The death of 83-year-old Charles Manson reminds us of two things, among others: It is usually a fallacy to believe that life in America in the recent past was somehow better than it is at present. And second, punishment for the crime of murder is not always the same as justice.
In Manson’s case, it is probably fair to say that his half-century imprisonment was as close to justice as our fallible system provides. I don’t know whether Manson was “evil,” as many seem to believe, and deserved to die as he was sentenced to do before California suspended its death penalty in 1972. But in my nonprofessional view, Manson was manifestly insane; and while insanity is an explanation but no excuse for his crimes, I remain uncomfortable with the idea of a madman being put to death by the state. At the same time, California had every right and responsibility to keep Manson under lock and key—which should have included a ban on media interviews—until he died in old age. So justice was done, more or less.
In the meantime, two ancillary subjects intrigue me about his case. First, why did the Manson Family murders attract such attention and lodge so firmly in the public consciousness? People who weren’t born when the crimes took place (1969) are well aware of Manson and can probably name one or two of his accomplices. I don’t mean to diminish the memory of the seven innocents—Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate—whose lives were so viciously taken on two separate nights in Los Angeles. But how many can name the murderers of the concertgoers killed in Las Vegas in October or the Orlando nightclub patrons shot to death just last year?
The Manson murders are in a category of their own. The sheer arbitrary and protracted horror of the stabbings and stranglings was not unprecedented in human experience but was surely uncommon in mid-20th-century America, especially given the random nature of the bloodbaths in comfortable neighborhoods in a large metropolitan area.
Yet it was the character of the perpetrators, the sinister Manson and his roving band of misfits and lost souls, that struck a chord at the time of their apprehension. If there was ever any romance attached to the counterculture of the late 1960s—to the supposedly gentle hippies and the Summer of Love and “long beautiful hair” in the words of the Broadway celebration of the same—these wandering psychopaths who reveled in their cruelty and outlier status cast a shadow on what was left. And of course, the fact that the crimes occurred in L.A., the neon city of dreams, where movies and television shows are made, only added to the mystique.
That was the crime; the other subject is the punishment. It is an axiom of our legal system that some crimes, including homicides, are more equal than others, including other homicides. Assaults on the political order, for example, are treated with especial severity, which is why Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert Kennedy (1968), will undoubtedly die in prison, and why Lynette Fromme—who combined membership in the Manson Family with pointing a loaded gun at Gerald Ford (1975)—spent the next 34 years behind bars before being paroled. The notoriety of a murder, especially its grip on public sentiment, has much to do with how murderers are punished and for how long.
Retribution plays a role as well. Justice is blind, theoretically; but the fact that the popular ex-football player/celebrity O.J. Simpson escaped conviction for a double murder most people believe he committed explains his recent imprisonment for nine years on comparatively minor charges. That is why very nearly a half-century since the Manson killings his surviving associates remain incarcerated.
Now that Manson is dead, however, their status—in particular, the status of 68-year-old Leslie Van Houten—may be worth pondering. Those who were initially sentenced to death escaped execution by the grace of California’s protracted debate about capital punishment. But Van Houten’s conviction, and seven-years-to-life sentence nearly a decade after the murders, followed a series of legal miscues, including the death of her trial counsel and a deadlocked jury. For what it’s worth, she was absent when the actress Sharon Tate and four others were murdered, and the nature of Van Houten’s culpability in the separate LaBianca killings is ambiguous. Legally, of course, that’s a moot point: She was present, participated in some measure, was convicted of the LaBiancas’ murder, and correctly so.
But five decades later, it seems reasonable to question the purpose of her continued imprisonment. And since Van Houten has been twice recommended for parole by California’s commissioners, most recently in September, it is equally reasonable to ask what Governor Jerry Brown meant when he declared (as he did in 2016) that Van Houten poses “an unacceptable risk to society.” Manifestly, she does not: She has consistently shown remorse for her actions, takes responsibility for her crimes, and has served for decades as a model prisoner.
This is not intended to minimize her past conduct or dismiss the suffering of her victims and the pain of their families and friends. But to the extent that justice is proportional, or connected to moral reckoning, it appears in this instance to be imbalanced.
Especially when compared to an earlier, and equally notorious, example. Like the Manson killings, the 1924 Loeb-Leopold case—in which two rich post-adolescent Chicago prodigies murdered a schoolboy-friend for the thrill of doing so—transfixed America at the dawn of the age of mass media. Their attorney, the famous criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, managed to avert death sentences; but while Richard Loeb was stabbed to death in prison a decade later, his partner Nathan Leopold taught fellow inmates, organized a prison library, volunteered for medical experiments, and, perhaps most important, made no excuse for his crime.
His remorseful memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, might well have been self-serving and cynical, as critics suggested; but I am not so sure. When, in 1958, Leopold was paroled, he retreated to the penitential obscurity he craved and, after 34 years in prison, had probably earned.
