JUSTICE: The Chessman Affair

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Behind the bleak concrete walls of California’s San Quentin state prison, a Death Row guard handed a brief note, signed by the warden, to the pale, heavy-browed prisoner in Cell 2455. “Dear Sir,” it began.

“On this date I received Death Warrant in your case . . .” The presiding Superior Court judge, the note went on, had set the date for the prisoner’s execution, a date seven weeks away: March 28, 1952.

But Death Row Prisoner Caryl Chessman still had a lot of life ahead of him. In the eight years since he read the warden’s note, Convict Chessman, 38, has written four books, survived eight different execution dates, outlived the judge who sentenced him to death, and become the world’s most famous prisoner, center of impassioned arguments on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week, with Chessman scheduled to die in San Quentin’s green octagonal gas chamber next May 2 (execution date No. 9), the California legislature met in Sacramento in a special session called by Governor Edmund Brown, ostensibly to debate capital punishment but in effect to decide the fate of Caryl Whittier Chessman.

“Let Him Live!” The legislature’s capital-punishment hearing took place against the stir and clamor of mounting agitation to save Chessman from the “green room,” as Death Row inmates call it. An auto caravan pulled into Sacramento bringing 384 University of California faculty signatures on a petition urging abolition of capital punishment. A rodeo rider, billed as a “minuteman,” drove his tired horse from San Francisco to Sacramento, picking up save-Chessman signatures along the way. An unemployed schoolteacher named Norbert Nicholas was in the fourth day of a save-Chessman hunger strike in Sacramento. At the capitol building, a sprinkling of demonstrators displayed placards reading STOP INSTITUTIONALIZED MURDER and LOVE, NOT HATE. After the hearing, California beatniks assembled in North Beach for a reading of save-Chessman poems. Letters and telegrams were pouring into Governor Brown’s office at an average rate of 1,000 a day, and they ran 3 to 2 in favor of Chessman.

The spare-Chessman movement stirred emotions far beyond the borders of California. Showing in big cities across the U.S., as well as in dozens of movie houses in California, was a 45-minute documentary, Justice and Caryl Chessman, scripted by a sometime San Quentin inmate (forgery), and bent to the cause of clemency for Chessman. On jukeboxes across the land, an imitation folk song called The Ballad of Caryl Chessman was mournfully urging, “Let him live, let him live, let him live!”

Telephone callers from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia have importuned Governor Brown to spare Chessman’s life. Brown has received save-Chessman pleas from Belgium’s Queen Mother and from the Social Democratic members of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. Secretary of State Christian Herter told his press conference last week that the Chessman case had stirred up “quite a surprising amount of interest” in South America. In Brazil, circulators of a save-Chessman petition claim more than 2,500,000 signatures. In The Netherlands, record dealers are profiting from brisk demand for a new platter, in Dutch, called The Death Song of Chessman. The London News Chronicle recently editorialized that “the great American nation is humiliated because of the agony of Chessman,” and the London Daily Herald added that the day Chessman is executed “will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American.” Buenos Aires’ Critica called the Chessman case “the most terrible case that has faced the world in recent history.”

Symbolic Cause. A score of condemned men besides Caryl Chessman await execution on San Quentin’s Death Row, and another 140 or so in other Death Rows in the U.S. alone. But none of the others stir international telephone calls, hunger strikes, petitions and jukebox recordings. Why Chessman?

Essentially, the world has singled out Caryl Chessman from the faceless men on the world’s Death Rows because Chessman wrote his way out of obscurity. Most of the men sentenced to death for criminal offenses in the Western world are inarticulate and without the influence that Caryl Chessman’s talents as writer and self-taught advocate have brought to his cause. They tend to be, said Governor Brown in his message asking the legislature to abolish capital punishment, “the weak, the poor, the ignorant.” But Chessman wrote a bestselling book, Cell 2455 Death Row.* Published in 1954, it has sold 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, been translated into more than a dozen foreign languages. Cell 2455 Death Row is an erratic and pretentious book, but in the minds of its readers in the U.S. and abroad, it made Caryl Chessman a vividly living personality.

Once he emerged from obscurity, Chessman inevitably became a symbolic cause for opponents of capital punishment (see box), all the more so because he was not convicted of killing anybody. French Singer Georgie Vienette, official of an anti-capital-punishment organization, traveled from Paris to Governor Brown’s office in Sacramento to plead personally for Chessman’s life. Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Nelson Hungria, principal author of the Brazilian penal code (no capital punishment), declared that “Caryl Chessman is the most eloquent assurance of the need to wipe out once and for all the death penalty, that ugly stain on civilization.” Much of the save-Chessman agitation around the world has little or no connection with the general debate over capital punishment. It arises partly out of compassion, sometimes tinged with admiration, for his twelve-year battle to stave off execution—his self-publicized role as underdog, fighting alone against the impersonal power of the state, his sheer persistence in teaching himself law, drafting appeals, writs and briefs in a double-locked Death Row cell, smuggling out one writ on sheets of toilet paper, concealing the manuscript of a book by typing it lightly on carbon paper after prison authorities ordered him not to write any more for publication. But the No. 1 argument of the spare-Chessman camp is that he has already suffered enough. Such phrases as “long agony” and “legal torture” and “abominable suspense” abound in European editorials on the Chessman case.

Most Europeans seem strangely unaware that U.S. courts have postponed Chessman’s execution not to torment him but to safeguard his legal rights, to listen, at his own resourceful and persistent urging, to his own appeals on his own behalf.

Intricate Combination. The vigor and eloquence of the appeals, delivered from the unique platform of Death Row, have caught the public ear as they once caught the ear of cops, judges and social workers when Chessman began his life of crime back in the 1930s. Caryl Chessman was a bumbling criminal, but he had a special genius: he has always known by instinct the intricate combinations that lead to the law’s heart. In his teens he won second chances (for more crime) with a patter of contrition and redemption. (“I now see crime in its true light. I feel a keen desire to rid myself completely of it.”) In reform school, jail and prison he worked so diligently at worthy projects, e.g., once he wrote a constitution and bylaws for a youngsters’ anti-dope league, that he impressed detention and parole authorities.

With it all, Caryl Chessman was—and is—arrogant, self-centered and pathologically egotistical. At San Quentin, he greeted one of his lawyers—who arrived an hour late for an appointment after winning another legal delay—with a snarling “Where have you been, you son of a bitch?” Said a former Los Angeles plainclothesman who got to know him well: “His ego is so apparent that it almost reaches out and grabs you by the throat.”

The Outsider. A psychologist’s report, written when Chessman was 18, noted that his “boastfulness is a compensation for underlying feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.” Chessman was brought up in the Glendale section of Los Angeles. His father was a bitter, disappointed ineffectual who drifted from one job to another (carpenter, poultry butcher, Venetian-blind installer, yardman), and the precarious family income was battered by heavy medical expenses. Chessman’s mother was injured in an auto accident when he was nine, for the rest of her life was a chaired invalid, paralyzed from the waist down. And her son Carol (the Caryl spelling is his own invention) was sick and undersized, afflicted with bronchial asthma, chronic nasal congestion and a pale, dolorous, big-nosed, droop-lipped face.

At first Chessman made up for poverty and physical shortcomings by excelling in schoolwork. A schoolmate remembers him as “very argumentative in class. He always talked way over people’s heads, and he had a superior attitude toward other students. A lot of them disliked him. Carol never seemed to make friends with nice boys, and he finally took up with some bad ones.”

Over the Wall. By his own accounts, Chessman started pilfering and stealing cars for joyrides back in his early teens. But his first serious run-in with the law came when he was arrested at 16 on a charge of auto theft. Taken to Los Angeles’ juvenile hall for a medical examination, he scrambled through a window, jumped into a truck, drove it up to the wall surrounding the place, climbed atop the truck and escaped over the wall. Arrested at 3:30 a.m. next day while looting a drugstore (inexplicably Chessman piled all the cigars in the middle of the floor and broke whisky bottles over them), he was sent to the Preston state industrial school at Ione, Calif, for eight months.

A few months after his second release from Preston, 18-year-old Caryl Chessman landed in the county jail on another auto-theft charge. With two stays in Preston already on his record, he faced a term in San Quentin. But he summoned his talent with words, wrote a long essay declaring that he was filled with “a sense of repulsion against all things criminal, including myself for having become ensnared in its brutal grip during my formative years.” An impressed Superior Court judge put young Chessman on probation.

A year later he was sent to San Quentin on five convictions for robbery and assault.** After two years in San Quentin, as a reward for good behavior Chessman was transferred to the model “open prison” at Chino, where men are trusted not to escape. Chessman escaped, went back to robbing, explained after his capture that he had run away only because he was bent on carrying out a plot to kill or kidnap Hitler. Sent back to prison, he was released on parole four years later, in December 1947.

Red Light Bandit. Over a span of several days within the next month, a gunman in a grey Ford coupe equipped with a red spotlight prowled lovers’ lanes in outlying sections of Los Angeles. Flashing the spotlight as if he were a police man, he pulled up to parked cars, robbed the couples at pistol point. Local news papers called him “the Red Light Bandit.” On two occasions, he forced a woman to get into his car and perform, as the indictments later charged, an “unnatural sex act.” One of the victims, a girl of 17, was also forced to submit to “attempted rape.” The girl later sank into schizophrenia, has been confined to a state hospital for nearly as long as Caryl Chessman has been confined on Death Row. Some psychiatrists think that the ordeal inflicted upon her by the gunman is partly to blame for her mental illness.

The evening after the final Red Light Bandit crime, Los Angeles police flashed a bulletin to patrol cars: two armed men had just robbed a clothing store and escaped in a grey Ford. Shortly afterward, two officers in a patrol car spotted a grey Ford, pursued it, ran it down after a wild, 70-m.p.h. chase. Driver of the fleeing Ford: Caryl Chessman.

Damaging Evidence. Charged with the Red Light Bandit crimes as well as the clothing-store robbery, Chessman insisted on acting as his own defense counsel. He denied the red-light crimes, but the evidence against him was strong enough to convince the jury. The grey Ford (it had been stolen Jan. 13) matched descriptions of the Red Light Bandit’s car. At the trial, Red Light Bandit victims identified the .45 pistol that Chessman had tossed away when the pursuing patrol car caught up with him. Witnesses also said that a pen flashlight found in the grey Ford looked like one that the bandit had used. The prosecution produced a nut, found in Chessman’s pocket when he was arrested, and charged that he had used it in attaching red cellophane to the spotlight on the car. A plainclothesman who had interrogated Chessman the day after his arrest testified that he made several statements linking him to the red-light crimes, including an admission that the 17-year-old girl was in his car. And most damaging of all, three victims, including the sexually maltreated woman and girl, unequivocally identified Chessman as the Red Light Bandit.

Chessman was convicted and sentenced in Los Angeles County Superior Court on a total of 17 counts. The two counts on which Judge Charles W. Fricke sentenced Chessman to death were not the sexual assaults, but two offenses under the California kidnaping statute, which makes it a capital offense to “seize” anyone “for ransom, reward or to commit extortion or robbery,” if the victim suffers “bodily harm.” The prosecution argued, and the jury agreed, that by robbing the woman and the girl, then forcing them into his car and sexually assaulting them, Chessman had committed kidnaping for robbery with bodily harm.***

In the Mazes. Since July 1948, a cell 4 ft. 6 in. wide, 10 ft. 6 in. long and 7 ft. 6 in. high has been Caryl Chessman’s world. In it he has, in his own words, “read or skimmed 10,000 legal books, and written between two and three million words.” In the opinion of celebrated Liability Lawyer Melvin (“King of Torts”) Belli, Chessman has become “one of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers I have met.” With the help of various lawyers, self-taught Legal Expert Chessman managed to keep his case dragging back and forth through the courts for twelve years after he was sentenced to death. His major appeals have revolved around the disputed, 2,000-page transcript of his 1948 trial. Court Reporter Ernest Perry died of a heart attack when he had finished transcribing only one-third of his shorthand notes, and his death, plus an error on the part of Judge Fricke, threw the case into a legal limbo.

Fricke’s error, as the U.S. Supreme Court saw it, lay in denying Chessman’s request to be present at the mid-1949 hearings at which Judge Fricke certified the transcript that a substitute court reporter put together from Perry’s notes.

Chessman appealed that denial through the mazes of the courts, and won six stays of execution along the way. In 1957, nearly nine years after Chessman was sentenced to death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the denial violated his constitutional right to due process of law. After new hearings a Superior Court judge ordered more than 2,000 changes in the transcript.

Chessman attacked the revised transcript, again carried his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But last December, after ordering the seventh stay of execution, the court rejected Chessman’s appeal for a review of a state court decision upholding the revised transcript. A Superior Court judge set a new execution date, No. 8: Feb. 19, 1960.

The Deathwatch. At any time during the past few years Caryl Chessman might have saved his life by appealing to the Governor of California to exercise executive clemency and commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.**** But Chessman’s prickly, demanding ego stands in the way. “Caryl Chessman has not sought executive clemency from me,” said Governor Brown last October. “To the contrary, he has declared that he seeks only vindication. This I cannot give him. The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming . . . His attitude has been one of steadfast arrogance and contempt.” But with his mail running 10 to 1 in favor of sparing Chessman, and with his own conscience nagging at him, Pat Brown, longtime opponent of capital punishment, agonized over the Chessman case as Feb. 19 drew near. Ten hours before Chessman was to die—he had already been taken to a special deathwatch cell 15 paces from the door of the gas chamber —Brown received a State Department telegram advising him that the government of Uruguay was gravely concerned about the possibility of demonstrations protesting Chessman’s execution when President Eisenhower visited Uruguay in early March. Brown promptly decided to grant a 60-day reprieve (TIME, Feb. 29).

After the Marathon. Governor Brown called the special session of the state legislature to consider his proposal to abolish capital punishment, but even before the session started, Brown decided that he could not win. The lawmakers were sore at him for “passing the buck,” as they grumblingly put it, and a poll showed that sentiment in the legislature was running 4 to 1 against saving Caryl Chessman from the gas chamber. Many legislators felt strongly that Chessman had been escaping justice too long. Facing defeat, Brown decided not to fight, tamely placated fellow Democrats in the legislature by agreeing to let his proposal be channeled through the senate judiciary committee, which was sure to block it.

Last week, though the outcome was already decided, the committee held a marathon 16-hour hearing to listen to witnesses for and against capital punishment. When the final witness wound up his testimony, past midnight, the committee got down to its business, and by a vote of 8 to 7 blackjacked Brown’s proposal (amended at the last minute to call for a 3½-year moratorium rather than outright abolition of capital punishment).

The Ninth Life. Brown said he was “deeply sorry” about the outcome. He was “powerless,” he said, to take any further action in the Chessman case. “The regular schedule of executions will continue under the constitution and laws of the State of California.” Under that schedule Caryl Chessman was notified once again that he would be executed. The date: next May 2.

George Davis, best known of the three lawyers currently working for Caryl Chessman, was still full of plans for trying to save him, including a new appeal based on the claim that Chessman’s twelve years under sentence of death constitute “cruel and unusual punishments,” in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Caryl Chessman himself seemed to have little hope for any of the plans. He seemed resigned to playing out his role of martyr to capital punishment. Standing at the barred door of his cell after he got the expected news that the judiciary committee had blocked Brown’s proposal, Chessman managed to summon a wry smile. “I have had nine execution dates, and have been spared eight times,” he said. “I do not want to be credited with more lives than a cat.”

The bitterly anti-Chessman Los Angeles Times thought he might well be. “One atrocious but clever criminal called into question our judicial system and brought discredit to our laws,” editorialized the Times. “Then … he intimidated the Governor of California and drove the timorous U.S. State Department to declare him an international issue. And finally, he beheld the legislature in a session specially called to change the law so that he could be saved from execution . . . What will happen now? They would not change the law for Chessman, but it would be unwise to give odds that he won’t beat it again.”

* He followed it with two comparatively feeble accounts of his Death Row years, Trial by Ordeal and The Face of Justice, and then a novel, first published in Europe and scheduled for publication in the U.S. next month as Obsession.

** In the interval between Preston and San Quentin, Chessman had married a teen-age girl. After he had been in San Quentin for five years, she got a divorce.

*** Chessman has managed to create an impression that the California statute has since been changed in a way that makes the Red Light Bandit offenses no longer capital crimes. Not so. The statute was indeed amended in 1951, but only to eliminate the possibility that a “standstill” robbery might be construed under the law as kidnaping.

**** Since Chessman had previous convictions on his record, Brown could not commute the death sentence to life imprisonment without the approval of the State Supreme Court—and that court has twice, by votes of 4 to 3, turned down clemency appeals by Chessman lawyers.

But if Brown notified the court that he wanted to grant clemency, he would almost certainly get the needed approval.