Word: chessman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THROUGH OUR EMBASSY IN MONTEVIDEO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENT OF URUGUAY HAS TONIGHT BROUGHT TO THE URGENT ATTENTION OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT THE GRAVE CONCERN OF THE COUNCIL OVER ANTICIPATED HOSTILE DEMONSTRATIONS OF STUDENT ELEMENTS AND OTHERS TO CHESSMAN EXECUTION WHEN OUR PRESIDENT VISITS URUGUAY MARCH...
...Brown, who in hours-long solitude had been agonizing over the Chessman case, Rubottom's wire came as from "the hand of God." The Governor quickly got on the direct phone line to San Quentin Prison on San Francisco Bay, talked to Warden Fred Dickson. Said the warden: "I am at the cell with the condemned man." Ordered Governor Brown: "Well, you can send him back upstairs. I am granting him a 60-day reprieve." In his "holding cell," only 15 paces and ten hours from death in the gas chamber, hawk-nosed Convict Caryl Whittier Chessman, 38, self...
...death on two of those crimes, both of them kidnaping for robbery, with bodily harm. In itself, the man, his crime and his punishment would scarcely cause a ripple of interest beyond the California state line. Yet, in the days preceding the reprieve, concern for the fate of Caryl Chessman had swept itself into a passionate whirlwind that whipped around the globe, gathered up pleas for clemency and dumped them in an overwhelming cascade on Pat Brown's shoulders...
...petitions signed by 2,000,000. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, called for mercy. In France, where dialectical discussion is served with each bottle of wine, the arguments raged as if the Dreyfus case had come alive again; in London, where the press devoted more space to Chessman than to news of the Queen's confinement, the Laborite Herald said: "If he is executed tomorrow, it will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American...
...Strangely enough, the man who created all the noise was neither lawyer, nor governor, nor humanitarian, but the criminal himself. Self-styled descendant of famed Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Caryl Chessman was the son of an unstable Hollywood movie-studio worker...