By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American)
If you want to know why the California Supreme Court’s ruling in 1972 that temporarily stopped the death penalty was such a disaster not only for crime victims but also for justice itself, the state’s Second District Court of Appeal has provided some insight. The court has freed Leslie Van Houten, who murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on August 9, 1969.
Those gruesome murders followed those of Sharon Tate and her friends the night before, an orgy of violence orchestrated and directed by sociopath Charles Manson.
Cort is right about all this, of course, but the average time actually served for first degree murder in California is less than 14 years! Mind-boggling, isn’t it. Leslie Van Houten thus served well more than triple the time of most other first degree murderers and, unlike most of those other murderers, she could make a case for leniency–she was a drug-addled girl under the Svengali influence of Charlie Manson.