Whatever prompted anyone to give this creep the option of parole?
Note the very British dig against firearms - "The bullets were hollow-pointed and designed to maximise the wounds to ensure Lennon's death, Chapman admitted"
Jeff
The Times: World News:Lennon widow will fight killer's parole http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/05/timfgnusa03006.html
September 5 2000
UNITED STATES
Lennon widow will fight killer's parole
FROM IAN BRODIE IN WASHINGTON
Chapman: in custody since the 1980 killing
©
THE psychotic loner who killed John Lennon with a burst of revolver fire in New York 20 years ago has been granted his first parole hearing next month.
Yoko Ono, the former Beatle's widow, is, however, expected to tell the parole board of her concerns that she and Lennon's two sons, Sean and Julian, would be vulnerable should Mark David Chapman be freed.
Chapman, 45, was sentenced to 20 years to life for the 1980 murder, with a condition that he would have to serve 20 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole.
If he does succeed in winning freedom on his first application to the Parole Board, his earliest possible release date would be December 4 - four days before the 20th anniversary of the killing.
Ms Ono will be asked to offer a "victim-impact" statement to the board in advance of the private hearing. She told a television interviewer earlier this year of her worries about parole for Chapman.
Her fears were heightened by the stabbing attack on Lennon's fellow Beatle, George Harrison, by a man who broke into his mansion at Henley-on-Thames last December. Ms Ono's spokesman, Elliot Mintz, said that he was sure that she would have something to say to the Parole Board, but would confine her statement to official channels before making her feelings known to the media.
By all accounts Chapman has been a model prisoner at Attica prison in western New York state. He has become a born-again Christian and for the past 11 years has worked as a clerk in its law library. As a notorious prisoner, he is kept segregated from the general prison population.
A prison spokesman told the New York Daily News that Chapman's behaviour behind bars had been acceptable. He had been disciplined for only minor infractions.
He has been in custody since the night of December 8, 1980, when he shot Lennon outside the Dakota apartment block on Central Park West, where Ms Ono still lives. A security guard from Hawaii with a history of mental illness, Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder over the objections of his legal-aid lawyer, who advised him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge recommended that he receive psychiatric treatment in prison.
The prosecution said that Chapman had deliberately and coldly planned to murder Lennon for two months "in order to draw attention to himself, to gain fame and to massage his ego". Chapman himself has said: "I was Mr Nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on Earth."
Chapman had offered no hint of whether he thought he would win freedom. "He's keeping his feelings about that pretty much to himself," Jack Jones, his biographer, said.
Opposition to Chapman's release may already be growing, with at least one website encouraging Lennon fans to sign an onsite petition against parole. New York prison officials are expecting a flood of letters demanding that Chapman remain incarcerated. Robert Gangi, a lawyer who specialises in inmate issues, thought that there was no chance of Chapman winning parole. In America anyone convicted of murdering a famous person was unlikely to get out, he said.
That is certainly true of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian immigrant who assassinated Robert Kennedy, brother of President Kennedy, in Los Angeles in 1968. His repeated pleas for parole have been opposed by the Kennedy family and all have been rejected.
Lennon, by then a passionate spokesman for pacifism, was returning home after an evening of recording with Ms Ono when Chapman stepped from the shadows and fired four bullets into his back. The bullets were hollow-pointed and designed to maximise the wounds to ensure Lennon's death, Chapman admitted.
Lennon had been enjoying a comeback after several years of seclusion. He was, as the title of his then new single proclaimed, Starting Over.
By midnight hundreds of mourners had gathered by candlelight outside the Dakota apartments singing "All you need is love. Love is all you need."
Today there is a memorial to Lennon across the street in Central Park. It is a flat, decorated circle with the word Imagine in the middle.
Note the very British dig against firearms - "The bullets were hollow-pointed and designed to maximise the wounds to ensure Lennon's death, Chapman admitted"
Jeff
The Times: World News:Lennon widow will fight killer's parole http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/05/timfgnusa03006.html
September 5 2000
UNITED STATES
Lennon widow will fight killer's parole
FROM IAN BRODIE IN WASHINGTON
Chapman: in custody since the 1980 killing
©
THE psychotic loner who killed John Lennon with a burst of revolver fire in New York 20 years ago has been granted his first parole hearing next month.
Yoko Ono, the former Beatle's widow, is, however, expected to tell the parole board of her concerns that she and Lennon's two sons, Sean and Julian, would be vulnerable should Mark David Chapman be freed.
Chapman, 45, was sentenced to 20 years to life for the 1980 murder, with a condition that he would have to serve 20 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole.
If he does succeed in winning freedom on his first application to the Parole Board, his earliest possible release date would be December 4 - four days before the 20th anniversary of the killing.
Ms Ono will be asked to offer a "victim-impact" statement to the board in advance of the private hearing. She told a television interviewer earlier this year of her worries about parole for Chapman.
Her fears were heightened by the stabbing attack on Lennon's fellow Beatle, George Harrison, by a man who broke into his mansion at Henley-on-Thames last December. Ms Ono's spokesman, Elliot Mintz, said that he was sure that she would have something to say to the Parole Board, but would confine her statement to official channels before making her feelings known to the media.
By all accounts Chapman has been a model prisoner at Attica prison in western New York state. He has become a born-again Christian and for the past 11 years has worked as a clerk in its law library. As a notorious prisoner, he is kept segregated from the general prison population.
A prison spokesman told the New York Daily News that Chapman's behaviour behind bars had been acceptable. He had been disciplined for only minor infractions.
He has been in custody since the night of December 8, 1980, when he shot Lennon outside the Dakota apartment block on Central Park West, where Ms Ono still lives. A security guard from Hawaii with a history of mental illness, Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder over the objections of his legal-aid lawyer, who advised him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge recommended that he receive psychiatric treatment in prison.
The prosecution said that Chapman had deliberately and coldly planned to murder Lennon for two months "in order to draw attention to himself, to gain fame and to massage his ego". Chapman himself has said: "I was Mr Nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on Earth."
Chapman had offered no hint of whether he thought he would win freedom. "He's keeping his feelings about that pretty much to himself," Jack Jones, his biographer, said.
Opposition to Chapman's release may already be growing, with at least one website encouraging Lennon fans to sign an onsite petition against parole. New York prison officials are expecting a flood of letters demanding that Chapman remain incarcerated. Robert Gangi, a lawyer who specialises in inmate issues, thought that there was no chance of Chapman winning parole. In America anyone convicted of murdering a famous person was unlikely to get out, he said.
That is certainly true of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian immigrant who assassinated Robert Kennedy, brother of President Kennedy, in Los Angeles in 1968. His repeated pleas for parole have been opposed by the Kennedy family and all have been rejected.
Lennon, by then a passionate spokesman for pacifism, was returning home after an evening of recording with Ms Ono when Chapman stepped from the shadows and fired four bullets into his back. The bullets were hollow-pointed and designed to maximise the wounds to ensure Lennon's death, Chapman admitted.
Lennon had been enjoying a comeback after several years of seclusion. He was, as the title of his then new single proclaimed, Starting Over.
By midnight hundreds of mourners had gathered by candlelight outside the Dakota apartments singing "All you need is love. Love is all you need."
Today there is a memorial to Lennon across the street in Central Park. It is a flat, decorated circle with the word Imagine in the middle.