Word: chessman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...death row in 16 years on the bench; following a heart attack; in Newport Beach, Calif. Avuncular in appearance, Walker reduced just one of his death penalties to life imprisonment. However, only one of the men he sentenced to die ever went to the gas chamber: Convict-Author Caryl Chessman, whom Walker ordered executed in 1960 for a robbery and rape committed in 1948. The best-known survivor of a Walker death sentence is Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan...
...night school and learn more and learn faster, then his time should be cut down. I think there is a good correlation between good citizenship (if that is the antithesis of criminality) and education. I know there are a number of extreme opposite examples: Bill Sands, Caryl Chessman (both of whom I represented) and others who had high IQs and became criminals. But the usual criminal is part of an ethnic minority, economically distressed and uneducated, or, if you will, untaught how to tell right from wrong...
...while I was Governor of California, I had a similar situation, which hurt me all the days of my governorship. I am referring to the case of Caryl Chessman...
...Chessman had been convicted of raping two girls on two separate occasions at the point of a gun. As attorney general I had fought hard for affirmance of the conviction and the execution of Mr. Chessman. I then became Governor and was faced with a difficult problem-not of justice but of clemency (mercy). I felt Mr. Chessman was guilty, but that the death penalty was too severe because it had been so long delayed. On the very eve of his execution I granted a 60-day reprieve. This was attacked by almost every newspaper in the state of California...
Brando had his mind on other things anyway. He began pouring energy and money into a series of standard liberal causes, from blacks in the South, to the campaign against capital punishment (on the night of Caryl Chessman's execution, he picketed San Quentin), to the fishing rights of the Puyallup Indians of the Northwest. He became a zealous and outspoken critic of the war in Viet Nam. In the later years of the 1960s, he devoted an increasing amount of time to his children, both in California and in Tetiaroa, the South Sea atoll of 13 islands that...