John Flanagan (AP)
Gov. Andrew Cuomo must remove the state Board of Parole members who voted to free cop-killer Herman Bell, state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan demanded Thursday.
“Herman Bell is a callous and depraved cop-killer who took the lives of two police officers just because they wore the uniform. He has forfeited his ability to live outside of the four walls of a prison cell,” Flanagan said in a statement.
“The members of the Parole Board who made this decision should be removed immediately.”
Bell — one of three Black Liberation Army thugs who killed NYPD Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones in 1971 — was granted parole by the board following an interview with him earlier this Monday.
The trio lured the cops to a Harlem housing project with a phony 911 call and then opened fire. Jones died immediately, but a wounded Piagentini begged for his life before Bell finished him off with the cop’s own gun.
Bell — who protested his innocence all the way up until 2012, insisting that he was a political prisoner who’d been framed — had already been turned down by the board seven times since 2004 on the grounds that parole would “deprecate the severity of this crime.”
But on his eighth try this month, the panel agreed to grant his freedom on the basis that he is unlikely to reoffend.