The specific nature of what that death resolved and what it left unresolved is not documented in the public record. What can be said is this: the appeal effort had ended three years earlier, with the Supreme Court’s 2004 refusal to disturb the conviction. The legal question had been settled by every court that considered it, including the highest court in the country. The man was dead. The conviction stood.
What remained, after Charles’s death, was the biographical fact: a son whose father was a convicted murderer, who had maintained a relationship with that father throughout his adult life, who had spent significant resources trying to undo the conviction, and who had built one of the most varied and distinguished careers in American film and television simultaneously with all of that. The biographical fact does not resolve the moral question — it doesn’t tell us what it means, how to weigh the loyalty against the crime, what the relationship reveals about either man — and it doesn’t need to. It is what it is.
He has not, in the years since his father’s death, spoken extensively about it. The absence of sustained public commentary on the father’s death is itself a kind of information: it suggests that the death was processed privately, as a private matter, rather than transformed into a public statement. He has continued making films and television and living in Maui and advocating for marijuana and hemp legalization and practicing jiu-jitsu and being a father to his daughters. The father’s death was one event in a life that has continued to be full of events.