List: American prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment

by likeorhate

•  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender. Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys – many of whom were of African or Asian descent – between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1987 and 1991. His murders were particularly gruesome, involving rape, torture, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by a fellow Columbia Correctional Institution inmate.

  

  42.9%
  

  21.4%
  

  35.7%
  
•  Leonard Peltier

  Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is an American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who was convicted and sentenced in 1977 to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents during a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There has been debate over Peltier’s guilt and the fairness of his trial.

  

  53.8%
  

  15.4%
  

  30.8%
  
•  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook on April 24, 1954) is an American convicted murderer, sentenced to death for the December 9, 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He has been described as "perhaps the best known Death-Row prisoner in the world", and his sentence is one of the most debated today. Before his arrest he was a member of the Black Panther Party, an activist, part-time cab driver, journalist, radio personality, news commentator and broadcaster.

  

  66.7%
  

  22.2%
  

  11.1%
  
•  Samuel Mudd

  Samuel Alexander Mudd I, M.D. (December 20, 1833 – January 10, 1883) was an American physician who was convicted and imprisoned for aiding and conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the 1865 assassination of U. S. President Abraham Lincoln. He was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson and released from prison four years later.

  

  22.2%
  

  55.6%
  

  22.2%
  
•  Charles Manson

  Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders, carried out by members of the group at his instruction.

  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Assata Shakur

  Assata Olugbala Shakur (born July 16, 1947 as JoAnne Deborah Byron, married name Chesimard) is an African-American activist and escaped convict who was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA). Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was accused of several crimes, of which she would never be charged, and made the subject of a multi-state manhunt.

  

  66.7%
  

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  33.3%
  
•  Christopher Scarver

  Christopher J. Scarver (born July 6, 1969) is a convicted murderer who, while in prison, killed Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesse Anderson. He described the deed as "the work of God". Scarver was the second son of five children born in Milwaukee. He attended Madison University High School before dropping out in the eleventh grade. Eventually his mother forced him to leave the house because of his increasing alcoholism. Scarver was hired as a trainee carpenter in a Youth Conservation Corps job program.

  

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  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  William Calley

  William Laws Calley (born June 8, 1943) is a convicted American war criminal. He was the U.S. Army officer found guilty of ordering the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War.

  

  25.0%
  

  25.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  H. Rap Brown

  Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (جميل عبد الله الامين; born October 4, 1943, as Hubert Gerold Brown), also known as H. Rap Brown, came to prominence in the 1960s as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later the Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party. He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation during that period that "violence is as American as cherry pie", as well as once stating that "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down".

  

  25.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  25.0%
  
•  Wayne Williams

  Wayne Bertram Williams (born May 27, 1958) is an American alleged serial killer and was identified as the key suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders that occurred in 1979 through 1981. In January 1982, Williams was found guilty of the murder of two adult men. After his conviction, the Atlanta police declared that an additional 23 of the 29 child murders were solved, with Williams shown to be the murderer.

  

  100.0%
  

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•  Ira Einhorn

  Ira Samuel Einhorn, a.k.a. "The Unicorn Killer" (born May 15, 1940), is a former American activist of the 1960s and 1970s who is now serving a life sentence for the 1977 murder of Holly Maddux.

  

  0.0%
  

  100.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Leopold and Loeb

  Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 29, 1971) and Richard Albert Loeb (June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and were sentenced to life imprisonment. The duo were motivated to murder Franks by their desire to commit a perfect crime. Once apprehended, Leopold and Loeb retained Clarence Darrow as counsel for the defense.

  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  50.0%
  
•  Robert Franklin Stroud

  Robert Franklin Stroud (January 28, 1890 – November 21, 1963), known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz", was a Federal American prisoner who reared and sold birds and became an ornithologist. Despite his nickname, he actually only kept birds at Leavenworth penitentiary, prior to being transferred to Alcatraz, where he was not allowed to keep pets.

  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Susan Smith

  Susan Leigh Vaughan Smith (born September 26, 1971) is an American woman sentenced to life in prison for murdering her children. Born in Union, South Carolina, and a former student of the University of South Carolina Union, she was convicted on July 22, 1995 of murdering her two sons, 3-year-old Michael Daniel Smith, born October 10, 1991, and 14-month-old Alexander Tyler Smith, born August 5, 1993.

  

  100.0%
  

  0.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Jesse Timmendequas

  Jesse K. Timmendequas (born April 15, 1961) is a convicted murderer who on July 29, 1994 raped and murdered his neighbor, seven-year-old Megan Kanka, in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. The murder led the New Jersey Legislature to pass Megan's Law, which requires convicted sex offenders to notify the local police department when they move into a neighborhood.

  

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•  Robert Hanssen

  Robert Philip Hanssen (born 18 April 1944) is a former American FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. He began working for the FBI and then defected to the KGB while continuing to work for the FBI. The codename of the FBI for the spy before they found out it was him was Graysuit.

  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Aldrich Ames

  Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later Russia.

  

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•  Yolanda Saldívar

  Yolanda Saldívar (born September 19, 1960) was convicted in 1995 for the murder of Tejano music singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas on March 31, 1995. After the shooting, Yolanda Saldivar kept police at bay for about 10 hours while she held a gun to her own head.

  

  50.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Buford O. Furrow, Jr.

  Buford O'Neal Furrow, Jr. (born November 25, 1961) is a former Aryan Nations member and security guard who perpetrated the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting in August 1999. As of 2009, he is serving a life sentence in an Indiana federal prison.

  

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•  Eric Robert Rudolph

  Eric Robert Rudolph (born September 19, 1966), also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American far-right radical described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a terrorist. Between 1996 and 1998, Rudolph committed a series of bombings across the southern United States which killed two people and injured at least 150 others. Rudolph declared that his bombings were part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion and the "homosexual agenda".

  

  100.0%
  

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•  D. C. Stephenson

  David Curtiss "Steve" Stephenson (21 August 1891 – 28 June 1966) was an American Grand Dragon (state leader) of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. state of Indiana and 22 other Northern states. He is considered to have been one of the most successful Klan leaders up until his downfall after his conviction for murder. His trial and imprisonment contributed to the end of the second wave of Klan activity in the 1920s.

  

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•  Angelo Buono, Jr.

  Angelo Buono, Jr. (October 5, 1934 – September 21, 2002) was an American serial killer. Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi together are known as the Hillside Stranglers.

  

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  100.0%
  

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•  Kenneth Bianchi

  Kenneth Alessio Bianchi (born May 22, 1951) is an American serial killer. Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, Jr. , together are known as the Hillside Stranglers. He is serving a term of life imprisonment in Washington. Bianchi is also a suspect in the Alphabet murders, three unsolved murders in his home city of Rochester.

  

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•  Byron De La Beckwith

  Byron De La Beckwith (November 9, 1920 – January 21, 2001) was an American white supremacist and Klansman who was convicted of killing civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

  

  100.0%
  

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•  Andrew Luster

  Andrew Stuart Luster (born December 15, 1963) is the great-grandson of cosmetics giant Max Factor, Sr. and an heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune. He grew up in Malibu, California and attended Winward School in Santa Monica. Convicted of a series of rapes in 2003, Luster had been supported by a $3.1 million trust fund as he traveled and surfed at various beaches.

  

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