NEW YORK (AP) – A former black separatist imprisoned as the getaway driver in a 1981 armored-truck robbery that left three people dead is facing legal hurdles in her bid for a new trial.

Federal appeals judges in Manhattan on Monday expressed skepticism to lawyers representing Judith Clark, who had insisted on representing herself at her trial and is serving a 75-year prison sentence. At issue is whether a lawyer should have been appointed to help Clark, 56, during her trial.

Clark said the goal of the 1981 heist in suburban Rockland County and other robberies was to finance a Republic of New Afrika consisting of former slave states.

Clark, convicted of three counts of second-degree murder, was charged along with four other people, including since-paroled former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin. The Weather Underground, a 1960s group of increasingly violent anti-war activists, began as the Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.

In awarding a new trial last year, Judge Shira Scheindlin had noted that Clark was “so unwilling to abide by courtroom protocol that she remained in a cell, outside the courtroom, for the entire presentation of the prosecution’s case.”

Clark’s lawyers, Leon Friedman and Lawrence Letterman, asked the appeals panel to uphold Scheindlin’s decision – that the trial judge should not have let her represent herself or should have disallowed it once it became clear that no one would represent her interests during the prosecution.

But 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor countered Monday: “It was her choice. It is one she has lived to regret, but it was her choice.”

Rockland District Attorney Michael Bongiorno said Monday that Clark had left the courtroom voluntarily and made a decision without counsel to waive appeal.

Clark is imprisoned at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center in Westchester County.

In a December 2002 affidavit, she expressed regret for her actions and said she had rejected her past life.

The appeals judges are not expected to rule on her bid for the new trial for weeks or even months.

In the Oct. 20, 1981, robbery, a heavily armed group ambushed a Brink’s armored truck delivering $1.2 million to a Nanuet shopping mall, killing one Brink’s guard and wounding another. Two police officers who stopped Boudin’s van at a roadblock at the Nyack entrance to the New York State Thruway were shot dead.