Life & Death

In Chicago, Negro Paul Crump, 32, read from the Bible and Socrates, watched the lights of his Cook County cell flicker as officials tested the electric chair behind a green steel door just 20 steps away. He was waiting, as he had been through nine years and 14 reprieves, to die for the holdup-slaying of a Chicago industrial guard.

But as he waited, famed publicity-sensitive Trial Lawyer Louis (My Life in Court) Nizer, who entered the case without fee at the last minute, brought tears even to the eyes of opposing Assistant State's Attorney James Thompson with the eloquence of his plea that Crump be spared because he was "a rehabilitated man, a newborn man, a transformed personality." Nizer read from 57 affidavits attesting to Crump's change of character, including one from the warden -the culmination of a massive public drive by columnists, clergymen and penologists to establish the principle that prison can reform a killer, and that when it does he should not die.

Faced with the kind of decision that must torture the conscience of a Governor, Democrat Otto Kerner (a onetime county judge) spared the condemned man's life, changed Crump's sentence to 100 years "without parole" -a condition that some lawyers doubt that a Governor can legally impose.

In Corona, Calif., Elizabeth ("Ma ") Duncan, 58, waited in women's prison for transfer to San Quentin, where she was scheduled to die in a gas chamber for being so jealous of the 30-year-old nurse who married her son that she hired two thugs to kill the bride in 1958.

Far from reading philosophy in jail, state officials claimed, Ma Duncan had plotted to kill a matron and break out. At her clemency hearing, her son Frank, 33, argued that his mother was "periodically" mentally ill; that "she had a tremendous fear of, frankly, losing me. She needed someone to whom she could come home, someone to cook for, to keep house for," he contended, ignoring the fact that Mrs. Duncan had been married at least ten times. There was no public drive to save Mrs. Duncan; of 220 messages on her case reaching Governor Brown, 165 urged that she and her hired hands be executed.

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.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.