Word: executioner
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Symbolic Cause. A score of condemned men besides Caryl Chessman await execution on San Quentin's Death Row, and another 140 or so in other Death Rows in the U.S. alone. But none of the others stir international telephone calls, hunger strikes, petitions and jukebox recordings. Why Chessman?
Once he emerged from obscurity, Chessman inevitably became a symbolic cause for opponents of capital punishment (see box), all the more so because he was not convicted of killing anybody. French Singer Georgie Vienette, official of an anti-capital-punishment organization, traveled from Paris to Governor Brown's office...
Most Europeans seem strangely unaware that U.S. courts have postponed Chessman's execution not to torment him but to safeguard his legal rights, to listen, at his own resourceful and persistent urging, to his own appeals on his own behalf.
Chessman appealed that denial through the mazes of the courts, and won six stays of execution along the way. In 1957, nearly nine years after Chessman was sentenced to death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the denial violated his constitutional right to due process of law. After new hearings...
Chessman attacked the revised transcript, again carried his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But last December, after ordering the seventh stay of execution, the court rejected Chessman's appeal for a review of a state court decision upholding the revised transcript. A Superior Court judge set a new...