Race in the Death House

San Francisco Lawyer George T. Davis was in a gut-wracking hurry. He glanced at his wristwatch: 8:50 a.m. In 70 minutes Burton W. Abbott, 29, found guilty of murdering a teen-aged girl, would die in San Quentin's gas chamber. Davis waited tensely for the U.S. Court of Appeals to grant a stay of execution based on his claim that Abbott had not received due process of law. Then the answer came: appeal denied.

Davis moved fast. Perhaps California's Governor Goodwin J. Knight would grant a brief stay. But the governor, who was just preparing to inspect the Navy's aircraft carrier Hancock in San Francisco Bay, was out of reach of the telephone. Davis messaged the ship by Navy radio to turn on a television set for Knight, then arranged with a TV station to broadcast a tape-recorded plea to the governor. Knight got the message. At 9:02 he called Davis by radiotelephone, granted an hour's stay. Six minutes later, Davis presented a writ of habeas corpus to the State Supreme Court. The answer came down at 10:42: petition denied. Attorney Davis tried again, this time with a frantic message to the Federal District Court. Judge Louis E. Goodman refused a further postponement. It was 10:50--ten minutes to go.

"God Bless You." There was just one other chance. Racing into the Supreme Court clerk's office, Davis grabbed a phone, put in another call to Governor Knight, who was sitting in the Hancock's flag plot room and (charged Davis later) "taking tea." Despite the fact that there were two open radiotelephone lines aboard the ship, Davis says he got a busy signal. After arguing futilely with an adamant telephone operator, Davis phoned Knight's Capitol offices for permission to break into one of the lines. At 11:12 Goody Knight came to the phone.

At 11:15 Burton Abbott--a former accounting student who was charged with murder after his wife found the murder victim's purse in the Abbott cellar--was led into the prison gas chamber, still quietly insisting on his innocence. After a minute, Warden Harley O. Teets shook hands with Abbott, murmured "God bless you." Replied the prisoner calmly: "Thank you." A doctor strapped the long tube of a stethoscope to Abbott's chest. Abbott sat quietly, bound to the execution chair. The warden and other officials left the chamber, bolted the door. Three minutes later the executioner pulled a lever, and 16 pellets of sodium cyanide dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid beneath Abbott's chair. The deadly fumes began to rise.

"Has It Started?" In the clerk's office, Davis was talking at last to Governor Knight over the radiotelephone: "There's a new point of law," he said insistently. "There's no time to explain. Can you stop it?" Knight picked up his other phone, spoke to his secretary, Joseph Babich. Knight overheard Babich's conversation as the secretary called the warden on a direct line:

Babich: Has the execution started?

Warden: Yes, sir, it has.

Babich: Can you stop it?

Warden: No, sir, it's too late.

In the death chamber Burton Abbott looked straight ahead, his face impassive. The invisible gas rose. His head inched back, his feet twitched. He died, as on the carrier the governor hung up the phone.

Almost instantly, news of the split-second drama raced across the nation. Loudly Lawyer-Governor Knight explained : "I did everything possible to give Mr. Davis every opportunity to develop anything new in the case. This he could not do. In return he staged a dramatic stunt--with no legal ground to stand on--by waiting until the very last minute and then appealing for still another stay."

Tragedy's Calendar. From Lawyer Davis came the charge that Goody Knight's "open lines" were busy when the governor claimed that they were not. But more important than even the fact that Davis did have an opportunity to make his plea at an earlier date was the clear instance of how a set of confused legal procedures can spell tragedy. On the one hand, said Davis, federal law allows an attorney 90 days to file for a writ of certiorari (a re-examination of the record) upon the State Supreme Court's refusal of a rehearing. But in Abbott's case, the State Court set the date for execution two weeks before the 90-day limit. Thus, with the writ still on file, there was the barest possibility that Convicted Murderer Burton Abbott might have won a new trial.

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