CHARLES MANSON Biography - Crimes, Laws and people

 
 

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CHARLES MANSON

Charles Manson                                                                           
Born November 12, 1934                                                                   
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States                                                           
Charge(s) Murder and conspiracy                                                           
Penalty Death, reduced by abolition of death penalty to life in prison                   
                                                                                         
Charles Milles Manson (b. November 12, 1934) is a convict who led the "Manson             
Family," a quasi-commune that arose in the U.S. state of California in the later         
1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca                     
murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the           
joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders                 
themselves.                                                                               
                                                                                         
Manson is forever associated with "Helter Skelter", the term he took from the             
Beatles song of that name and construed as a race-based conflict that the crimes         
were intended to precipitate. This unusual connection with rock music linked him,         
from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an             
emblem of transgression, rebellion, evil, ghoulishness, bloody violence,                 
homicidal psychosis, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title         
of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.             
                                                                                         
At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who           
had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses.           
In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los               
Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis           
Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written             
and performed by him were released commercially; a number of artists have                 
covered his songs in the decades since.                                                   
                                                                                         
Manson's death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a             
decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state's           
death penalty. California's eventual reestablishment of capital punishment               
did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.