If the panel decides to grant Atkins parole — called a “tentative suitability finding” — the decision is subject to a 120-day review process by the California Board of Parole Hearings, Thornton said. If it still stands, the matter then goes to the governor’s office. The governor’s options include allowing the decision to stand, actively approving it, modifying it or reversing it, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Web site.
However, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has previously opposed Atkins’ request for compassionate release — a request made by terminally ill patients wishing to be released before death. The Board of Parole Hearings unanimously denied that request in July 2008. It was also opposed by Debra Tate, Sharon Tate’s sister.
If parole is not granted, another hearing will be set in three, five, seven, 10 or 15 years, at the discretion of the panel, Thornton said.
Atkins has been described as a model prisoner who has accepted responsibility for her role in the slayings and now shuns Manson.
But Debra Tate told CNN in an e-mail in March she does not believe any Manson family member convicted of murder should ever be set free, saying the slayings were “so vicious, so inhumane, so depraved, that there is no turning back.”
“The ‘Manson Family’ murderers are sociopaths, and from that, they can never be rehabilitated,” Debra Tate said. “They should all stay right where they are — in prison — until they die. There will never be true justice for my sister Sharon and the other victims of the ‘Manson Family.’ Keeping the murderers in prison is the least we, as a society who values justice, can do.”
In a manuscript posted on her Web site, Atkins, who was known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz, wrote that “this is the past I have to live with, and I have to live with it every day.”
“Unlike the reader, or the people who seem to think Charles Manson was cool, I can’t think about it for an hour or so and then go on with my life. Just like the families and friends of the victims, this is with me every day. I have to wake up every day with this and no matter what I do for the rest of my life and no matter how much I give back to the community I will never be able to replace what my crime took away. And that’s not ‘neat,’ and that’s not ‘cool.’”
Atkins’ brain cancer was diagnosed in March 2008, Whitehouse wrote on his Web site. On May 15, doctors predicted she would live less than six months. But she passed that deadline, he wrote, and celebrated her 21st wedding anniversary on December 7
