Word: chessman
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Turner's record is marred by one embarrassing failure: he has yet to spring himself-a problem that afflicts even the best jailhouse lawyers. San Quentin's Caryl Chessman, for instance, studied 10,000 legal works, took 1,000,000 words of notes, ground out more than 100 assorted writs, appeals and petitions, for stays of his own execution-and still the state put him to death in the gas chamber...
...scattered but distinct. A number of small political organizations had been formed, each for a specific purpose. A civil rights group formed in sympathy with the Woolworth sit-ins in Montgomery, Alabama. A disarmament group was encouraged by the Spirit of Camp David. Another organization sympathized with Caryl Chessman's plea for clemency. In all, five such organizations had formed in the spring of 1960. They were collectively known as "single issue clubs." A few observers, including professors David Reisman and Stuart Hughes, guessed that politics at Harvard were about to be reborn...
...personally, Randall wrote right back, sending along a photograph of himself. (It didn't work.) He has kind notes from representatives of Jackie Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill saying that they are simply too busy to send autographs. When he tried to get Caryl Chessman's signature, however, he got only a steely note from an assistant warden of San Quentin saying that prisoners were not permitted to give autographs...
...essay gatherings go, A View of My Own is oddly uneven, since the deft Hardwick prose has occasionally been put to work at drab tasks. There are forgettable reviews of forgotten books, a surprisingly maudlin attempt to explain the death and nine legal lives of Caryl Chessman as an indictment of the U.S. inability to understand its youth. But Hardwick also writes with wit and accuracy about the proud, faded elegance of Boston, a city, she argues, "that is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult, but is, rather, a specially organized...
Faced with his own opposition to capital punishment, and perhaps mindful of the harmful political effects of his vacillations in the Caryl Chessman case, Governor Pat Brown said he was "unable to find circumstances" to interfere with Ma Duncan's imminent execution...