Ok people,. I know its a few days old but I've been wanting to get feedback on this and I kept forgetting about it.

Susan Atkins, Manson Follower, Dies

Filed at 7:42 p.m. ET

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Susan Atkins, a member of the Charles Manson
''family'' who admitted ruthlessly stabbing pregnant actress Sharon
Tate to death in the cult's 1969 murder spree, has died in prison less
than a month after a parole board turned down a bid for compassionate
release. She was 61 and had brain cancer.

Atkins, who eventually came to call the crimes a sin, died late Thursday, according to the California Department of Corrections.

Corrections
spokeswoman Terry Thornton said that at the time of Atkins' death she
had been in prison longer than any woman currently incarcerated in
California.

Atkins' final chance at freedom was denied on Sept.
2. Terminally ill, she was brought to a parole board hearing on a
gurney and slept through most of it, but managed to recite religious
verse with the help of her husband, attorney James Whitehouse.

Atkins
was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008, had a leg amputated and was
given only a few months to live. She underwent brain surgery, and in
her last months was paralyzed and had difficulty speaking.

She
had been transferred to a skilled nursing facility at the California
Central Women's Facility at Chowchilla exactly one year before she died.

Tate, the 26-year-old actress who appeared in the movie ''Valley of the Dolls'' and was the wife of famed director Roman Polanski, was one of seven people murdered in two Los Angeles homes during the Manson cult's bloody rampage in August 1969.

Atkins
was the first of the convicted killers to die. Manson and three others
involved in the murders -- Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and
Charles ''Tex'' Watson -- remain imprisoned under life sentences.

Atkins,
who confessed from the witness stand during her trial, had apologized
for her acts numerous times over the years. But 40 years after the
murders, she learned that few had forgotten or forgiven what she and
other members of the cult had done.

Debra Tate, the slain
actress' younger sister, told the parole commissioners Sept. 2 that she
''will pray for (Atkins') soul when she draws her last breath, but
until then I think she should remain in this controlled situation.''
Debra Tate noted that she would have a 40-year-old nephew if her sister
had lived.

Atkins' prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had spoken out
earlier in favor of release, saying the mercy requested was
''minuscule'' because Atkins was on her deathbed.

Atkins and her
co-defendants were originally sentenced to death but their sentences
were reduced to life in prison when capital punishment was briefly
outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s.

During
the sensational 10-month trial, Atkins, Manson and co-defendants
Krenwinkel and Van Houten maintained their innocence. But once they
were convicted, the so-called ''Manson girls'' confessed in graphic
detail.

They tried to absolve Manson, the ex-convict who had
gathered a ''family'' of dropouts and runaways to a ranch outside Los
Angeles, where he cast himself as the Messiah and led them in an
aberrant lifestyle fueled by drugs and communal sex.

Watson had a separate trial and was convicted.

One
night in August 1969, Manson dispatched Atkins and others to a wealthy
residential section of Los Angeles, telling them, as they recalled, to
''do something witchy.''

They went to the home of Tate and her
husband. He was not home, but Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and
four others were killed. ''Pigs'' was scrawled on a door in blood.

The
next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife were found stabbed to death
in their home across town. ''Helter Skelter'' was written in blood on
the refrigerator.

''I was stoned, man, stoned on acid,'' Atkins testified during the trial's penalty phase.

''I
don't know how many times I stabbed (Tate) and I don't know why I
stabbed her,'' she said. ''She kept begging and pleading and begging
and pleading and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her.''

She
said she felt ''no guilt for what I've done. It was right then and I
still believe it was right.'' Asked how it could be right to kill, she
replied in a dreamy voice, ''How can it not be right when it's done
with love?''

The matronly, gray-haired Atkins who appeared before
a parole board in 2000 cut a far different figure than that of the
****y young defendant some 30 years earlier.

''I don't have to
just make amends to the victims and families,'' she said softly. ''I
have to make amends to society. I sinned against God and everything
this country stands for.'' She said she had found redemption in
Christianity.

The last words she spoke in public at the September
hearing were to say in unison with her husband: ''My God is an amazing
God.''

She spent 37 years in the California Institution for Women
at Frontera. When she fell ill, she was moved to a medical unit at the
Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She died there.

Susan
Denise Atkins was born May 7, 1948, in the Los Angeles suburb of San
Gabriel. Her mother was stricken with cancer and died when she was 15.
Her father, reportedly an alcoholic, sent her and her brother to live
with relatives.

While still in her teens, she ran away to San
Francisco where she wound up dancing in a topless bar and using drugs.
She moved into a commune in the Haight Ashbury district and it was
there that she met Manson.

He gave her a cult name, Sadie Mae
Glutz, and, when she became pregnant by a ''family'' member, he helped
deliver the baby boy, naming it Zezozoze Zadfrack. His whereabouts are
unknown.

The Manson slayings remained unsolved for three months,
until Atkins confessed to a cellmate following her arrest on an
unrelated charge. Police found Manson and other cult members living in
a ranch commune in Death Valley, outside Los Angeles.

Besides
Tate, their other victims were celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring,
coffee heiress Abigail Folger, filmmaker Voityck Frykowski and Steven
Parent, a friend of Tate's caretaker; and grocery owners Leno and
Rosemary LaBianca. Atkins also was convicted with Manson of still
another murder, of musician Gary Hinman, in July 1969.

Atkins
married twice while in prison. Her first husband, Donald Lee Laisure,
purported to be an eccentric Texas millionaire. They quickly divorced.
Whitehouse, her second husband, is a Harvard Law School graduate and had recently served as one of her attorneys.

------

EDITOR'S
NOTE -- Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch, the AP's trial reporter
for 40 years, covered the Manson Family trial.

www.nytimes.com/aponline/.../AP-US-Obit-Manson-Follower.html

so what do you think? Should she have been granted parole considering the horrendous context of her crime? Or was it a right decision to deny her parole as a legitimate punishment for her barbaric act? Say her parole was granted....how would that reflect on our justice system and would that do justice to the families of the victims? 
Your opinions pleasseee.....