Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten freed: What to know

Leslie Van Houten was freed from a California prison on Tuesday, a stunning development after she had served more than a half-century for one of the infamous murders carried about by Charles Manson followers.

Here are some things to know about her release, part of one of the most notorious murder cases in modern American history.

Even by the standards of the Manson Family, the 73-year-old Van Houten has experienced a legal odyssey, with multiple trials.

She was originally sentenced to death for helping Manson's followers carry out the August 1969 killings of Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary. Those murders came one night after the shocking killings of actress Sharon Tate and four others.

Van Houten, then 19, stabbed Rosemary LaBianca, though arguments have persisted whether that act was pre- or post-mortem. Her sentence was later commuted to life in prison when the California Supreme Court overturned the state's death penalty law in 1972.

But that first conviction was then thrown out on appeal, as her attorney died during trial and she wasn't granted a delay.

A subsequent court proceeding resulted in a mistrial, with seven jurors voting for a murder conviction and five believing she was guilty of manslaughter.

The district attorney's office wouldn't consider a manslaughter plea deal, and she was then convicted of murder at a mid-1978 trial. But for about six months before that trial, she was out on bail and attended classes to become a legal secretary.

California is one of only two U.S. states in which a governor can reverse a parole board decision. That authority has been exercised by multiple governors over the years with respect to Manson associates convicted of murder, including on five occasions after the state board recommended parole for Van Houten.

Those governor decisions have been approved by the courts, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office erred after a 2020 reversal and Van Houten legal's team successfully took up the matter with the state's appellate court.

The judges took issue with Newsom's claim that Van Houten did not adequately explain how she fell under Manson's influence. At her parole hearings, she has discussed at length how her parents' divorce, her drug and alcohol abuse, and a forced illegal abortion led her down a path that left her vulnerable to him.

Hadar Aviram, author of 2020's Yesterday's Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole, wrote in a recent blog entry on her website that, "what paved the way to Van Houten's release was the re-emergence of adolescence as a relevant factor for parole."

There's been much discussion in recent years involving neuroscience and the teen brain and what is an appropriate sentence for young persons convicted of violent crimes.

Van Houten was a drug-consuming teenage runaway who had experienced a traumatic abortion when she met Manson, in his mid-30s at the time. Manson then plied his followers with drugs and used sex to manipulate them, when not subjecting them to his violent prophecies.