Word: chessman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Brown, left with the final decision, was rocked by indecision: a longtime opponent of capital punishment, Brown, for eight years California's attorney general, nevertheless believed Chessman to be guilty, unrepentant and undeserving of clemency. Observed Chessman shrewdly at a press conference: The issue of capital punishment would be so much clearer if he were dead...
Reading the wire as an implied bid for clemency (which it was, despite the State Department's insistence that it was only a report of the Uruguayan facts), Brown ordered the reprieve of Chessman, promised that he would reprieve three others waiting in the death house...
...debate once and for all the question of capital punishment at its next session, beginning Feb. 29 (now being called "bloody Monday" by the Governor's aides). "If the people, acting through their elected representatives," said he, "determine that the present law shall be continued in effect, Caryl Chessman will be executed under...
Outrage. As the news of Chessman's reprieve clattered around the world, a new burst of outrage thundered out, much of it centered on State Department "interference" in California's internal affairs and Brown's complaisant response. It is "very disturbing," declared Arkansas' J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that U.S. justice can be "pressured by groups of people in Europe and incipient mobs of students in a small Latin American country." Others, including California's Senators Thomas Kuchel and Clair Engle, found the Rubottom telegram unwarranted...
...week's end the Chessman whirlwind was spinning over the globe with renewed power. U.S. Information Agency posts abroad hurriedly cranked out dossiers on Chessman for the benefit of those who had long forgotten (or had never known) the details of the man's crimes. California's State Senate Majority Leader Hugh Burns, Democrat and once Brown's most effective supporter, charged that the Governor had let "the people of California down." In Chicago, the American Bar Association ordered a study to determine whether federal legislation is needed to limit multiple appeals...