He has said, in a 1988 People magazine interview, that Charles “took no valid part in my upbringing” and that he didn’t feel he “was much of a father.” He has also said that after making contact with Charles in the early 1980s, he came to see him “as someone who could be a friend more than someone who was a father.” These two statements, together, describe the specific relational recalibration that often happens when an adult child meets the absent parent: the parent-child relationship cannot be recovered, because the parent was not there for the years when it would have been formed, and what is built in its place is something more deliberately chosen and therefore more genuinely voluntary than the conventional parent-child bond.
## Alan Berg, Sam Degelia, and the Shape of a Criminal Career
Before Charles Harrelson became famous for killing a federal judge, he had already killed at least once by conviction, and had been tried for and acquitted of killing at least once more.
The Alan Harry Berg case was the first. Berg was killed in 1968, and Harrelson was charged with the murder. He was represented at trial by Percy Foreman, a defense attorney of considerable reputation in Texas criminal law, and he was acquitted on September 22, 1970, by a jury in Angleton, Texas. The acquittal does not establish innocence — juries acquit for many reasons, and an acquittal is a finding that the prosecution has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, not a finding that the defendant did not commit the act. But the acquittal is the legal record, and it is the legal record that stands.