For our newsletter thats the fastest way to get updates on what Tattered Cover is doing. For instance, we are open for Curbside Pickup which is amazing and so awesome. Thank you to the continued support through your online orders. You can still order online but now you can do Curbside Pickup if you live in the area or wanting to drive our website is now open 24 7. Which means we are getting caught up on orders doing really well there. Thank you guys again for that. You can browse our website or offering recommendation to for all the times are bookofthemonth cookbook of the month and also all these author events we do we have at least one bookseller if not plenty more who read these books and its a huge reason as to why we put these authors. Which leads me into why we do this. Arch is a survival and something thats vitally important but has very few safety nets especially in crisis like the one were facing now. We are here to affirm that Creative Work is essential. We want to elevate it, its always going to be our top priority at Tattered Cover. These authors have been chosen specifically because we love their work and we cant stand the idea they dont have a platform right now and we think youre gonna love it too. We believe entirely that our communities need books as much as independent bookstores need our neighbors business right now. We know that Tattered Cover is a communitybased normally even our authors out awas only early about how its always a bus stop in denver and while we cannot be physically together were hoping you guys can join us as a Virtual Community and we can provide that opportunity and connect with you all this way. Thank you for joining us tonight. Also just to let you know this will be recorded on youtube and close captioning will be available for, you need it. We have plenty more live streams coming up. Check out our website we had a middle grade author. We got some Young Readers out there jessica kim is going to be friday, may 22 and we also have William Kent Kruger on thursdays may 28 all of them are 5 00 p. M. Mountain time. The author we have today and very excited for this. My reading has expanded so much getting to do the these author events in this book is no exception. Im so excited to pick her brain. Hadar aviram is a professor of law at the university of California Hastings College of law. Shes the author of cheap on crime and the transformation of american punishment and coeditor of the Legal Process and the promise of justice. She is a frequent media commentator and runs the california correctional crisis law. We here to talk about her book yesterdays monsters and him and invite her to join me. And get a turn on her video here. Let me get her connected and we will get this show on the road. Hello welcome hi everyone. Thank you for joining us. I know youre a little bit earlier than us so thank you for hanging out with us before dinner time. This is perfect. My toddler is napping and i have time and this is great. Im so glad. Thank you for doing this. Its our pleasure is something we really want to share your work and thank you for taking the time to write this book. Give us a little bit of a summary of what tran nine is about and then you have a presentation abyesterdays monsters is about and any representation. It talks about the parole process in california and use a fairly unique lens assuming many of the people listening to us on youtube have heard about the manson family members. Usually what you read about is the murders in the trial and not a lot of people know what happened after. This book is based on 50 years work of all the paroles transcripts of all the parole hearings the manson family inmates have had since the late 70s. Through those stories i tell a fiftyyear story arc of what happened with criminal justice and extreme punishment in california. And it so fascinating because you are right, we think manson family murders we definitely dont go to what happened after the conviction. Im gonna hop off what you share your screen and your presentation and then i will join us back for a q a. While hadar is presenting make sure to think of your questions. Here we go. There we go. This is actually a topic i figure a lot of people are more interested in now because we been hearing a lot about the question of whether to release people out of prison given what covid19 is doing inside prisons and all the people that are getting sick. Its an opportunity for us to think about how we feel about people who have committed serious crime and what is the back door of the prison look like for people like that. To give you a little bit of an idea of the extent of how many people get out of parole in california im going to start with a little bit of numbers. This is the number of parole releases in california from 1978 onward to 2012. He can see thousands of people come up from parole every year but only a very few get out. Just to drive that point home, this is the percentage of parole grants you can see that during the 90s and until more or less the Great Recession of 2008 pretty much almost nobody got out. There were three governors that would not let anybody out the parole board responded by not letting anybody out and its only once jerry brown became governor and a few other changes happen the doors of the parole open a little bit. So what is parole . Parole comes from the french term for word used to be the idea that you come up to be released from prison and give your word you not to commit crime again and then you are let out. In the states that still have parole boards the parole hearing looks Something Like this. Every person would have room that looks like this. Three parole commissioners, all political appointees of our governor and they will be sitting in the room and there will be the inmate the person seeking parole trying to convince them to let them out. The inmate could be represented by a lawyer and often they are but the lawyer is not doing like lawyer trial lawyer work but rather just sitting there and helping the person prep for the hearing. Other people in the room including the prosecutors, victims of a crime if they show up, a few other people, prison personnel and a lot of people work involved. Then the board of commissioners decide whether they can recommend lease or not. California is one of the few states that has two tiers of parole so even if the board decided to get out you still have to wait four months. The governor has four months to look at parole recommendation and decide whether to approve or veto it. Only if the board agrees to release you and the governor agrees to release you then get out. Thats the way things work in california. A little bit about the case is at the heart of my book. Some of the reviewers might have heard about the manson family viewers for those who have it around 19 67 a man by the name of Charlie Manson gets at a federal prison at that point he is already a very seasoned criminal, hes done more time inside that hes done outside the really Violent Crimes. The first place he goes out in 1967 after he gets out is to san francisco. Shortly after the summer of love abis ravaged with crime and violence and drugs and lots of lost people looking for charismatic guys with guitars looking for followers so hes no different than other people and he starts gathering a flock of disciples, followers, most of them young women, teenagers and they start following him to get a bus and travel up and down the coast of california and they find a movie ranch in Southern California where they settled down. They sort of hobnob a little bit with the counterculture the music culture in la, manson is trying to break into the music scene unsuccessfully. In 1969 a group of mansons followers commit for very heinous murders which initially are not connected to each other and its only later that the Police Connect the dots. The first is the killing of a man by the name of Gary Kinnaman who was a music teacher and acquaintance of the family. Then there is the iconic famous murder of sharon tate at the time nine months pregnant with her child with Roman Polanski and four of her friends at their mansion. The following night for murder lino and rosemary aa married couple also living in la and then they kill donald shea who is a ranch shorthand ranch and at the ranch they were living because they were afraid he was gonna tell on them. Finally, the lapd drops the crime they bring the child in the 1971 all of the people Charlie Manson, the three women aba few other compasses and other related trials get our own found guilty and ill get the Death Penalty. But there is a reversal of fortune because only a year after all these people are sentenced to death, the Death Penalty is abolished in california. So at the time this case called people versus anderson in which the court says the Death Penalty is unconstitutional its the basis california its inhumane. They basically do away with it and it really angers people in california. Ronald reagan, the governor at the time, is just outraged at the courts partly because theyre all waiting to hear Supreme Court decision in a case that some of you mightve heard about the case that actually halted the Death Penalty in the United States for 42 years between 1972 in 1976. But what really enrages people is that at the time, there was some pretty serious people on death row in california. Because of this decision, 107 people that are later known as a class of 72, all had sentences commuted from death to life with parole. Some of you might be wondering why did they just give them the life without parole . Life without parole didnt exist in california until 1978. The outcome of this decision was that everybody gets transferred to general prison in 1972 there gonna start coming off for parole in 1978. Even though this sounds really hard to imagine now with a very long sentences we have, it was not outlandish at the time for somebody to be serving 10, 15 years for firstdegree murder and then getting out. Theres a lot of outrage in california, people are very worried this crime becomes that of the symbolic thing. Could be nothing more evil than this we have to make sure this doesnt happen again. Partly why this happens is because theres a series of books chief among those is helterskelter the book written by the prosecutor in the case. Talking about this crime is being a product of this very sort of demonic apocalyptic cults. The story is that manson told his followers that there was going to be a race war, black people and white people were going to fight each other. Blood was going to float on the streets and what the black people win, there to look for a leader and then manson and his followers will come out of hiding and basically rule the world. Thats the story of what the story becomes. Everybody buys into the idea this is a crime that is very very unique. One of the things that come up in the book is that even though this story is factually true, its a truth that hides other truths. There are two other stories you could tell about this crime theres also a story you can see those books in the second or middle row is also a way to look at these crimes is not being so outlandish and being the crimes of common criminals. There are some accounts including accounts from the victim and offenders and journalists that suggests what actually happened was a drug deal gone bad they tried to make amends with the panthers when the whom they really feared. Manson was afraid of the panther getting money and they were trying to get money out of him. And one of the Family Associates got arrested for the gary inman murder. They recreated the other crimes to be copycat crimes to sort of throw the lapd off the fence and show them they been on the wrong track. Unsuccessfully obviously. Then theres also another dimension to this crime that people dont often think about or didnt think about at the time that the issue of the cults. The books right at the bottom. The idea is that these people were hopped out of their mind on drugs, many very young, hungry, didnt really have food. The room and were regularly sexually exploited. Manson himself was a very violent man. A lot of this factors into the way we view the crime. This is crucially important because the account in helterskelter, the story that yosi tells is a story that he crafted to great extent for legal purposes. Under California Law at the time you couldnt convict a murder of somebody who had not been on the murder scene itself without tying the very close to the crime. He needed that story to tie manson to the ground. The story of the colt starts percolating after the conviction become real. One of the things that some of you might think about is that just last year a new tarantino movie came out basically telling the story of what happened and one of the reasons i like the tarantino book movie is because it tells you a complicated story basically tells you all these three stories i want. The helterskelter story, the criminal story the colt story you get a flavor of everything some of you will recognize this little scene from the movie you can see there is something wrong going on there the brad pitt character coming into the ranch to see whats going on. Theres something very wrong and sinister going on. But you can also see the squalor and the exploitation. Its all there. Just to lend more credibility to the story that manson was not the only person violent and scary and exploited at the time this guy in the picture was widely known as one of the granddaddys of california he could see him with some of his wifes. Very scary man just as well. The moon is very active in california at the time. And in the early 70s worries about cults in california starting manson said that in 1974 Martin Duque Emily the first African American legislator in california actually holds legislative hearings and people who are in cults come to the hearings fathers and mothers of people in cults come and say please save our kids. He said theres nothing i can do a lot of these people are adults theres freedom of speech. Notably a lot of the people who speak up at these hearings in 1974 in mentioning the manson murders and saying, if we knew now, now meeting 1974, if we knew then what we do now about cults we probably would have sentenced the girls to death theres probably victims. Think about now looking at the whole thing through a me too lens and how we would perceive the murders at this point but the training of what to do the manson family is already left the station. Not only does it come back big time to the United States with greg versus georgia but also california introduces something called determinate sentencing act which is the change the way that they get punishment to serious crimes and in 1978 california brings back the Death Penalty creates life without parole and the explanation to these built they say we are doing this because we want to make sure the next Charlie Manson that comes in we can punish them appropriately. Theres a lot of viewing this case as a cautionary tale. A lot of fear about this case repeating itself manson and the disciples are often mentioned. Heres jerry brown today use jerry brown when he was young and governor california in the 70s he gets letters from the aclu the legislative Analyst Office from the lapd police union saying please dont pull the sentence off every time a heinous crime is gonna come up punishment is gonna skyrocket and jerry belts not attentive listening to the helterskelter argument ratchets up the platform for punishment and this is probably how we get these increasingly severe sentences in california ever since. In 1988 theres an extra layer to this is thats where we at the governors veto before that the government could it veto the decisions now the governor has a political jn denae after the board makes its decision. On top of everything the commissioners become political appointees by the governor so youre looking at a page from the California Department of corrections website and as you can see in the picture of the commissioners im gonna move myself up so you can see everybody he can see its a pretty Diverse Group in terms of gender and race but they are not of all diverse in terms of their background. Everything a person you see here comes from corrections background or former sheriff or police chief. Not a Single Person with therapeutic professional not a single psychologist or social worker. Nobody who knows anything therapeutic about Substance Abuse about Mental Illness about a lot of the things that happen in prison, its only much much later just in the recent two or three years they start appointing people from defense backgrounds but still nobody with a professional therapeutic background is on the board. Finally, we have this extra layer on top of everything. This is 2008 when california took off the Voter Initiative called mercies law. The two in the extra things when victims come to the parole board they can bring a lot of people to support them. The victim advocates can bring their own advocates. More portly, to increase the time between parole denial. When you deny parole in california the presumptive time you have to wait until your next year is 15 years. Because this is so much theres often exceptions. This is supposed to be the rules this gives you an idea of what the law is like. What i want to do now is talk a little bit about whats happening this year. abruns a nonprofit in california called on common law which represents people in parole. He holds trainings for lawyers who want to represent evil on parole. The firs