Just after 1 a.m. on July 29, 1976, David Berkowitz walked up to a parked Oldsmobile in the Bronx and fired five shots at two young women sitting inside.
Half a century later, the thing that keeps his name in circulation is not the anniversary. It is a parole bill that would almost certainly never let him out.
Donna Lauria, 18, died where she sat. Her friend Jody Valenti was seriously wounded and survived. Neither of them knew they were the opening of anything. Over the next twelve months the shootings continued until six people were dead and seven wounded, and a city of eight million rearranged its summer around a man nobody could name yet.
The Case That Rewrote More Than the Tabloids
The cultural memory of Son of Sam is the blackout summer, the Daily News letters, the parking ticket that finally did it. The legal memory is more consequential.
New York’s Son of Sam law, passed in 1977 while Berkowitz was awaiting trial, was written to stop him from selling his story and keeping the money. It was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1991 as a First Amendment violation, then rewritten in a narrower form that survives today and has been copied in some version by most states. An entire branch of American law about criminals profiting from their crimes exists because of what happened on that Bronx street.
The other legacy is quieter and it is the one operating right now. Berkowitz became the template for a particular kind of political argument: the name you invoke when you want a conversation to stop.
Twelve Denials Is the Point, Not the Problem
Berkowitz is 73 and has been in custody since 1977. He has gone before the Board of Parole twelve times. He has been denied twelve times, most recently after a prison interview at Shawangunk in May 2024. At one point he stopped seeking release altogether, saying he had already been freed in a way the board could not grant. He now signs himself Son of Hope.
Sitting in Albany is the Elder Parole bill, S454, sponsored by Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and referred to the Senate’s Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee in January 2025, where it has stayed. It would require the Board of Parole to interview incarcerated people 55 and older who have served at least fifteen years, within sixty days of their fifty-fifth birthday or the last day of that fifteenth year, whichever comes later. It does not release anyone. It does not shorten a sentence. If parole is denied the person gets written notice, another look within twenty-four months, and the board files quarterly public reporting on how it decided.
Berkowitz would qualify for a hearing. He already gets hearings. He has been refused at every one of them.
That is the part that gets lost, and it is the whole argument. The system already has the discretion the bill’s critics are worried about losing, and it has used that discretion to say no twelve consecutive times to the most recognizable name in the building. If Elder Parole passed tomorrow, the most likely outcome for Berkowitz is a thirteenth denial.
Who the Bill Is Actually About
The people the bill would reach are not household names. They are men and women in their sixties and seventies serving long sentences for crimes committed decades ago, in a prison system now paying for geriatric care it was never built to provide. The case its supporters make rests on a well-documented pattern in corrections research, that people released in later life reoffend at markedly lower rates than younger releasees, which is why the age threshold sits where it does.
Opponents know all of this. It is why the argument is almost never made about them. It is made about Berkowitz, or about the handful of others whose names still land, because “should a 71-year-old who has served 40 years get an interview” is a much harder case to lose than “should Son of Sam go free.”
This is a familiar move and worth naming plainly: build the rule around the worst possible beneficiary, then apply the resulting rule to thousands of people who look nothing like him. New York has spent decades doing sentencing policy this way, and we wrote last week about the same instinct at the other end of the process, when a judge handed down life without parole and framed the sentence around motive and notoriety.
The survivors are entitled to their view, and they hold it fiercely. Robert Violante, who was shot and lost the sight in one eye in the final attack of the series, said earlier this year that he sincerely doubts Berkowitz is going to heaven and that he is lucky not to be in hell already. No policy argument obligates a victim to be magnanimous, and none should try.
But a parole system is not a memorial. It is supposed to answer one question, which is whether a specific person presents a risk today. When the answer is determined instead by whether the public remembers the name, the board has stopped doing the assessment and started doing the polling.
What the Anniversary Actually Marks
Fifty years is long enough that most New Yorkers alive during that summer are now the age Elder Parole is written about.
The reckoning worth having on this date is not whether Berkowitz deserves freedom. Twelve boards have answered that, and there is no evident appetite on any of them for a thirteenth answer that differs. It is whether a state can build a functioning parole system while one 1976 shooting still sets the terms of the debate, and whether the thousands of people currently aging out of their sentences across the state should keep serving time for the political convenience of a name that was never theirs.