Charles Manson Dies 45 Years Late — Charles Manson is dead and it’s 45 years too late.
I was eight years old in the summer of 1969 when the Manson cult killed nine innocent people. It horrified me and I’d put my fingers in my ears when the story was reported on the radio.
But as my understanding of the world then came from TV shows where the bad guys would be caught and justice done, I had faith that would happen.
And they did catch the bad guys.
Justice, though, was never done.
Manson and three of his followers — others would be convicted of other murders — were found guilty in 1971 and received the death penalty. The Supreme Court, however, bizarrely ruled the next year that the death penalty as it existed was unconstitutional and commuted all death sentences to life in prison.
And so Manson live to an old age with the cool crowd calling him a hero. Rolling Stone magazine, which hopefully soon goes the way of Manson, portrayed him as a visionary and expressed sympathy for him. Hippie underground newspapers named him Man of the Year. Chic radical Bernadine Dohrn expressed awe and admiration. Ms. Dohrn and her rapey husband Bill Ayers would go on to become Barack Obama’s mentors.
Pop singers adopt his name and his image can still be found on t-shirts.
I really am a fan of Pope Francis but he is dead wrong on the death penalty. The world — and America — would be exponentially better off if that piece of human debris kept his date with the gas chamber 45 years ago.
