How Much Time For This Kind Of Crime?

Update January 23, 2011: The petition and letter-writing  campaign referred to below were partially successful. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger granted clemency on January 2, 2011, to Sara Kruzan, a woman who, at the age of 16, shot dead George Gilbert Howard, her alleged pimp. Schwarzenegger commuted Kruzan’s life sentence without the possibility of parole to life to 25 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole, saying that her life sentence was “excessive." She is still in jail.

Update (November 2010): you are invited to help free Sara Kruzan who has spent 16 years in a US prison for the murder of her pimp, who molested and prostituted her from the age of 13. Click here to sign one such petition.  Residents of USA can send a letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger here.

Susan notes (November 2009): this moral dilemma leaves me torn: a young girl kills the ruthless and manipulative pimp who has entrapped and abused her. She is then sentenced to life in prison without parole for his murder. I'm 100% against violence and killing; and yet, somehow, something doesn't seem right... It feels to me like she has gone from one prison to another...

Sara Kruzan was 11 years old, a middle school student from Riverside, California, when she met a man -- he called himself GG -- who was almost three times her age. GG took her under his wing; he would buy her gifts, take her and her friends rollerskating. "He was like a father figure," she recalls in the video below.

Despite suffering severe bouts of depression as a child, until then, Kruzan was a good student, an "overachiever" in her words. But her mother was abusive and addicted to drugs; as for her father, she had only met him a couple of times. So, more and more, GG filled in...