After murderer Paul Crowder was granted parole last year, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed it.
Today, the Board of Parole Hearings, California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation once again determined the killer of a 17-year-old Anaheim basketball star on her prom night should be set free.
The ball is now in Gov. Jerry Brown's court.
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On June 1, 1991, Berlyn Cosman was sleeping in her room at the Sterling Crown
Suites Hotel in Anaheim after her prom when drunk, laughing
and then-19-year-old Crowder walked in, waved a gun around, shot the Crescenta Valley
High School basketball star and fled. He was sentenced in November 1991 to 15 years to life in state prison for
the second-degree murder of Cosman and four additional years for
personal use of a firearm.
The state parole board voted in 2010 to let Crowder loose, but Schwarzenegger invoked his authority to reverse the board's decision, citing Crowder's lack of insight into and
responsibility for the murder. That set up another parole hearing at Deuel Vocational Institution, the Tracy prison holding Crowder. But the hearing was continued in May after Crowder's attorney objected to a psychological report on his client.
As they have all along, the Anaheim Police Department and Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) have objected to now 39-year-old Crowder's parole, arguing that he still fails to take responsibility for the crime by
claiming the gun was accidentally discharged, and has made no
rehabilitation effort by only taking one anger management course in 20
years of imprisonment.
But the parole board did not see things that way meeting in Tracy today, so the OCDA is forced to take its objections to Gov. Brown.
Previous coverage:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.