Word: chessman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...honeyed prose more than a dozen stories he covered in his long career in journalism. He interviews the bullfighter El Cordobes and retraces Mahatma Gandhi's last moments. Much of the narrative runs to the cloyingly inspirational, and a good deal of it challenges credulity. For example, Caryl Chessman, awaiting execution at San Quentin, is portrayed as an intellectual who speaks in finely wrought sentences as he discourses about crime prevention, citing Albert Camus ("What a writer!"). Oh, what a mess...
...very unusual for a wealthy, well-connected person to get the death penalty," says TIME legal correspondent Adam Cohen. "I don't think there has been a case like this." Celebrated past recipients of the death penalty such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Caryl Chessman were neither rich nor powerful, and gained their status as a consequence of their trials, Cohen says. More recently, capital punishment was pre-emptively rejected in the O.J. Simpson case. But Capano had no legendary gridiron past, and a wholly unpleasant present. Although the scion of a wealthy real estate family and a mover...
...Anaya in 1986 could afford the moral luxury of commuting the sentences of everyone on death row. Former California Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown wrote a 1989 book reliving his clemency deliberations, in which he saved 23 men from the gas chamber and spurned appeals from 36 others, including Caryl Chessman, whose 1960 execution sparked major protests. "The longer I live," declared Brown, now 85, "the larger loom those 59 decisions about justice and mercy...