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