Poor, poor Phil Spector

[Lightyear]

You, sir, are just a few short years away from looking forward to the early bird special at the Golden Coral

[Pilgrim]

I understand what he's saying too, yet I still don't have an ounce of sympathy.

Lana Clarkson is just as dead as if she'd been killed by a habitual criminal.

I'm with ya.  He dealt the hand and he has to play it out.

[Highlander]

Hopefully the rest of the guys are playing with a marked deck...

[uwe]

May I raise my squeamish, liberal minority opinion here? 


More than social status, I think it is also an age thing. It's a fact of life that there are not too many 70 year old inmates with a still violent nature in their daily prison routine, while testosterone-charged thirty-year olds go mad and aggressive with it. Unless you believe that all prisons should be darwinistic survival dens where the strongest live better than the weakest, the two age groups should be sensibly kept apart in different tracts.

Phil Spector might deserve to die in prison, but he doesn't deserve to be bullied until he does. That's not a viable concept in any penal system. The state has sentenced him to prison, not to being bullied. If he spends the rest of his life tending the audio part of the prison library thinking why it was wrong to shoot Ms Clarkson then hopefully that is ample retribution for her; him being threatend by other inmates won't make her come alive either.

[the mojo hobo]

But is he really being bullied or just fearful of it? The notorious murders mentioned by name are in his age group.  Manson is four years older than Spector, and I'll bet he's just as scary as he was 40 years ago.

[uwe]

Admittedly, Herr Manson did not age gracefully!  He is one of those rare things in real life, normally relegated to horror movies, a vicious intelligent nutcase.

I have no idea whether Herr Spector is being bullied (not that he deserves a little for it for some of his headachy productions in the past, I challenge anybody to hear all three CDs of the remastered Harrison opus "All Things Must Pass" without some Tylonol!!!), but my guess is yes. For being a celebrity who's deemed to have money and influence, for being an old man not at the height of his physical strength and for being a novice to prison gang life.

[OldManC]

It's hard to say as I don't know California prisons other than what I've read, but I have a nephew in Utah State Prison who is housed with some of the worst offenders known in this state (contrary to what one might think, the prison in Utah is as vicious and dangerous as any other in the U.S.). He's not in the general population (his case was very high profile and he hasn't been there long). Are Phil Spector and Charles Manson even in the general population at Corcoran? I'd find that kind of surprising if they were.

[Dave W]

He says he's in 24/7 lockdown in his 3x7 cell. And I don't see any reference to him actually being threatened. He just thinks he's better because he still doesn't see himself as a murderer. He still doesn't take responsibilty for what he did.

[OldManC]

He still doesn't take responsibilty for what he did.

I don't know how many years he's got left but all the time he has on his hands might do the trick! Whether he meant to or not, Lana Clarkson is dead because she went home with him that night and he pulled out a gun. Maybe the fear will be a good part of his so called rehabilitation.

[rahock]

Imagine my best Walter Brennan cowboy movie voice (which is actually pretty good) " I reckon we best give 'em a fair trial and hang 'em".
Rick