Editorial: What O.J. Simpson can teach us about parole

The marathon murder trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995 educated a generation of Americans about the criminal justice system. Now it’s time for O.J. The Sequel, as the former football star faces a Nevada parole hearing in a bid to win release after serving nine years of a 33-year sentence for robbery and kidnapping. Why not take the opportunity to bone up on the nation’s sometimes mysterious parole system?

The first thing to remember when getting ready to watch Simpson’s live televised hearing (10 a.m. Thursday) is that the proceedings have nothing to do with either the murder case, which ended in his acquittal, or the lawsuit that found him civilly liable in 1997 for the wrongful death of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Simpson is in prison because he was convicted in 2008 of robbery and kidnapping for joining with others to take sports memorabilia by force in a Las Vegas hotel room. He said he thought the items belonged to him and was trying to get them back.

Robbery and kidnapping are crimes of violence, hence the long sentence. But under Nevada law Simpson remains eligible for parole. The four-person parole commission’s charge is to consider whether Simpson has obeyed prison rules and whether his release would pose a threat to public safety.

That’s not how it works in every state, or for every crime. Some states require evidence of rehabilitation beyond staying out of trouble behind bars. Others — including, at times, California — have moved up parole dates in order to alleviate crowding.

Although the qualifications for parole vary, the purpose is generally the same from state to state: to give offenders an opportunity to demonstrate that they can abide by the rules of society while being supervised by a parole agent. That allows parolees to reintegrate into normal life and regain a measure of liberty while complying with strict rules of conduct. It also gives inmates an incentive to stay out of trouble while in prison.

Californians may be most familiar with parole from the steady stream of stories about a particularly notorious cohort of violent offenders from the late 1960s and early 1970s coming up for parole and, almost inevitably, being denied. Sirhan Sirhan (the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy), Charles Manson and members of Manson’s “family” had their death sentences commuted to life when the state’s death penalty was struck down in court in 1972. (The state at that time had no sentence of life without parole.)

If the shooting victim at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 had been a regular guest rather than a U.S. senator, a presidential candidate and the brother of an assassinated president, wouldn’t Sirhan have been paroled long ago? If the Manson murders hadn’t carved such an emotional scar into a generation’s psyche, wouldn’t Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and all the rest have been released?

Perhaps. Parole should not be tougher — or easier — for inmates to obtain because of their fame or notoriety, and that goes for Simpson as well as the others.

A murder conviction is an important distinction. The Times opposed even compassionate release for Atkins, who later died in prison of cancer. The Times also opposed release for Gregory Powell, the killer of a police officer in what became known as the “onion field” murder. On the contrary, it supported parole for three kidnappers who had served more than 30 years in prison in the notorious 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping of a busload of school children.

There are many vexing questions about parole, punishment, justice and mercy, and Californians will be grappling with many of them in coming months as regulations are considered to implement Proposition 57, last year’s landmark parole reform ballot measure.

Other states are also attempting to reform their parole systems, including Connecticut, the subject of a fascinating episode this week of PBS’ Frontline and companion reporting in the New York Times. The project brushes past the actual parole hearing and instead shows the gritty reality of life on parole, the role of drug addiction in a typical case, and the struggle of state justice officials to change the focus of a parole system that for years prioritized “violating” parolees rather than helping them to succeed. The program and stories are worthy counterparts to Thursday’s live broadcast of O.J. The Sequel.

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