Word: chessman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
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...
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...