Word: caryl
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...