David Gilbert (born October 6, 1944) is an American radical leftist who participated in the deadly 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored vehicle. Gilbert was a founder of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became a member of the Weather Underground. Gilbert, who served as the getaway driver in the robbery, was convicted under New York's felony murder law in the killing by co-defendants of two Nyack, New York police officers and a Brink's security guard. Gilbert received a grant of clemency from Governor Andrew Cuomo on August 23, 2021, reducing his minimum term from 75 years to 40, thereby making him eligible for conditional release. He was granted parole on October 26, 2021, and released on November 4, 2021. Early life and education Gilbert grew up in a Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was an Explorer Scout, and his father was Post Leader, of a South Brookline Explorer Post. Inspired in his teens by the Greensboro sit-ins and other events of the Civil Rights Movement, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality at age seventeen. He entered Columbia College of Columbia University in 1962. In March 1965, Gilbert founded the Independent Committee on Vietnam (ICV) at Columbia. Later, in the same year, he co-founded the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which merged with ICV in the Fall of 1966, even though there was already an SDS chapter established at Columbia, formed in the early 1960s. The SDS chapter founded by Gilbert became renowned. He traveled regularly to Harlem while working as a tutor, and saw Malcolm X speak at Barnard College in February 1965, experiences he describes as formative. Gilbert was one of the attendees at the Flint War Council known to the FBI. Career After graduating from Columbia University in June 1966, Gilbert spent most of his days and evenings during the fall of 1967 downtown, attending graduate school at the New School for Social Research, building an SDS chapter there, or attending meetings at the New York SDS Regional Office. In addition, Gilbert spent his spare time studying Karl Marx's Das Kapital and writing New Left theoretical papers on imperialism and U.S. domestic consumption, consumerism and "the new working-class". At Columbia, the SDS expanded during the Spring 1967 term. Gilbert returned to the Columbia campus to offer a "radical education counter-course" for Columbia