Only weeks after his parole conditions were lifted by the state of California and he was released to society, a 67-year-old convicted murderer in Los Angeles who killed a woman in 1982 was charged with the stabbing murder of another woman.
According to court documents, Eddie Allen Harris murdered a woman in South Los Angeles on March 23.
“According to LAPD, officers responded to E. 59th Place & South Main Street in south Los Angeles at around 5:30 a.m., where they found a deceased Black woman in an alley with lacerations across her body,” FOX 11 reported. Citing court documents, FOX 11 noted that in 1982, “Harris was convicted of murdering another woman in Los Angeles County.” Harris “raped and stabbed a woman to death before leaving her body in an alley.”
Police arrested Harris on April 8.
The state granted Harris parole in 2018 after over 30 years in prison. His parole conditions were terminated this year.
Larry Morse, Legislative Director for the California District Attorneys Association, told FOX 11, “There’s just too many awful examples of people who commit horrible, egregious crimes in later years. It’s an appalling story.”
Morse noted the California penal code was amended in 2020 when California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 3234 into law, allowing prisoners to be eligible for parole if they were 50 or older and had served a minimum of 20 years of continuous incarceration on their current sentence.
Morse asserted, “A lot of criminals are still very active and very capable of inflicting unimaginable pain and suffering on people after 50 years of age. There is a headlong rush in Sacramento to pass any and everything that can be characterized as criminal justice reform. The fact of the matter is a great deal of what is coming out of Sacramento these days is not reform, it’s reckless.”
EXCLUSIVE: A 67 y/o man convicted in 1982 of raping & murdering a woman in L.A. was granted parole after 30+ yrs in prison. He spent only 3 yrs on parole before the state terminated his supervision. Now, he's charged with committing a new murder weeks after that decision. @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/QTfO8Armg2
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) April 16, 2021
In December 2020, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon issued a directive in which he stated, “Justice demands that the thousands of people currently serving prison terms imposed in Los Angeles County under earlier, outdated policies, are also entitled to the benefit of these new policies. Many of these people have been incarcerated for decades or are serving a ‘virtual life sentence’ designed to imprison them for life.”
Gascon stated in the directive, “Accordingly, this Office will reevaluate and consider for resentencing people who have already served 15 years in prison. Experts on post-conviction justice recommend that resentencing be allowed for all people (not just those convicted as children or as emerging adults) and some experts recommend an earlier date for reevaluating continued imprisonment.”
“Many people accepted plea offers to manslaughter, made by this Office in order to avoid a conviction for murder,” the directive added. “It is this Office’s policy that where a person took a plea to manslaughter or another charge in lieu of a trial at which the petitioner could have been convicted of felony murder, murder under the natural and probable consequences doctrine, attempted murder under the natural and probable consequences doctrine, or another theory covered by Senate Bill 1437, that person is eligible for relief under section 1170.95.”