Gotta' go with Bob on this one.
If you murder a 78 year old woman, ideally, you should be put to death. I favor public hangings, but I guess we have to do lethal injection now.
Under no circumstances is 26 years in prison an appropriate period of time to spend in prison for murdering an old woman...
Again, it's twice what most murderers serve. I will even go so far to say what he did was worse than what that cop in Chicago or that cop in Dallas did.
If you are going to say, "It doesn't matter how hard you work to reform yourself, it doesn't matter how well behaved in prison you are, you have NO HOPE of parole or clemency", then what incentive do we have for prisoners to behave well?
Clearly, we are not going to start doing mass executions. We only execute 20 people a year, and we've still managed to put hundreds of innocent people on death row by mistake.