Hillary Clinton stammered when asked whether she would apologize for her support for the 1994 crime bill as Bernie Sanders accused her of using a “racist term.”
CNN’s moderator opened the question by saying Chelsea Clinton said the Democratic front-runner had apologized for the crime bill, now blamed for entrenching mass incarceration with a disparate impact on minorities. But when challenged to do so publicly, she stopped just short.
Clinton acknowledged that she was sorry for some of the crime bill’s negative “unintended” consequences, but said, “My husband signed, Sen. Sanders voted for it.”
Sanders, reeling from a tense exchange on gun control, then hit her for using the term “superpredator” while supporting the bill during the 1990s.
“It was a racist term and everybody knew it was a racist term,” he said calmly, eliciting cheers from the crowd.
“Superpredator” was a term used by then Princeton professor John DiIulio, Jr. to describe a small subset of criminals he said were committing a large number of violent crimes.
