A parole hearing is supposed to be a quiet administrative event. Two or three commissioners sit at a table, a prisoner answers questions about insight and remorse, a psychologist’s report is read into the record, and a decision is mailed out weeks later. Most of them pass without a line in any newspaper. A handful, though, become public theatre on a scale the system was never designed for, drawing television crews, petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, sworn statements from the families of the dead, and, in California, the personal signature of the governor.
These ten cases come from four countries and span more than half a century. In some the board said no and kept saying it for decades. In others the board said yes and was overruled from above. In one, a mother convicted of killing her infant daughter walked out after seven tries. What they share is that each hearing became a contest over a question no psychological instrument can settle: whether the passage of time has changed a person, or merely aged him.
Edmund Kemper was convicted in Santa Cruz County on November 8, 1973, of eight counts of first-degree murder, covering six young women and girls killed in 1972 and 1973, his mother and her friend. At 15 he had killed his paternal grandparents, a case handled in juvenile court. He was sent to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where he is still held.
His hearings have been notable mostly for his reluctance to take part in them. United Press International reported that he was denied parole in 1980, 1981 and 1982. After the June 1982 hearing, the panel concluded that he would pose a threat to public safety if released and that his crimes showed a callous disregard for human life. Kemper himself told the board he was not ready.
In June 1985, moments before a hearing before the state Board of Prison Terms, he gave up his right to be heard. He was 36. A prison spokesman, Lieutenant Joe McGrath, said Kemper felt he could not state his case properly in front of the press, and that he had told officials he was not fit for release and would wait three years before asking again. McGrath called his prison record "spotless."
The pattern held into his old age. On July 9, 2024, a three-member panel of the Board of Parole Hearings met at Vacaville for what Lookout Santa Cruz counted as the twelfth time he had become eligible since 1973. Kemper refused to attend. His attorney, Nicholas Ageo, asked for a postponement and was refused; he told the board he had met his client only once and that Kemper had since declined to speak to him. Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell came to testify. "Ed Kemper is still dangerous. He remains a high risk," Rosell said, describing him as untreated and essentially unchanged since he was first imprisoned. A cousin attended to speak for the victims, as she had in 2017.
The board heard that Kemper, then 75, had diabetes and coronary heart disease, wore a pacemaker, had suffered a stroke and used a wheelchair. A psychiatric evaluation that April had nonetheless rated him a high risk to reoffend, and the panel cited a 2022 incident in which he grabbed a staff member while being moved to his wheelchair. It denied parole for seven years.
No prisoner in California drew more attention to the parole process than Charles Manson, convicted in 1971 of nine first-degree murders committed in 1969 by members of the commune around him. His death sentences were vacated after the state’s death penalty was struck down in 1972, and the life terms that replaced them carried the possibility of parole. He became eligible in the late 1970s and went before the board again and again until his death in custody in 2017.
The transcript of his hearing at Corcoran State Prison on April 21, 1992, published in full by the Famous Trials project at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows what those sessions were like. Manson told the panel he was nervous and unused to being around so many people. He disputed the official account of the crimes and argued that the law could hold him only seventeen or eighteen years on the terms he accepted. "Everyone says that I was the leader of those people," he said, "but I was actually the follower of the children."
The panel was not persuaded. It noted about sixty serious disciplinary reports since 1971, nine since his previous hearing, many for threatening staff, and an unfavorable psychiatric report. Stephen Kay, a deputy district attorney who attended more than forty parole hearings for Manson and his co-defendants, told the commissioners that Manson had once said he wanted to be paroled to Death Valley to live with the spiders and snakes, or else to outer space. Kay also told them the board had received more than 352,000 letters, cards and petitions asking that none of the five be released. The panel ruled him unsuitable and set his next hearing five years away.
Manson’s case produced the longest-running parole fight in modern California, and it did not involve Manson. Bruce Davis, a member of his group, was convicted in 1972 of the 1969 murders of the musician Gary Hinman and the ranch hand Donald "Shorty" Shea, with conspiracy. He took no part in the Tate or LaBianca killings. According to Alta Journal, he became sober and converted to Christianity at Folsom State Prison in 1974, had no disciplinary write-ups after 1980, and earned a doctorate in the philosophy of religion while ministering to other prisoners at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.
In January 2010 a parole panel ruled him suitable for release for the first time. CBS News later reported that at that hearing he said, for the first time, "I was as responsible as everyone there." The Los Angeles County district attorney, Steve Cooley, urged Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to reject the grant, and on June 28, 2010, Schwarzenegger announced that he had. "I believe his release would pose an unreasonable risk of danger to society at this time," he wrote, adding that Davis "still exhibits conformist tendencies." Davis’s lawyer, Michael Beckman, called the decision "a political calculation rather than an individual consideration."
That set the pattern for eleven years. On October 4, 2012, on the eve of his 70th birthday, a panel recommended parole again, over the objections of Sharon Tate’s sister and a former member of the group who had testified at the trials. The district attorney’s office said it "certainly" disagreed. In March 2013 Governor Jerry Brown reversed the grant in a six-page decision, writing that Davis "continues to withhold information about these events" and that in rare cases a murder can be so grave that it shows current dangerousness by itself. Until Davis could explain why he had actively championed the group’s interests, Brown wrote, he was "not prepared to release him."
Beckman said that of the more than 700 life prisoners he had represented, Davis was "the most rehabilitated and qualified." The panels kept agreeing with him. A third grant came on March 12, 2014, at Davis’s 28th suitability hearing; Sharon Tate’s sister told CBS Los Angeles that she felt sick about it. At that hearing Davis said, in a line the Associated Press would quote for years, "I wanted to be Charlie’s favorite guy." Brown reversed the grant on August 8, 2014, writing that Davis "currently poses an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison." Davis challenged that reversal in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and on April 22, 2015, Judge William C. Ryan upheld it, holding that there was "some evidence" in the record that Davis was still dangerous.
A fourth grant followed on August 27, 2015, and a fifth on February 1, 2017. Brown blocked the 2017 grant late on a Friday in June, a week before his deadline, writing that "these cult murders have left an indelible mark on the public." In 2019, after Davis moved to San Quentin State Prison, a sixth panel ruled him suitable, and on November 15, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom reversed it, writing that Davis lacked "the current insight and skills to abstain from violent situations in the future if released." Beckman said his client could not afford to fight the decision in court. "They’re wrong," he said. "He is rehabilitated and has been for a long time."
On January 22, 2021, Commissioner Deborah San Juan and Deputy Commissioner Neal Chambers granted parole a seventh time, citing his age, his long confinement and his physical condition. Newsom reversed it on June 18, 2021, concluding that Davis "currently poses an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison at this time."
The next panel did the governor’s work for him. On July 8, 2022, Commissioners Julie Garland and Rachel Stern denied parole outright and set a three-year wait. "They said he lacks empathy," Beckman said. A nephew of Jay Sebring, one of the Tate victims, spoke on behalf of Hinman’s family: "Bruce Davis remains in prison because his crimes were so severe and profound that they shook our country to its core with permanent repercussions." Beckman answered that the 14 commissioners before these two had judged Davis suitable and that the last nine experts to evaluate him had rated him a low risk of violence. "For these two commissioners to think they know better is appalling," he said.
Davis died on September 11, 2026, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, aged 83, still serving his sentence.
William Heirens was 17, a University of Chicago student, when he was arrested in Chicago in June 1946. On September 4 of that year he pleaded guilty to three murders, those of Josephine Ross, Frances Brown and six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, along with 26 indictments for burglary, robbery and assault. He took the pleas to avoid a possible death sentence, recanted soon afterward and insisted for the rest of his life that he was innocent.
His life sentences allowed for parole, and his case went through the federal courts on the strength of it. A federal magistrate concluded that the Illinois board had applied a standard adopted after his crimes and, in April 1983, ordered him released. On February 24, 1984, the Seventh Circuit reversed, holding that the board had weighed deterrence and retribution before 1973 as well, so the newer standard did him no harm.
In April 1988 the Prisoner Review Board denied him parole for the 28th time, United Press International reported. He told the board he was rehabilitated and innocent. Suzanne Degnan’s brother and sister asked that he be kept in prison, and the Cook County State’s Attorney, Richard Daley, dismissed the innocence claims as ridiculous. By 1995 Heirens was 66 and had a job offer from a group in Albany, New York, that counseled former prisoners; the writer Ed McManus argued in Illinois Issues that it was time to let him go. The Cook County State’s Attorney, the Illinois Attorney General and Suzanne’s sister opposed it.
His last hearing came on August 2, 2007. He was 78, in a wheelchair and 61 years into his sentence. The day before, his lawyer Steven Drizin of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions told WBEZ that the corrections system had shifted from rehabilitation to retribution, and that Heirens was still in prison because of that shift rather than anything he had done. The board denied parole. Its chairman, Jorge Montes, told WBEZ that the board did not "go back and look at all the original facts and retry the case," and that the crimes were too grave for release despite a good prison record.
Heirens died on March 5, 2012, at 83, after being moved from Dixon Correctional Center to a Chicago hospital. At his death he was reported to be the longest-serving prisoner in Illinois history. Suzanne Degnan’s sister, who had attended every one of his parole hearings over 30 years, told CBS Chicago: "After he was caught, his horrible crimes stopped."
Nine of Marybeth Tinning’s children died in Schenectady, New York, between 1972 and 1985. She was tried for one death only, that of her four-month-old daughter Tami Lynne, and on July 17, 1987, a jury convicted her of second-degree murder under the depraved indifference theory, acquitting her of intentional murder. She was sentenced to 20 years to life. The other deaths were never tried.
Her parole hearings became the only place she spoke at length about the case, and the Daily Gazette of Schenectady followed her account as it shifted. At her first hearing, in 2007, she denied responsibility, and the board cited that denial in refusing parole. By 2009 she was acknowledging the killing, explaining that she had been "going through bad times"; the board called her remorse "superficial at best." On January 26, 2011, she told the panel, "I just believed that she was going to die also, so I just did it," and described herself as "a very damaged and just a messed-up person." She was denied a third time.
In January 2013 she said she could not explain it. "I can’t remember. I mean, I know I did it, but I can’t tell you why," she said. The board rated her risk on reentry as low but held that release would so deprecate the seriousness of the crime as to undermine respect for the law, describing Tami Lynne as "an innocent, vulnerable victim who was entrusted in your care as her mother." The Schenectady County District Attorney, Robert Carney, said her inconsistent memory suggested she knew more than she admitted. Parole was refused again in 2015 and in January 2017, when the board, noting remorse but a lack of full insight, set her next hearing for 18 months rather than the usual two years.
The seventh hearing, by video on July 10, 2018, went the other way. "I killed my daughter, my baby daughter, on that day," she told the commissioners. One of them told her she had committed a terrible crime but had taken every possible opportunity to improve herself. The state corrections department announced the grant on July 16, 2018; she was 75. Carney, who opposed release, said she had "admitted guilt, I guess, but it was without any insight." Assemblyman Jim Tedisco called the decision "a total disgrace and an affront to the victims and the safety of the public." She left Taconic Correctional Facility on August 21, 2018, after 31 years in custody. The parole described at the time as lifelong did not last that long: the Daily Gazette later reported that she had been discharged from supervision after just under five years under a 2022 state directive. Carney, told of it, said, "I hope they’re correct."
Donald Gene Miller, a Michigan State University graduate known in Lansing as Don Miller, was caught in August 1978 in Delta Township, Michigan, hours after a crime against a girl of 14 and her 13-year-old brother, both of whom survived. In May 1979 an Eaton County jury convicted him of attempted murder, with other charges. In July 1979 he pleaded guilty in Ingham County to two counts of manslaughter in the deaths of his former fiancee, Martha Sue Young, and the schoolteacher Kristine Stuart, and under a no-charge agreement he admitted causing the deaths of Marita Choquette and Wendy Bush as well. A 1998 conviction for possessing a weapon in prison added 20 to 40 years.
Between 1989 and 1997, according to the Associated Press, he had seven parole hearings, all refused. After a 2015 Court of Appeals decision moved his timeline forward, he was due before a parole board member in August 2016, his first consideration since 1997. The families organized again. A sister-in-law of Kristine Stuart told WXYZ-TV in Detroit that Miller was "a threat to society," and Attorney General Bill Schuette wrote to the board that the details of Miller’s crimes were reason enough to keep him where he was. The board said no.
By 2021 the hearings had become an annual ordeal. Ingham County Prosecutor Carol Siemon wrote to the board on February 2, 2021, that "nothing has changed in these years to change that belief for me." The board interviewed Miller that April and confirmed in June that it had denied parole, by The State News’s count for the ninth time. The brother who had survived in 1978 had attended each hearing. He told WCMU that the decision was "a great relief," and he told WILX that under the law then in force he "might get the summer" before he had to start over, because Miller could seek another review within a year.
That law, passed in 2018, had cut the longest wait between reviews from five years to one or two. The survivors went to Lansing. House Bills 4562 and 4563, sponsored by two Eaton County-area representatives, allowed a majority of the parole board to wait up to five years between reviews when more frequent reviews would cause added harm to victims or their families. Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed them on March 11, 2022, and the Associated Press reported that the legislation had been spurred by Miller’s surviving victims. "Every year, I fear for the safety of my future, the future of my children and the future of our community," the brother said at the signing.
On May 19, 2022, the board denied parole again and, using the new law, set Miller’s next eligibility for August 29, 2027. "This extended period of time allows victims time to heal," said the Eaton County prosecutor, Douglas R. Lloyd. Miller was 67.
Kenneth Bianchi pleaded guilty in 1979 to two murders in Bellingham, Washington, and five in Los Angeles County, part of a series of ten killings of women and girls in the Los Angeles area in 1977 and 1978 for which his cousin Angelo Buono was later convicted of nine. He has since denied the killings and claimed his confessions were produced by hypnosis. In 2023 he legally changed his name to Anthony D’Amato.
Because he holds life sentences in two states, he answers to two parole systems. California’s board denied him in August 2010 and barred a new application for 15 years, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told CBS News. He was 59.
Washington’s Indeterminate Sentence Review Board heard him at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla on June 25, 2025, in a session closed to the public. Its minutes of July 14, 2025, are unusually blunt. Risk assessments placed him at high risk to reoffend. The panel noted his "active refusal to participate in available programs or resources" and wrote that he had "spent dramatically more time pursuing legal challenges to his conviction than toward rehabilitative efforts." It said he avoided responsibility by introducing irrelevant or confusing information, using complex legal language and pointing out the faults of others, which it did not regard as a sign of rehabilitation. It declined to release him to his California sentences and added 120 months to his minimum term. Weeks later, California denied him parole for another ten years. He was 74.
Paul Bernardo was convicted in Toronto on September 1, 1995, of the first-degree murders of Leslie Mahaffy, 14, and Kristen French, 15, with other charges, and was declared a dangerous offender that November. He became eligible for full parole in 2018, after 25 years.
His first hearing, at Millhaven Institution on October 17, 2018, lasted about 30 minutes before the two-member panel refused day and full parole. "I hurt a lot of people," he said. Board member Suzanne Poirier told him his empathy seemed recent. The second, by video on June 22, 2021, ended the same way after about an hour. His parole officer reported no progress and no programming since 2018 and no release plan. "Your understanding and insight remains limited," said board member Maureen Gauci. Kristen French’s parents told the board, "Time doesn’t heal the pain; the pain is a life sentence." A statement from Leslie Mahaffy’s mother said, "There is no known cure for sadistic psychopathy."
By the third hearing, on November 26, 2024, Bernardo had been moved to La Macaza Institution in Quebec, a medium-security prison, and the families' attendance had itself become a story: the board first refused to let them attend in person, then reversed itself too late for Kristen French’s mother to travel, and she spoke remotely. Bernardo asked for day parole or escorted absences. His parole officer said he was "overestimating his progress while underestimating the risk he presents," and the Correctional Service did not support release. Leslie Mahaffy’s mother told the board that "the biggest destruction of the peace and joy and hope in my life has been and remains Bernardo." The panel refused all forms of release, citing his risk of reoffending, his narcissistic personality, the "extremely violent" and serial nature of the crimes and his dangerous offender designation.
A fourth review was set for October 20, 2026. On September 21, 2026, the families' lawyer, Tim Danson, confirmed that it had been postponed to January 2027. Danson has argued that offenders like Bernardo should be heard every seven years rather than every two. "The price he has to pay for what he did is to spend the rest of his natural life in jail," he said.
In England and Wales the Parole Board can hold a hearing in public, though it rarely does. Allan Grimson, a Royal Navy petty officer, pleaded guilty in 2001 to the murders of two young men, Nicholas Wright in December 1997 and Sion Jenkins in December 1998, both in Portsmouth, and received two life sentences with a minimum term of 22 years. His first review, which ended on November 23, 2020, recommended a move to open conditions; the Secretary of State for Justice declined to accept it. His minimum term expired on December 20, 2021, and an oral hearing was adjourned in November 2022 so that a separate matter could be investigated.
In November 2023 the board received an application for his relisted hearing to be held in public, citing continuing media interest, the seriousness of the murders and public concern about release. Grimson opposed it, arguing that a public hearing would put him, his supporters and the professional witnesses at risk of serious harm. In late January 2024 Hampshire police told the board that Grimson was the subject of a live investigation relevant to its decision. On January 31, 2024, the board’s chair, Caroline Corby, refused the application. She accepted that the gravity of the murders weighed toward openness and that the case would be very distressing for the victims' families, but held that the high bar for a public hearing could not be met while a police investigation was live and evidence critical to the decision could not be heard in public.
The investigation explained itself two years later. On July 27, 2026, a jury at Winchester Crown Court convicted Grimson of 13 non-recent offenses against four male complainants between 1994 and 1999. He was remanded in custody, with sentencing listed for November 6, 2026.
The most tangled recent parole fight played out in South Australia. James Vlassakis pleaded guilty in June 2001 to four counts of murder committed in 1998 and 1999, among them those of his half-brother and stepbrother, in the series of killings led by John Bunting, which came to light in Snowtown in May 1999. He became the prosecution’s key witness against Bunting and Robert Wagner. Justice Kevin Duggan sentenced him to life with a non-parole period of 26 years, telling him that without his pleas and his promise to testify the figure would have been 42.
On August 5, 2025, the Parole Board approved his release. Its chair, Frances Nelson, said he appeared "genuinely remorseful," that his behaviour in custody had been excellent, and that sentencing and punishment were matters for a judge, not a parole board. He would spend up to 12 months at a pre-release centre and stay on parole for life. "I doubt he even knows how to operate a mobile phone," Nelson said.
In October 2025 Attorney-General Kyam Maher sought a review, arguing that the board had "erred in granting the prisoner’s release on parole." The review commissioner, Michael David, a retired judge, overturned the grant on December 15, 2025, describing the crimes as "very evilly premeditated by everyone" and finding that the board had "underestimated the effect of the gravity of the criminal behaviour of Mr Vlassakis." The Commissioner for Victims' Rights said the families were "incredibly relieved."
The board went to court. Nelson said David had in effect re-sentenced Vlassakis and was "wrong as a matter of law." On June 18, 2026, the Court of Appeal agreed that he had made a jurisdictional error, holding that he had "impermissibly" substituted his own view of the gravity of the offences for the sentencing court’s, and sent the matter back. The judges stressed that they were not deciding whether Vlassakis should be paroled. A second commissioner, David Lovell, decided the fresh review on September 14, 2026: "I dismiss the Attorney-General’s application and affirm the decision of the Parole Board, dated 5 August 2025." Bunting, he reasoned, will never be released, and "this same power dynamic cannot be replicated." Vlassakis moved to a pre-release centre that September and was filmed in public in October 2026, at 46, for the first time in decades.
Set side by side, these cases describe less a single parole system than a set of pressures acting on one. In California, three governors overruled seven panels on the gravity of crimes committed in 1969, and Bruce Davis died at 83 with every grant reversed. In Michigan, survivors who had sat through hearing after hearing persuaded the legislature to give them five years between reviews. In South Australia, a board’s decision went through a review commissioner, the Court of Appeal and a second commissioner before it held. In England, the question was not whether to release but whether anyone outside the room would hear why.
The boards themselves keep returning to the same few words: insight, remorse, risk, the seriousness of the offence. Marybeth Tinning was paroled when commissioners concluded she had used her time well. William Heirens never was, though by his last hearing he could no longer walk. Edmund Kemper, sick and in a wheelchair at 75, did not bother to come. The hearings rarely settle what the public most wants to know. They record, in transcripts and minutes and the statements of mothers and brothers, how long a sentence feels from both sides of the table.
• September 4, 1946: William Heirens pleads guilty in Chicago to three murders, with other charges.
• 1972: Bruce Davis convicted of the murders of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea.
• November 8, 1973: Edmund Kemper convicted of eight counts of first-degree murder.
• July 13, 1979: Don Miller pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
• 1979: Kenneth Bianchi pleads guilty to two murders in Washington and five in Los Angeles County.
• 1980 to 1982: Kemper denied parole each year.
• February 24, 1984: Seventh Circuit reverses a federal order to release Heirens.
• June 1985: Kemper waives his hearing.
• July 17, 1987: Marybeth Tinning convicted of second-degree murder.
• April 1988: Heirens denied parole for the 28th time.
• 1989 to 1997: Miller refused parole seven times.
• April 21, 1992: Charles Manson’s parole hearing at Corcoran; next hearing set five years away.
• September 1, 1995: Paul Bernardo convicted of two first-degree murders.
• 2001: Allan Grimson pleads guilty to two murders; James Vlassakis pleads guilty to four.
• August 2, 2007: Heirens denied parole at his last hearing.
• January 2010: first parole grant for Davis; Governor Schwarzenegger reverses it in June.
• August 2010: California denies Bianchi parole for 15 years.
• January 26, 2011: Tinning denied parole a third time.
• October 4, 2012: second grant for Davis; Governor Brown reverses it March 1, 2013.
• March 12, 2014: third grant for Davis; Brown reverses it August 8, 2014.
• April 22, 2015: Superior Court upholds the 2014 reversal.
• August 27, 2015, and February 1, 2017: fourth and fifth grants for Davis; both blocked.
• 2016: Miller denied parole.
• July 16, 2018: Tinning’s parole announced; she leaves prison August 21, 2018.
• October 17, 2018: Bernardo refused parole.
• November 15, 2019: Governor Newsom reverses Davis’s sixth grant.
• November 23, 2020: Grimson’s first review recommends open conditions; not accepted.
• June 2021: Miller denied parole; Newsom reverses Davis’s seventh grant June 18; Bernardo refused June 22.
• March 11, 2022: Whitmer signs House Bills 4562 and 4563.
• May 19, 2022: Miller denied; next eligibility August 29, 2027.
• July 8, 2022: board panel denies Davis parole for three years.
• January 31, 2024: Parole Board refuses a public hearing for Grimson.
• July 9, 2024: Kemper denied parole for seven years.
• November 26, 2024: Bernardo refused parole a third time.
• July 2025: Washington board declines release for Bianchi and adds 120 months; California denies him for ten years.
• August 5, 2025: Vlassakis granted parole.
• December 15, 2025: review commissioner overturns the Vlassakis grant.
• June 18, 2026: Court of Appeal sets that decision aside.
• July 27, 2026: Grimson convicted of 13 non-recent offenses.
• September 11, 2026: Davis dies in custody at 83.
• September 14, 2026: second review affirms the Vlassakis grant.
• September 21, 2026: Bernardo’s October hearing postponed to January 2027.