NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, who gets his first parole hearing Wednesday, deserves to be released from prison, his supporters say, a decade after he was convicted of killing his neighbor, because he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice and has been a model inmate.

But the victim's relatives want Skakel kept in prison the rest of his life, saying he was properly convicted and has shown no remorse.

Skakel, 52, is serving 20 years to life for beating Martha Moxley to death with a golf club in 1975 in Greenwich when they were 15-year-old neighbors. Skakel is a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy.

"There's never been a person more deserving of parole than Michael Skakel," his attorney, Hope Seeley, said in a statement. "His conviction was a miscarriage of justice, but that aside, his further incarceration would also be a miscarriage of justice in light of the fact that he should have been sentenced as a juvenile."

Skakel has lost appeals challenging his conviction that raised the juvenile issue and other claims.

Martha Moxley's mother, Dorothy, and brother, John, want him kept in prison for life. Skakel has shown no remorse, John Moxley said.

"Michael Skakel is representative of the most dangerous aspect of our society in that he was raised in an environment in which he was exposed to and at some point embraced the mindset that the rules of our general society did not then and do not now apply to him," Moxley wrote in a letter to the parole board. "And, I believe that Michael Skakel's inbred sense of self and his self-confessed quick temper will always represent a threat to society."

He said the murder continues to haunt him. "No child should ever have to witness the pain I have seen my parents go through, which I know in my heart contributed to my father's early death," Moxley wrote.

Skakel's brother, John, said in a statement that criticism of his family was unfair.

"We have been hurting just as long -- because we know that Michael did not kill Martha Moxley," John Skakel said.

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