilitator” of the criminal activity in the robbery.

“They (committee members) feel her record since she came back into normal society has not convinced them entirely that she’s really committed to the practice of law,” Harold R. Tyler Jr., one of Dohrn’s lawyers, said Thursday. “She is disappointed. She continues to think she is now qualified and that she presents a good record.”

Dohrn, now married and the mother of three, has been working as a clerk in the Manhattan offices of Sidley & Austin, a large Chicago law firm.