Word: transcript
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...best-trained lawyers I have met." With the help of various lawyers, self-taught Legal Expert Chessman managed to keep his case dragging back and forth through the courts for twelve years after he was sentenced to death. His major appeals have revolved around the disputed, 2,000-page transcript of his 1948 trial. Court Reporter Ernest Perry died of a heart attack when he had finished transcribing only one-third of his shorthand notes, and his death, plus an error on the part of Judge Fricke, threw the case into a legal limbo...
Fricke's error, as the U.S. Supreme Court saw it, lay in denying Chessman's request to be present at the mid-1949 hearings at which Judge Fricke certified the transcript that a substitute court reporter put together from Perry's notes...
...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 a Superior Court judge ordered more than 2,000 changes in the transcript...
...arguments ranged from pleas that the trial transcript was faulty (the court reporter had died before he completed transcription of his notes), to claims of new evidence proving his innocence, to declarations that all the delays (occasioned by his own persistence) had been torture and punishment enough for a man standing on the brink of death. In the span of a dozen years, he had won seven stays of execution, had made no fewer than 15 appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court ("The conclusion is irresistible," wrote Justice William O. Douglas in June 1957, "that Chessman is playing a game...