More than half a century after she helped stab to death a woman she had never met, Van Houten still has the advantage over her hapless victim.

She’s alive.

She can attend parole hearings.

She can express remorse.

She can benefit from the advocacy of people who seem to believe that 53 years in prison puts paid to the permanence of death.

Most important of all, Van Houten has time.

Time to live, to learn and to hope that the passage of the years and the decades would, in effect, lessen the carnage she and her friends inflicted on Rosemary LaBianca in August 1969.

This seems to be the case.

Van Houten, who is 73, is as close as she has ever been to gaining parole after being convicted of participating, as a 19-year-old member of Charles Manson’s “Family,” in the murder of Rosemary LaBianca, who was 38 when she died, and her husband, Leno, in their Los Angeles home.

The previous night, two of the cult members who accompanied Van Houten into the LaBiancas’ home — Charles “Tex” Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel — along with Susan Atkins slaughtered five other people, including actress Sharon Tate, in Bel Air.

Known as the “Helter Skelter” murders — the name Manson gave to the black-white race war he told his followers he hoped to instigate — those two crimes are among the more infamous in American history.

This is due both to the savage nature — the murderers inflicted more than 160 stab wounds, as well as shooting and beating the victims — and, perhaps more so, because three of the killers, including Van Houten, were young women. Their obedience to Manson was so slavish that they not only killed strangers, but during the months-long trial in 1970 and 1971 they laughed, joked and sang in court while witnesses testified to their butchery.

The jury in that trial convicted Van Houten of two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy. Jurors also sentenced Van Houten, along with the other defendants (Tex Watson was tried separately) to die in California’s gas chamber.

(Manson was also convicted, although he didn’t actually murder any of the victims, because the criminal concept of conspiracy made him equally culpable.)

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi told the jury that if the Manson killers didn’t deserve to be executed, then capital punishment was meaningless.

I agree with Bugliosi, whose 1974 account of the case, “Helter Skelter,” is the best-selling true crime book ever.

Yet in 1972, less than two years after the jury sentenced Van Houten and the others to die, California’s Supreme Court overturned the death penalty. Although capital punishment was later reinstated, the court’s decision had the immediate, and irreversible, effect of commuting Van Houten’s sentence from death to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.

That last phrase is key.

In 1972 California law didn’t allow for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

This, of course, is precisely the punishment Van Houten and the other Manson killers, having had their lives spared, would have received.

Instead they have all occasionally been eligible to apply for parole, as far back as 1978 (one year after the California legislature reinstated the death penalty, a decision the state’s voters endorsed, through a proposition, in 1978).

None has been released.

(Atkins died in prison in 2009, followed by Manson in 2017. Watson and Krenwinkel are still in prison in California.)

A California parole board five times has recommended that Van Houten be released, most recently in 2020. In each case the California governor — Gavin Newsom in 2020 — has overruled the parole board.

But on May 30 a panel of the California Appeals Court voted 2-1 to overturn Newsom’s decision. If that stands — Newsom could appeal to the California Supreme Court — then Van Houten would be released.

Some pundits would celebrate that milestone.

Van Houten’s supporters over the years include actor Johnny Depp and director John Waters.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board recently opined that Van Houten should be “allowed to live out the rest of her life among us.”

The Times’ editorial noted that Van Houten has been a model prisoner. She has earned a college degree. She has worked to help other inmates.

These facts are beyond dispute.

They’re also, in my view, irrelevant as regards Van Houten’s future.

The Times editorial board, pointing out that until now it had supported governors’ denial of parole for Van Houten, contends that concern about Van Houten’s potential for violence, stemming from the “horror” of her crime, “has been superseded by the facts of Van Houten’s comportment for more than half a century. Van Houten should be released.”

This is nonsensical.

Van Houten’s comportment in prison isn’t a relevant factor in determining her punishment. What matters is what she did before she was sent to prison. She joined a cult and willingly — gleefully, by multiple accounts, including her own — plunged a knife into a woman she did not know.

To argue in favor of Van Houten’s release is to ignore, or at least to diminish, the absolute finality of death.

To imply that a person, through their subsequent good works, can partially offset their worst action.

In some instances this seems to me a valid concept. A person who steals money can pay restitution and leave the victim in the same position, financially speaking, as before the crime.

But murder, of course, is different.

It cannot be undone.

For Leslie Van Houten, the ability to truly pay her criminal debt dissolved, immediately and permanently, when Rosemary LaBianca, her blood soaking the carpet of her own bedroom, took her final breath.

To grant Van Houten parole, or to call for her release, is to ignore this reality.

It is also to ignore that Van Houten, for all the admirable things she has accomplished in prison, did nothing to earn the possibility of parole.

This is a gift, bestowed upon her by a decision of the California Supreme Court in a case which didn’t involve Van Houten.

It was an act of mercy, and one that gave Van Houten decades of life she would not have had otherwise.

This is more than she deserved.

And immeasurably more than she gave to Rosemary LaBianca.