‘The System’ Gets Blame for Parole of Dangerous Killer

When a woman reporter told Parole Officer Hugh Alcott that she wanted to interview convicted murderer Raymond George after his release to a North Hollywood neighborhood two weeks ago, Alcott responded in horror:

“I think you’re crazy as hell if you do. He likes to chop up women.”

The next day, Deputy Dist. Atty. Roger Kelly, who successfully prosecuted George for killing a state police officer and permanently crippling a college student with a machete, said he wanted to know where George was living on parole “because I don’t want to be anywhere around there.” Kelly described George as “one of the most dangerous individuals I’ve ever encountered, a real clear and present danger to society.”

From the Los Angeles Police Department, which sent North Hollywood officers a circular warning them to use “extreme caution” with George, to George’s neighbors, who were frightened by the cautionary circular after it was leaked, to those in the criminal justice system who have known him for years, George’s new freedom evokes a common response: Alarm.

It is usually followed by some form of the question: Why isn’t he locked up?

The explanation for what happened in the case of George, 36, is both simple and complicated.

The simple version, as state corrections authorities have stressed repeatedly, is that the law requires that George be turned loose, under certain conditions. One of them is that he take a daily dose of a drug that is supposed to control what a parole supervisor called “a delicate psychiatric condition” of paranoid schizophrenia.

The complicated answer lies in changes in the laws, going back 20 years, regarding sentencing of criminals and locking up mental patients against their will. It is those changes that enabled George to slide through the system, the beneficiary of a series of breaks because of the timing of his case.

The publicity given George’s North Hollywood address and protests from neighbors prodded parole authorities to move him Tuesday to a new, secret location, which they describe only as a “staff-operated facility” where he is under 24-hour surveillance, in Los Angeles but outside the San Fernando Valley.

George was originally convicted of second-degree murder for the Oct. 21, 1974, killing of David Jack, 21, a state police officer who was guarding a state building in downtown Los Angeles. Paroled after eight years and four months, he was rearrested three years later and imprisoned for carrying a concealed knife.

The killing climaxed a series of four assaults in 1974 in Los Angeles County. In the first, George attacked a 21-year-old college student with a machete, leaving her permanently disabled and disfigured, according to police records.

Five days later, when he was stopped by two police officers, he disarmed one of them and shot him four times with his own gun. The officer survived after extensive surgery.

Later that year, George was stopped by two sheriff’s deputies on suspicion of stealing car parts, fought with them and tried to take their guns. He was arrested and released on bail. Fifteen days later, he killed Officer Jack.

Indeterminate Sentence

George was sentenced in 1975 to 22 1/2-years-to-life. Under the system then in force, George’s sentence was for an indeterminate period, leaving his release to be determined by a parole board responsible for weighing evidence of rehabilitation against a prisoner’s danger to society.

But the system was being revised. Between 1971 and 1978, California converted from one philosophy of criminal justice, which stressed rehabilitation, to another predicated on punishment. The purpose was to give parole boards less voice in determining how long prisoners remained behind bars. Only first-degree murderers remained subject to parole board discretion, and George’s conviction was for second-degree murder.

Under the transitional system, prisoners such as George were given new, fixed terms by a sentencing board, but became eligible for parole before completing them.

George received a fixed term of 12 years and 4 months, probably well short of what he would have served under the old system, said Pat Kenady, assistant director of the state Department of Correction’s liaison office to the Legislature. That made George eligible to be paroled after eight years and five months.

Even though the board had been instructed to give prisoners the benefit of lower terms, with allowances for special circumstances such as having previous convictions, “sometimes it’s hard to understand how they came up with these (new) sentences,” Kenady said.

“A lot of people were let out. I don’t have an accurate figure but it was probably a couple of hundred for second-degree murder.”

In the years after the conversion, sentences for virtually all major crimes were lengthened and the parole board’s discretion over second-degree murderers was restored. But in the meantime, George “escaped both systems,” Kenady said.

“If he had been sentenced after 1978 for that, he would have gotten 15 years to life,” Kenady said. “Today he wouldn’t be eligible for parole for at least 10 years, and there would be discretion all the way up. The board could decide whether he was a danger to the public, and if they decided to release him, now the governor could intervene.”

That is because the timing of George’s case also eluded the strictures of Proposition 89, a constitutional amendment passed in November, which took effect this year. The new law empowers the governor to revoke the paroles of first- or second-degree murderers within 30 days of the parole board’s decision.

That law would not have applied to George’s latest parole on the weapons law conviction, but he would have been subject to it if he were still imprisoned on his original murder conviction.

Corrections officials say that because his case was handled during the sentencing “gap,” George was allowed to go free on parole on his first murder conviction, be rearrested, convicted again, sent back to prison and paroled again--all during a period when under current law he might otherwise have been behind bars on the first conviction.

George was not alone in benefitting from what some state correctional officials now refer to as the “sentence gap” or “interregnum” of the mid-1970s.

“We have some real anomalies coming out of this period,” which created an entire generation of prisoners who served comparatively short sentences, Kenady said, including many who figure in controversies about the system, such as Lawrence Singleton, Theodore Streleski and Archie Fain.

‘Confusing Period’

“The Raymond Georges of this world, the Streleskis, Singleton, the problems with them all date from that confusing period,” he said.

Singleton, convicted of raping a young woman and chopping off her forearms, was paroled in 1986 after serving eight years. Officials had to move him repeatedly as his location was revealed, setting off protests in one Northern California community after another.

Streleski served seven years for killing his Stanford University mathematics professor by hammering his skull in 1978. He left prison saying he felt no remorse. Authorities said he had been given the maximum term possible at the time.

Fain was originally sentenced to death for killing a 17-year-old boy and raping two high school girls in rural Stanislaus County in 1967.

The sentence was overturned on appeal and converted to life in prison. During the changeover in the system, however, Fain obtained parole dates, provoking an outpouring of protest, including a 62,500-signature petition. Deukmejian’s efforts to block the parole led to a showdown between the judicial and executive branches that the courts won in 1983, setting the stage for passage of Proposition 89.

George was paroled on the murder and assault convictions in 1983. In 1986, he was convicted of carrying a concealed knife and was sentenced to four years. With credit for working and for good behavior, he served three years and was automatically paroled this month.

State law required that George be returned to the county where he was convicted, said Jerry DiMaggio, regional administrator of the parole division.

His release this month was subject to psychiatric treatment for mental problems diagnosed in prison. There are indications that those problems extended back at least to 1985, when shortly after his first parole expired, Los Angeles police officers found him wandering in the street, naked, with a steak knife plunged into one of his eyes. He had tried to blind himself, police said, but his sight survived.

Complex Review System

Again, George may have benefited from timing. At one time, such conduct could have gotten him committed to a mental hospital. But experts say it has become far more difficult to commit anyone to a mental hospital involuntarily in California since the landmark Lanterman-Petris-Short Act went into effect in 1969 with the aim of eliminating past abuses.

Because the law now provides a complex array of judicial reviews of patients’ rights and limitations on authority, it is tough today to commit mentally disturbed people. In Los Angeles County, judges reject about 20% of commitment requests, according to the county Department of Mental Health. The number of patients has fallen from 37,500 held in 10 state mental hospitals in 1959 to about 5,000 in five hospitals today.

In George’s case, a condition of parole is that he take daily doses of drugs that are intended to calm the urge to violence.

Alcott, his parole supervisor, said a psychiatric examination in prison, where George was undergoing therapy, found him “totally in remission and cooperative.” He said George “seems calmer today, and he understands he’s got to keep a low profile and stay on his medication.”

Daily supervision by parole agents will ensure that George takes the drugs, Alcott said. However, the supervision will stop when his parole expires in about a year.

Mental health officials would not discuss George’s case specifically. But Dr. Paul Grossman, a UCLA psychiatry professor, said the odds are not high that someone being treated forcibly with the drugs will continue taking them voluntarily.

Studies show that at least 25%, and perhaps 50%, of young males stop taking the drugs when supervision ends, he said.

“The drugs are inherently unpleasant,” he said. “They produce a syndrome called akathesia, a disturbing restlessness, a compulsion to stay in motion which cannot be easily quelled. At the same time, they make you sleepy, sleepy but unable to sit still--a very unpleasant sensation.”

He said they also have side effects, such as tremors, muscle rigidity and fixed eyes. “The tongue gets stuck and protrudes out of the mouth and you can’t get it back inside. Your eyes stare upward and you can’t make them stop. It frightens them.”

Also, he said, schizophrenics find it humiliating to admit they have a mental problem. “Taking the medication is a daily acknowledgement that you’re mentally ill, a constant reminder of your humiliation. Patients go off the drugs to deny their illness.”

When George will be allowed to move into an apartment of his own, and what will happen next, are undecided, said DiMaggio, the parole supervisor.

“It depends on what happens once the interest dies down,” he said.