The Quality of Mercy

Toward midnight the lights still burned in California's state capitol in Sacramento. Cecil Poole, clemency secretary to Governor Edmund Brown, rummaged through the bales of telegrams that flooded the executive offices. MY DAUGHTERS WILL NOT BE SAFE UNTIL HE IS DEAD, read one. DON'T BE SWAYED BY ALL THE BLEEDING HEARTS, declared another. Then Poole picked up another telegram, read it and reached for the phone. A few minutes later, he carried the wire into the executive mansion and showed it to Governor "Pat" Brown. It was signed by Roy Rubottom Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and it read:

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 2.

To Pat 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-admitted hardened criminal, got the news from the warden, asked incredulously: "You're not kidding, are you?"

Climax & Philosophy. In this melodramatic fashion last week came the climax to one of the most remarkable episodes in U.S. criminal annals. The man thus saved --if perhaps only temporarily--was convicted twelve years ago of 17 felonies and sentenced to 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.

From Brazil came 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."

136 & 2455. 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.

By his own account, he stole food and cars at 15, brought heartbreak to his mother, was committed four times to reform schools, went on to San Quentin (robbery, assault) in 1941. Seven years later, he was arrested and identified by three of his victims as the "Red Light Bandit" who drove into lovers' lanes in Los Angeles County with a red spotlight flashing (much as police cars would) and robbed the couples that he found parked there. Of the 18 separate counts filed against him, five included the kidnaping of two women, crimes of sex perversion against each of them, and the attempted rape of one of them--"indescribable crimes," as the Los Angeles Times put it last week, whose "horrible details lie in the decent exclusiveness of the court records." Clearly no ordinary criminal, Caryl Chessman, grade-school educated, had an IQ of 136, and he argued his own case creditably in court. Nonetheless, he was convicted by a jury under California's "Little Lindbergh Law" (which, like the federal "Lindbergh Law," makes kidnaping with bodily harm a capital offense) and sentenced to die. It was after he was condemned that he began stirring up his astonishing storm. He published three books, one of which, Cell 2455 Death Row, became a bestseller, and all of which, according to his publishers, Prentice-Hall, sold "millions" of copies in more than a dozen translations from Norway to Japan.

While Chessman's ringing, indignant denunciations of capital punishment were being avidly read, he himself digested dozens of law books, wrote briefs, held press conferences, won his celebrated series of postponements of sentence.

His 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 with the courts").

Indecision & Mockery. Chessman's last chance loomed last week. As public opinion poured its torrents on Governor Brown, two attorneys for Chessman made two final appeals for clemency to the State Supreme Court. The court turned them down, 4-3. Under California's law, the Governor may not issue a pardon or commutation of sentence for a two-time loser like Chessman over an adverse Supreme Court decision--but he can still give a reprieve. At the same time, California precedent holds that Pat Brown, had he wanted to grant clemency, could properly have so notified the court and probably swayed its decision.

But Brown, left with the final decision, was rocked by indecision: a longtime opponent of capital punishment, Brown, for eight years California's attorney general, nevertheless believed Chessman to be guilty, unrepentant and undeserving of clemency. Observed Chessman shrewdly at a press conference: The issue of capital punishment would be so much clearer if he were dead.

Resolution. Brown buzzed fitfully for days, declaimed at visitors and friends about his problem. His assistant attorney general, Richard Rogan, even called Director George V. Allen of the U.S. Information Agency in Washington to hint strongly that the Governor would like an official request for clemency; Allen refused. But Roy Rubottom's telegram last week resolved the Governor's doubts.

Reading the wire as an implied bid for clemency (which it was, despite the State Department's insistence that it was only a report of the Uruguayan facts), Brown ordered the reprieve of Chessman, promised that he would reprieve three others waiting in the death house.

In his official statement he announced that he would ask the state legislature to debate once and for all the question of capital punishment at its next session, beginning Feb. 29 (now being called "bloody Monday" by the Governor's aides). "If the people, acting through their elected representatives," said he, "determine that the present law shall be continued in effect, Caryl Chessman will be executed under the law."

Outrage. As the news of Chessman's reprieve clattered around the world, a new burst of outrage thundered out, much of it centered on State Department "interference" in California's internal affairs and Brown's complaisant response. It is "very disturbing," declared Arkansas' J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that U.S. justice can be "pressured by groups of people in Europe and incipient mobs of students in a small Latin American country." Others, including California's Senators Thomas Kuchel and Clair Engle, found the Rubottom telegram unwarranted.*

By week's end the Chessman whirlwind was spinning over the globe with renewed power. U.S. Information Agency posts abroad hurriedly cranked out dossiers on Chessman for the benefit of those who had long forgotten (or had never known) the details of the man's crimes. California's State Senate Majority Leader Hugh Burns, Democrat and once Brown's most effective supporter, charged that the Governor had let "the people of California down." In Chicago, the American Bar Association ordered a study to determine whether federal legislation is needed to limit multiple appeals.

Back in his sixth-floor cell, with his trusty typewriter and law books, was happy Caryl Whittier Chessman. The Governor himself took off for a weekend meeting of fellow Democrats in Las Vegas, Nev., but he left Sacramento besieged, bothered and bewildered. His mail, once 10 to 1 in favor of saving Chessman, had turned 3 to 1 in denunciation of the Governor himself. It would surely grow worse in the next 60 days, for, though Caryl Chessman had sown the wind, Pat Brown was reaping the whirlwind.

* Rubottom had a precedent of sorts. In September 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, writing that he had no intention of interfering with a state judicial system, advised Alabama's Governor James E. Folsom that U.S. embassies around the world were being flooded with letters about the fate of a condemned Negro, Jimmie Wilson. Convicted of a nighttime robbery (a capital offense in Alabama), Wilson, 55, had stolen $1.95, faced the electric chair. Ordering a clemency hearing about two weeks after Dulles' letter, Folsom noted the "international hullabaloo," soon afterward commuted Wilson's sentence to life imprisonment.

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