The law requires that every death penalty sentence be reviewed by way of appeal. This is why sentencing someone to death is more expensive that sentencing them to life in prison.
4. I still wonder about Manson being guilty. Not that he was respectable public citizen # 1, but to base his conviction on the testimony of a 23 year old, college educated, young mom (Linda Kasabian), with her whole good life ahead of her, who was given the choice of life imprisonment, doesn't strike me as exactly valid-prone.
If I remember the 1969 Manson murders in Los Angeles, Linda Kasabian broke the case along with Lynette "Squeeky" Fromme, naming Tex Watson and the other participants in the Sharon Tate, etal murders, and the fact that Charlie Manson, head of their "family" had sent them to that house on Cileo Drive that evening to commit murder. Two night's later, Manson, according to those who talked, sent them up into the Hollywood Hills again, to kill, this time Abigail Folger, heir to the Folger Coffee fortune. Manson remained on the roadway in the car they drove up there with, and instructed the girls to "do something whitchy" - so one of the girls (forget her name, the one who is the model prisoner), carved the word "PIG" into the ladies belly as she stabbed her to death repeatedly. She has always claimed she can't remember how many times she stabbed the late Mrs. Folger.
Manson drove the car to the home, sent his killers out into the night, was about 30-yards away from the murder scene, and issued the instructions, making him just as guilty as those who conducted the actual killing's. Have to go back and read Vince Bugliose's book about the murder's, but none of them is ever being paroled - one has already died in prison - the rest will also. Charles Manson is as crazy as a rat in a tin outhouse, and has so far spent 46-years in jail, and probably will spend at least another 20 before he passes away in that cell. I like the idea of that crazy monkey brattling day and night locked in his cell, about the world coming to an end, and other nonsense. America can afford to keep him locked up for as long as he has a final breath in his body - which he will probably use to spit at his "hanglers" - err - guards.
It was the crime that ended the crazy, hippie culture, free love, make love not war, drug culture of America. It scared the entire nation, and when America saw all those nice, attractive, wealthy white kids, being brought into custody for those horrendous murder's, from affluent families, not ghetto criminal blacks preying on one another, but white kids murdering in the most horrendous manner - for sport - we started locking our doors all across the country - and law enforcement began to slam down hard on the youth drug culture, worse than the Chicago Police had at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where the cops got in all their "stick time" on the hippies and flower children protesting. The Manson Murders, as they are known, are a signature moment in American history, when the country stood back, stunned at what their children were capable of, and demanded the war on drugs in America be carried out by Law Enforcement and prosecutor's to the fullest.
All were sentenced to death for the crime's, however, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment statutes at the time were unfairly enforced across the nation, and most states could not enforce them, without passing new capital punishment laws, therefore the Manson's, along with all other's on death row at the time, had their sentences commuted to life in prison. It would have been a Constitutional violation of Double Jeopardy to retry them under new state statutes, so they remain rotting in prison - and that will always make me happy - as, like all American's, those murder's chilled my bones, and still do..........
