Protests against compassionate release of Susan Atkins expand

Protests against Susan Atkins’ release request expand

A growing chorus of prosecutors and other critics is urging state prison officials to reject former Charles Manson follower and convicted murderer Susan Atkins’ request for “compassionate release” because of a terminal illness.

A state board will take up the issue today. Corrections officials say the state has spent more than $1.4 million providing medical care and security for Atkins since her diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in March.

The state Board of Parole Hearings has received about 100 letters, most of them opposing her release.

In a letter Friday to the chairman of the parole board, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Atkins’ “horrific crimes alone warrant a denial of her request.”

Cooley said Atkins, 60, was not a good candidate for compassionate release because she had “failed to demonstrate genuine remorse and lacks insight and understanding of the gravity of her crimes.”

Atkins has been in state prison for 37 years, longer than any other female inmate in California, officials said.

Atkins and other members of Manson’s cult were convicted in seven murders during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area over two nights in 1969. Actress Sharon Tate, the wife of film director Roman Polanski, was 8 1/2 months pregnant when she and four others were killed at her hilltop home in Benedict Canyon.

The initial request for release consideration was made by doctors and prison officials after it was determined that Atkins had less than six months to live. Officials at her prison in Chino approved her release, as did officials at corrections headquarters in Sacramento.

“She can’t care for herself, she can’t feed herself or even sit up in bed by herself,” said her attorney, Eric P. Lampel. In addition to the cancer, Atkins had her leg amputated. “The reality is, even if she gets this compassionate release, she won’t leave her hospital room.”

Lampel said his client was not a threat to society and had been a model prisoner for nearly four decades.

“It was a horrific crime; she should have been convicted. She helped. She participated and she got the sentence she got and she fulfilled it,” Lampel said.

The issue has divided two prosecutors in the Tate-La Bianca killings, who had successfully argued for the death penalty before it was temporarily ruled unconstitutional. The killers’ sentences were commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Former prosecutor Stephen R. Kay opposes Atkins’ release. Kay, 65, said he had attended about 60 parole hearings related to the killings over the years and spent a lot of time with the victims’ families, witnessing their suffering.
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But prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi said Monday that he’d provided a declaration for today’s hearing supporting Atkins’ release largely because of her failing health.

Bugliosi said Lampel told him that Atkins had not only lost a leg, but that the other one was paralyzed. In an e-mail to Atkins’ attorney in support of her release, he wrote that the notion that “just because Susan Atkins showed no mercy to her victims, we therefore are duty-bound to follow her inhumanity and show no mercy to her” was wrong, Bugliosi said.

“Mercy is already built into California statutory law, because if it weren’t, we would automatically give the death penalty for every murder case, which we don’t,” he said. “My point is, what mercy are we giving her? It’s not like she has six months to live, and we’re letting her go home and she’s going to have fun with her family.

“My view is that anyone who opposes her request, other than relatives of the seven Tate-La Bianca victims . . . is either being robotic or extremely callous,” Bugliosi said. “The mercy being requested now is almost too minuscule to speak of because she’s in bed and she’s going to die.”

Despite Bugliosi’s view, there has been a growing drumbeat against Atkins’ being released.

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