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The latest urban legend about Sen. Hillary Clinton has drawn the attention of fact-checkers everywhere. The presidential candidate, it is alleged, helped defend Black Panthers accused of murder.

Politifact quotes the version of the e-mail it has seen:

“Hillary’s main extracurricular activity in law school was helping the Black Panthers, on trial in Connecticut for torturing and killing a federal agent. She went to court every day as part of a law student monitoring committee trying to spot civil rights violations and develop grounds for appeal.”

And Snopes.com, the legendary urban legends reference page, notes this sentence on another version of the e-mail: "This is proven true by SNOPES.COM." The only problem? That's not true.

So what happened?

Politifact explains:

In 1970, eight Black Panthers, including its national chairman Bobby Seale, were brought to trial in New Haven, Conn., on charges of murdering a fellow member, Alex Rackley, who was suspected of being a police informant. He was not a federal agent.

Clinton, a Yale Law School student a the time, played a “minor” role in the doings that year, said Paul Bass, a journalist who spent years researching the Black Panther case for a book he co-authored called Murder in the Model City. She co-chaired a committee whose main role was to prevent violence at a May Day demonstration, he said.

Clinton’s committee also offered legal advice to demonstrators who got arrested and to monitor the trial for civil rights abuses, Bass said.

But if that civil-rights monitoring ever happened, said two sources interviewed by the St. Petersburg Times, one thing is certain: Clinton was not an every-day trial watcher, as Morris claims. Nor did she “help” the defense.

Snopes.com adds:

Hillary Rodham (as she was known then) wasn't a lawyer then, either. She was a Yale law student, and like many of her politically-minded fellow law students who saw the latest "Trial of the Century" taking place right in their back yard, she took advantage of an opportunity to be involved in a minor, peripheral way by organizing other students to help the American Civil Liberties Union monitor the trial for civil rights violations. In any case, her tangential participation in the trial in no way helped "free" the two Black Panthers tried for the murder of Alex Rackley: they went free because the state failed to sufficiently prove its case, and after several days of deliberation the jury was unable to reach a verdict. The charges were dimissed, and the state declined to retry either Bobby Seale or Ericka Huggins.

So: Hillary Clinton defended Black Panthers. Truth or not?