In 2022, at 66, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. asked for compassionate release. He was in a Texas prison for six murders committed in 1973, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would not say what was wrong with him. It cited medical privacy. The department decided not to forward his case to the parole board for medical review, KHOU reported, and the matter ended there. The family of one of the dead boys put out a statement: "He does not deserve to have any compassion for his illness."
Requests of this kind reach their audience in a strange way. The prisoner asks for mercy on the grounds of his body. The people who answer, and the people who write to oppose him, are thinking about someone else’s. A family that has gone to parole hearings for fifty years has not forgotten who died, and a prison doctor who has watched a man fail for a decade is not asked to remember the victim. Between the two sit a prison agency, a parole board, a trial judge, a ministry and a court-appointed medical examiner, and which of them holds the key depends on the country and the year.
Some of the people who asked were dying. Susan Atkins was. Raymond Morris had kidney failure and leukemia. Others were not. The medical report that took Richard Choque out of a Bolivian prison listed gastritis, an ulcer and diabetes, and the justice minister later said none of them threatened his life. Elmer Henley’s illness has never been made public. Joseph Naso, 91 and in a prison hospital after breaking a hip, has not been described by any authority as dying. Each request is told below as it was made: what it asked, who decided, and what happened.
Henley was 17 on the morning of August 8, 1973, when he telephoned police in Pasadena, Texas, to say that Dean Corll, 33, an employee of the Houston electric company, was dead. The case became known as the Houston Mass Murders. Police described Corll as the leader of the killings and Henley and a second teenager, David Owen Brooks, as his procurers. Henley admitted that he had brought boys to Corll for money. He was convicted of six murders: those of Frank Aguirre, Johnny Delone, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Homer Garcia and Billy Lawrence, three of them minors. A San Antonio jury convicted him in July 1974, and he received six consecutive 99-year sentences, reported as 594 years in all. The verdict was reversed in December 1978, and at a retrial in June 1979 he was convicted again and given six life sentences. Authorities ruled Corll’s death self-defense.
Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the Texas Observer noted. At the time of the crimes and the first trial the death penalty had been halted nationally and in Texas, and Texas had not yet created a sentence of life without parole, KPRC reported in 2025. That gap has meant that the families of the victims have had to prepare for parole hearings, and to oppose them, again and again. Brooks was convicted in March 1975 of the murder of Billy Lawrence and sentenced to life; he died in May 2020 in a Galveston hospital of COVID-19, still serving his sentence.
Henley has been refused parole every time. Andy Kahan, the victims' advocate at Crime Stoppers of Houston, has said that he has come up 25 times. The families have written to the board each time his case or Brooks’s came up, and have met board members in person. "I want to see him stay there until he dies, personally," the father of Stanton Dreymala, Corll’s last known victim, said in 2011, after a parole panel turned down Brooks. In October 2015 the board denied Henley and set his next review for October 2025. KHOU reported that he was the first prisoner whose hearing was pushed back under a Texas law allowing the board to wait up to ten years between reviews.
The 2022 request came between those dates. Henley asked, on medical grounds, for compassionate release. Families received letters about it, the Texas Observer reported, and the prison agency declined to discuss his health, citing medical privacy. The agency then decided not to send his case on for medical parole review. That was the whole decision: it was made inside the prison system, and it was not a vote of the board.
His regular review came in the autumn of 2025. On November 7, 2025, KPRC reported that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had again denied parole and given him a 10-year set-off, so that his case will not be considered again for about a decade. He was 69. Kahan, speaking for more than 25 victims' families, thanked the board. "Henley deprived over 20 boys of their lives and all we can do in return is deprive him of his liberty," he said; Henley was convicted of six. Stanton Dreymala’s mother described the sleepless nights before each hearing. "I don’t feel he deserves to ever be free," she said. His father said they would keep going to the hearings "till the day we die." KPRC described the couple as believed to be the last surviving parents of the victims.
Susan Atkins, a member of the group around Charles Manson who was convicted in the murders of 1969, is the one case here in which the facts are short and the outcome is not in doubt. The California parole board refused her request for compassionate release in 2008. She died of brain cancer in a prison hospital in Chowchilla on September 24, 2009, aged 61, three weeks after her twelfth parole denial, ABC News reported. No reason for the refusal was made public.
Faye Copeland was 69 when a jury in Chillicothe, Missouri, convicted her in November 1990 of five counts of first-degree murder. The dead were five transient men hired by her husband, Ray, to buy cattle with checks that were not good; prosecutors said he killed each man before the checks could be traced to him. There was no evidence that Faye Copeland killed anyone herself. The state’s case was that she was an accomplice, and the jury agreed, recommending death on four counts and life without parole on one. She was described as the oldest woman on death row in the United States. Ray Copeland was convicted separately and sentenced to death; he died in prison in 1993, at 78.
The federal courts set her death sentences aside. A district court upheld the convictions on August 4, 1999 but held the penalty phase constitutionally flawed because of the prosecutor’s closing argument and her lawyers' failure to object. "Although the evidence of petitioner’s guilt was strong, the case for the death penalty was rather weak," the court wrote, as the Eighth Circuit later quoted it. The Eighth Circuit affirmed on November 30, 2000. In May 2001 a judge sentenced her to life without parole and turned down her lawyer’s request that she be released for the time already served. At that hearing she said, "I think I’ve paid for what I did or what I knew."
On August 10, 2002, she had a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, her son told reporters. She was paroled on a Friday a couple of weeks later, because of a severe medical condition, a Department of Corrections spokesman said, and moved to a nursing facility. She was 81. Missouri law, the Missourinet report explained, lets the parole board release a prisoner serving life without parole who is terminally ill or has a condition that cannot be treated in prison. The board’s chairman told the station that the board defines terminal as having about six months to live and also weighs the prisoner’s mobility and whether the prison system can care for the illness, and that it does not grant medical parole easily. Who applied has not been reported.
Faye Copeland died of natural causes at the nursing facility in Chillicothe, where she had been living on medical parole, the Associated Press reported on December 31, 2003. The Livingston County coroner gave the cause as natural. She was 82. She had been out of prison for about sixteen months. Her case is the clearest example of the route that works: a medical event, a board with a stated test, and a prisoner whose role in the crime the courts had already described as a lesser one.
Between 1975 and 1979, seven young women were killed in and around Auxerre, the main town of the Yonne department in Burgundy. Most of them rode to their day institutions on a bus driven by the same man, Émile Louis. In March 2001 the Inspectorate General of Judicial Services, in a report signed by Jean-Louis Nadal, called the handling of the case a failure of the prosecution service, the product of a series of negligent acts that together amounted to an institutional breakdown. By then Louis had been arrested in Draguignan, in the Var, on December 12, 2000, and charged two days later with abduction and unlawful detention. In custody he admitted the seven killings. He later retracted the confession.
In 2004 he was convicted of the murders, with other charges, and sentenced to life imprisonment with an 18-year minimum term. The Paris appeal assize court confirmed the verdict in 2006. He was held at Ensisheim prison in the Haut-Rhin department. By October 2013 he was 79, and his lawyer, Alain Fraitag, described his general condition as deteriorating, citing repeated falls and a loss of at least 20 kilograms. He had applied to have his sentence suspended on health grounds, and a medical examination was due within days.
It never took place in time. On October 14, 2013, he was moved from Ensisheim to the secure hospital unit in Nancy. He died there in October 2013, before the doctors reported, and Fraitag confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse. No decision on the request was reported. In the case of Émile Louis, the outcome was not a refusal or a grant. It was a procedure that moved more slowly than the illness.
Joseph Naso was 77 and a freelance photographer when Marin County detectives arrested him in South Lake Tahoe in April 2011 and charged him with four murders. In August 2013, after a two-month trial in which he acted as his own lawyer, a Marin County jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Roxene Roggasch, 18, in 1977; Carmen Colon, 22, in 1978; Pamela Parsons, 38, in 1993; and Tracy Tafoya, 31, in 1994, with the special circumstance of multiple murder. He denied killing anyone. "I dated, I danced, I took pictures, but I don’t kill people, and there’s no evidence of that," he told the jury. On September 17, 2013, after less than five hours of deliberation, the jury recommended death. On November 22, 2013, Judge Andrew Sweet followed the recommendation, sentencing him to death for the murders of Colon, Parsons and Tafoya and to life without parole for the murder of Roggasch. Naso said again that he was not guilty.
He was later moved from San Quentin’s death row to the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. In September 2025, at 91, he called Dan Noyes of ABC7 from the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, a prison hospital. He said he had broken his hip after another prisoner pushed over his wheelchair, that he could not walk or stand, and that he spent most of his time in bed. He said he had written to a celebrity in May 2025 asking for help with a compassionate release. No filing, hearing or decision has been reported, and no authority has said that he is dying. His automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court was still pending. "This trial should be reversed. And my sentence should be reversed," he told Noyes.
This is the least formal request of the eight. A man under a death sentence, who maintains his innocence and is pursuing an appeal, wrote to a public figure who has not been named. Nothing is known to have come of the letter.
Raymond Leslie Morris was convicted of one murder. On February 18, 1969, a jury at Stafford Assizes convicted him of killing Christine Darby, a seven-year-old girl from Walsall, with other charges. He was a foreman engineer and a married man. Mr. Justice Ashworth sentenced him to life imprisonment. His appeal was dismissed in November 1969. The Express & Star in Wolverhampton, the paper that covered the case from start to finish, has repeatedly called him the prime suspect in the deaths of two other girls in 1965 and 1966. He was never charged with either, and he denied every one of them to the end of his life.
He was refused parole in 1999. From 2000 he was held at HMP Wymott, near Preston in Lancashire, where he lived a solitary and largely anonymous life among much younger prisoners. By the time he died he was one of the oldest-serving prisoners in Britain. The Criminal Cases Review Commission refused to refer his case in June 2010; a judicial review was dismissed by Mr. Justice Simon on February 7, 2011; and he dropped a plan to go to the European Court of Human Rights in April 2011. The Express & Star reported in February 2011 that he would die in prison.
He had lived a healthy life in prison until 2011, when the first signs of kidney failure and chronic myeloid leukemia appeared. Over the next three years he had blood transfusions, a biopsy and regular dialysis. In June 2012 he instructed a solicitor to apply for his release on compassionate grounds, but the papers were never filed. He asked staff not to resuscitate him if his heart or breathing stopped. Why the application was not lodged has not been reported.
In July 2013 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled that prisoners serving whole-life terms should be entitled to have their sentences reviewed, the Express & Star reported, and the paper said that the ruling could in principle allow Morris to seek release. Maureen Freeman, by then 69 and a district councillor in Cannock, who had worked on the original inquiry and had seen Morris in court in 1969, called the ruling a disgrace and said it showed a total disregard for the victims of murder. "I have never seen a man with such cold and calculating eyes," she said. In February 2014 the Court of Appeal in London ruled that whole-life sentences could continue to be imposed for the most serious crimes. The Express & Star reported that the ruling confirmed Morris would die in prison. He died within weeks, at HMP Preston, Lancashire, on March 11, 2014, aged 84, after almost 45 years in custody.
His is the case of a request that never became a request. A solicitor was instructed; no application reached any decision-maker. The only rulings on his future that the record contains are general ones, issued to others, that were read in his case as bearing on him.
Richard Choque Flores was serving 30 years without the right to a pardon, the longest term in Bolivian law, when a judge in La Paz granted him 18 months of house arrest on December 24, 2019. He had been convicted in 2015 of the kidnapping and murder of Blanca Rubi Limachi, a 20-year-old university student, in 2013. The release rested on a medical report describing incurable illnesses.
On December 24, 2019, during the courts' end-of-year recess, his request reached Rafael Alcon Aliaga, the judge of the First Criminal Enforcement Court of La Paz, who was the judge on duty. Justice Minister Ivan Lima said Alcon granted it within three days, in a process that normally takes more than a month. Alcon relied on Law 2298, Bolivia’s sentence enforcement law, which lets prisoners with incurable, terminal illnesses serve the rest of a sentence outside prison. The medical assessment Choque submitted listed liver disease, chronic gastritis, a peptic ulcer, diabetes and bronchial asthma, according to the La Paz prosecutor’s office. It was prepared by a doctor who had previously worked for the prosecution service. Los Tiempos reported that Alcon cited a report saying Choque had incurable conditions and acknowledged that it did not show they were terminal. After his recapture Choque himself said, from Chonchocoro prison, that no doctor had ever examined him and that the document used to free him had been falsified, Los Tiempos reported. The doctor who was said to have treated him was arrested.
Prosecutors said the release should never have been possible. The La Paz departmental prosecutor, William Alave, said the judge "did not take into account the final sentence of 30 years of prison without the right to a pardon," which barred Choque from any benefit under Law 2298. Lima put it more bluntly: in three days this judge "grants freedom to a femicide who had no right to leave prison for a single day."
The supervision ordered with the release did not happen, according to Lima. The quarterly checks by a social worker were not carried out, and the file was never sent on to the enforcement court in El Alto that had jurisdiction over Choque’s address. The president of Bolivia’s Supreme Court of Justice, Ricardo Torres, told Correo del Sur that Choque had stopped signing the prosecution’s control book by late 2020 and that he stayed free after the 18 months ran out.
While he was out, two teenage girls died in El Alto, the city next to La Paz: Lucy, 17, in May 2021, and Iris Maylin, 15, in August 2021. Police arrested Choque again in January 2022. He admitted the two killings, and investigators established that his cousin, Fidel Lecon Choque, had been killed in 2011. Police said he had used a fake social media profile to contact 77 women and girls. Choque was convicted of the femicide of Lucy on March 2, 2022, of the murder of his cousin, and of the femicide of Iris on September 30, 2022, each with a 30-year sentence. In March 2023 he received a fifth sentence, of 15 years, for human trafficking and other charges involving the two girls. Bolivian law has no cumulative sentences, and a prosecutor said in September 2022 that he must stay in prison until September 2052.
The release became a national scandal within days of his recapture. In a social media post reported by Los Tiempos on January 28, 2022, President Luis Arce wrote that his government repudiated and condemned "the decision of the judge who freed the femicide" and demanded "an exemplary punishment with the full weight of the law." The Supreme Court of Justice announced a criminal complaint against Alcon and two other judges the same day. Alcon was arrested in late January 2022, when he went to the criminal investigation police in La Paz to give a statement. He defended his decision to local reporters, saying that Choque "met certain requirements" and that the measure was only for 18 months. A La Paz anti-corruption court ordered him held in pretrial detention for six months. In January 2023 prosecutors asked for ten years for the former judge; Los Tiempos reported in February 2025 that he had left prison and was serving house arrest.
The government created a review commission on February 1, 2022, with members from the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and gave it 120 days to review sentences dating back to 2013, Télam reported. Within weeks, six convicted people released by three judges had been recaptured, and the Consejo de la Magistratura had ordered the intervention of 18 criminal courts.
Choque is the one case here in which the request was granted by a court and the decision was the scandal. He was not dying. The doctors' own report did not say he was.
The last case does not involve a man who admitted a crime. Shawn Tanner was convicted of the first-degree murder of Mary Harris, 33, who died in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on April 28, 1988. A jury convicted him in 1989, and the Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the conviction in 1994. He was sentenced to life without parole and always maintained his innocence. DNA testing did not exist when he was tried.
Relatives of women whose deaths belong to the unsolved series of killings around New Bedford in 1988 and 1989, which the press and court papers group together, had asked for testing in his case, and the Supreme Judicial Court allowed it to go ahead after his death. Tanner was never charged in that series.
The New England Innocence Project took Tanner’s case in 2020. In 2021 he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. A Superior Court judge ordered DNA testing of evidence from the Harris case, and an agreed order entered on June 2, 2022, set out what was to be tested. The Innocence Project agreed to pay for the testing. The state police were to send the materials to a private laboratory, Bode Technology Group, which received them on June 22, 2022. Tanner was granted medical parole and died on September 13, 2022, at 57, before testing began.
The laboratory could not begin work until June 2023, the Supreme Judicial Court recorded, because of the timing of the Commonwealth’s approval for it to use the national DNA database, CODIS. It then emerged that part of the evidence had never been sent. On August 15, 2023, the Bristol County District Attorney’s office moved to vacate the testing order on the ground that Tanner was dead. Judge Raffi N. Yessayan denied the motion, and the office appealed. On February 27, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court let the testing go ahead.
Laura Carey, a staff attorney at the New England Innocence Project, said it had been Tanner’s "dying wish" to have the evidence tested and his name cleared. As of June 2026, no result of the testing had been reported.
The request here was not for freedom. Medical parole released a dying man from a life sentence, and the thing he wanted from the courts, a laboratory result, outlasted him by years.
Laid side by side, the eight cases have eight different answers. In Texas the prison agency itself decided that Elmer Henley’s case would not go to the board, and the board’s own regular review ended in a ten-year set-off. In California the parole board refused Susan Atkins a year before she died of cancer. In Missouri the board granted Faye Copeland medical parole after a stroke at 81 and she lived sixteen months more. In France a lawyer filed an application for Émile Louis, a medical examination was scheduled, and he died before the doctors reported. In California a man of 91 wrote to a celebrity instead of a court. In England a solicitor was instructed to apply for Raymond Morris and the papers were not filed. In Bolivia a judge on duty over the holidays granted Richard Choque house arrest on a report that did not say he was terminally ill, and was himself arrested. In Massachusetts a convicted man with a terminal diagnosis was released on medical parole and died before the laboratory began.
Two of the eight were released on medical grounds, one by a parole board and one by a parole decision whose maker has not been named. One was granted house arrest by a judge and the grant became a criminal case against the judge. The questions that recur are plain ones: whether the illness is real, whether it is terminal, and whether the prison system can care for it. In Texas the families answered in the name of the dead, and in Bolivia a government answered in the name of the living.
• February 18, 1969: Raymond Morris is convicted at Stafford Assizes; his appeal is dismissed in November.
• August 8, 1973: Elmer Henley, 17, telephones police in Pasadena, Texas.
• July 1974: Henley is convicted in San Antonio; the verdict is reversed in December 1978 and he is convicted again in June 1979.
• April 28, 1988: Mary Harris dies in Dartmouth, Massachusetts; Shawn Tanner is convicted in 1989.
• November 10, 1990: Faye Copeland is convicted in Chillicothe, Missouri.
• August 4, 1999: A federal district court sets aside Copeland’s death sentences; the Eighth Circuit affirms on November 30, 2000.
• May 2001: Copeland is sentenced to life without parole.
• August 10, 2002: Copeland has a stroke; she is paroled on medical grounds about two weeks later.
• December 2003: Copeland dies, aged 82.
• 2004: Emile Louis is sentenced to life imprisonment with an 18-year minimum term; the verdict is confirmed in 2006.
• 2008: The California parole board refuses Susan Atkins’s request for compassionate release.
• September 24, 2009: Atkins dies of brain cancer, aged 61.
• 2011: Morris shows the first signs of kidney failure and leukemia.
• June 2012: Morris instructs a solicitor to apply for compassionate release; the papers are never filed.
• August 20, 2013: Joseph Naso is convicted in Marin County; he is sentenced to death on November 22, 2013.
• October 2013: Louis applies to have his sentence suspended on health grounds; he is moved to Nancy on October 14 and dies days before doctors are to report.
• March 11, 2014: Morris dies at HMP Preston, aged 84.
• December 24, 2019: A La Paz judge grants Richard Choque 18 months of house arrest.
• January 2022: Choque is arrested again; Judge Rafael Alcon is arrested later that month.
• 2022: Henley asks for compassionate release and the prison agency does not forward his case to the board; Tanner is granted medical parole and dies on September 13.
• September 30, 2022: Choque receives a fourth 30-year sentence; a fifth, of 15 years, follows in March 2023.
• May 2025: Naso says he wrote to a celebrity asking for help with a compassionate release; he speaks to ABC7 in September 2025.
• November 7, 2025: The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denies Henley parole with a 10-year set-off.
• February 27, 2026: The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts allows the Tanner DNA testing to go ahead.