Did the Press Kill Caryl Chessman?
MARTIN, MELVIN
Did the Press Kill Caryl Chessman? by MELVIN MARTIN Tt is officially recorded that Caryl -*- Whittier Chessman, subject of possibly the most extensively litigated case in the annals of American...
...His last period of freedom, forty-six days, was ended on the night of January 23, 1948, when Los Angeles police caught him driving a stolen car with another parolee...
...The ultimate answer to that question remains between the Governor and his conscience...
...The Court ruled that he had "never had his day in court upon the controversial issues of fact and law involved in the settlement of the record upon which his conviction was affirmed...
...In another clemency move, a group of eminent attorneys asked Brown to extend the reprieve thirty days, at which time a Supreme Court replacement was expected to result in a majority voting for commutation...
...syndicated columnist George Sokolsky charged that "one of Chessman's victims is insane from having experienced a bout with him...
...He wore handcuffs...
...Of course, we could be courageous...
...Two months later, while presiding at a Chessman clemency hearing prior to the seventh execution date, Brown expressed doubt that the legislature intended to exact death for crimes such as the offenses of the "Red Light Bandit...
...Not once did he snarl, sneer, or salivate...
...The prison's Catholic chaplain, Father Edward J. Dingberg, told another reporter, "Chessman changed much for the better...
...Besides, it would be foolhardy of me to prejudice my case in the courts by seeking mercy as if I were guilty...
...Los Angeles Examiner columnist Flaherty wrote that Chessman was "a criminal who really had his 'day in court,' using every legal loophole at his command...
...But it sounded perfectly natural to the ill-informed public...
...He joined with other youths in car thefts, burglaries, and armed robberies...
...He consequently spent seventeen of his remaining twenty-three years in a forestry camp, a reform school, a road camp, a county jail, three state prisons, and death row...
...He granted commutations to four condemned murderers, mainly on the ground of questionable mental responsibility, and to two robbery-sex offenders largely because they had been condemned under the same twisted definition of kidnaping as Chessman...
...Editorial writers diagnosed Chessman as "remorseless," "arrogant," "completely amoral," and to quote the Los Angeles Herald Express, "just as despicable a character as he was the day he was convicted...
...The principal thesis of the hate-Chessman counterattack was that the prisoner was immune to rehabilitation...
...And the convict-author had Judge Fricke admit under oath that the court had not known of the relationship between Fraser and the prosecutor at the time Fraser was given the lucrative assignment...
...We could release these men earlier, while there's still a good chance to repair their lives with proper parole supervision...
...Another attempt to erase doubt of Chessman's guilt was a Time magazine report that the seventeen-year-old victim, Mary Alice Meza, "unequivocally identified" Chessman...
...Phase Two: In August, 1959, Governor Brown told me he was concerned about the morality of killing Chessman after the prisoner already had served more time than the average convicted murderer...
...According to another prevalent myth perpetuated by the press, Chessman was convicted of rape...
...In the secMELVIN MARTIN is a pseudonym of a Californian who watched the Caryl Chessman case at close range and had unusual opportunities to discuss developments with many of the principals...
...The Court's majority approval was necessary under state law because Chessman had a prior felony record...
...It further was alleged, in a widely published Associated Press story, that Chessman was so unpopular among the prison population that the convicts hanged him in effigy...
...These are the phases of Brown's extraordinary role in the case, starting with the beginning of his reform administration in 1959: Phase One: Brown declared himself an opponent of capital punishment but pledged to uphold the law...
...But he was charged instead with the crimes of the "Red Light Bandit," a sometimes-masked gunman who preyed on couples in lovers' lanes, using a police-type spotlight on his car to disarm his victims...
...In no case had anyone been held for ransom...
...The Chessman case was no exception...
...The momentum of the Fourth Estate's anti-Chessman juggernaut can be deduced from the fact that some California newspapers continued to fulminate against the man following the execution...
...It was the California press that played the madhouse theme most vigorously...
...Was Brown a hypocrite, a coward, or a sincere and tortured man caught in the web of a moral dilemma...
...Three months before Chessman's death, an independent Los Angeles film unit produced a documentary film on the case...
...The girl's mother, who was divorced when Mary Alice was only two years old and did not remarry until after the girl had been sent to the institution, insisted to me that the press was accurate in blaming Chessman for her daughter's insanity...
...So, when Judge Evans announced, on February 28, 1958, that he thought the transcript was legally adequate, it came as something of a shock to many reporters and lawyers who had observed the hearing...
...Unheeded by the "loophole" chorus was an historic decision rendered by the United States Supreme Court on June 6, 1957, as Chessman was about to begin his tenth year in death row...
...by MELVIN MARTIN Tt is officially recorded that Caryl -*- Whittier Chessman, subject of possibly the most extensively litigated case in the annals of American criminal law, was killed by "the administration of lethal gas...
...Newspapers also had something to lose—subscribers—by bucking what appeared to be an inexorable tide of public opinion...
...And the officials who held Chessman's life in their hands were more than somewhat politically inclined...
...ond instance, he had abandoned the monetary objective in favor o? another sex assault, then had driven the young woman to the vicinity of her home...
...Phase Five: Prominent personalities in the fields of religion, psychiatry, and law appealed to Brown to halt the execution permanently by asking the California Supreme Court for the authority to lessen Chessman's sentence to life imprisonment without possibility of parole...
...I spent approximately thirty hours in private conversation with Chessman from 1957 to 1960...
...was boosted all the way to 178 by Newsweek...
...During the last six months of the case, protests against the impending execution were registered by such influential overseas newspapers as the Manchester Guardian, the Stockholm Expressen and the Vatican City's L'Osservatore Romano, and from such internationally known individuals as Arthur Koestler, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Andre Maurois, Aldous Huxley, Karl Menninger, and Eleanor Roosevelt...
...A State Department official warned Brown that President Eisenhower might face hostile demonstrations during an imminent tour of South America if Chessman should be executed...
...She said she didn't feel it was her responsibility...
...Those who advocate any execution are forced, inevitably, into the position of acting as if man occasionally is endowed with a divinely inspired power of certainty...
...The Los Angeles Times reduced Chessman's legal arguments to "quibbles," and radio commentator Virgil Pinkley dismissed them as "bickering...
...The Los Angeles Times blamed the protests on "intellectuals," defining the word as "people who think they think...
...Phase Three: At the approach of Chessman's eighth appointment with the gas chamber—February 19, 1960 —pro-commutation letters, telegrams, and petitions poured into the Governor's office from around the world...
...During the weeks following Brown's reprieve of Chessman, Gerald W. Johnson of the New Republic accused Chessman of dispatching the young woman "to the living death of a madhouse...
...As Lafayette once observed, the practice of capital punishment is based partly on the myth of human infallibility...
...The battleground in the Chessman case also extended to the field of motion pictures...
...The original stenographer had died of a heart attack before he had transcribed more than a third of his personalized Pitman shorthand notes...
...They were convinced he was a monster, and I guess they felt it was wrong to publicize anything that might have won sympathy for him...
...The nation's highest tribunal also declared that the state of California had "violated [Chessman's] constitutional right to procedural due process" by not having allowed him to be present as his own attorney, a year after the conviction, when the disputed record of the trial had been certified as accurate...
...And only occasional references were made by the press to the following facts: Chessman had no prior record of being accused of a sex offense, and he repeatedly offered to stake his life on the outcome of a lie detector test...
...A Federal judge who frequently had rejected Chessman's appeals, Louis E. Goodman, publicly advised Governor Brown that the prisoner had "an impressive case for clemency...
...The newspaper denied the reporters' competency to judge the case inasmuch as they "had not even covered the Chessman trial...
...Graves, the former San Quentin physician, and Rosalie Asher, the Sacramento County law librarian who helped prepare Chessman's appeals...
...And Chessman did not make a cent from the enterprise...
...The local Communist paper, People's World, had treated Chessman's case sympathetically, but the sympathy had been much more restrained than that shown by leading ara ^'-Communist newspapers in Europe and Latin America...
...He was depicted in California newspapers as a "celebrated rapist" (Los Angeles Times), "kidnap-rapist" (Los Angeles Mirror), "notorious kidnaper and rapist" (Los Angeles Examiner), and "brutal bandit-rapist" (San Diego Union...
...I waited...
...I asked the woman why, during the more than half-dozen years that the inaccuracy was being published, she never had bothered to correct it...
...Associate Warden Achuff told me early in 1960 that "Chessman has not been the custodial problem that you might imagine from reading the newspapers...
...The truth was that Chessman had not in any sense been allowed to become a movie star...
...Consistent with that statement was the fact that he did send Governor Brown a "do-whatever-your-conscience-dictates" telegram two days before the eighth execution date, when all apparent court steps had been exhausted...
...The real star was an actor who portrayed Chessman in dramatic scenes that were filmed at another prison...
...But the newspapers won't stop until he's strapped in the chair...
...For example, four days after the Brown reprieve, the San Diego Union ran an editorial stating that Chessman had "smashed" Mary Alice Meza's sanity...
...The argument that [the "Red Light Bandit"] 'took a mind' is invalid...
...But we wouldn't get very far...
...the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Citizen-News in 1948 quoted police as stating that there were two such personages...
...He admitted that he had been engaged in the robbery of several gambling establishments...
...The exaggeration of Chessman's superior but not extraordinary I.Q...
...The issue has a significance that extends far beyond the boundaries of criminal justice...
...All found evidence of rehabilitation...
...A victim ol the "Red Light Bandit," seventeen-year-old Mary Alice Meza had been committed to a state mental hospital a year and eight months after the offense...
...One Los Angeles metropolitan daily solemnly warned that "he will continue to heckle us from beyond the grave...
...The San Francisco Examiner published a feature by Jack Lotto that viewed the clemency movement as the work of "pro-Reds and Communists...
...He became the target of a recall movement, and, along with Chessman, was hanged in effigy...
...Brown was excoriated in editorials and denounced in a huge wave of constituent mail...
...She said she just knew it was true from her own reasoning, and she asked, "What else could possibly make a child turn against its own mother...
...Moreover, Chessman's guilt was seriously questioned by two veteran courthouse reporters, one of whom was on the staff of the very newspaper so certain there was no reasonable doubt...
...Overlooked in all these statements was the finding of Dr...
...It is interesting that none of the papers that blamed Mary Alice's mental illness on the "Red Light" attack ever bothered to report that she therefore must have been at least pre-psychotic when she identified Chessman...
...But, through the efforts of a zealous prosecutor, J. Miller Leavy, Chessman received two death sentences as a "kidnap-robber...
...The magazine neglected to point out that the identification had not been made in a lineup, in which her judgment would have been put to at least a superficial test...
...Secondly, many newspapermen see the world from the viewpoint of law-enforcement officials, since they associate closely with policemen and prosecutors as vital news contacts...
...Anyone with the average police or prosecution outlook is understandably disturbed whenever a convict is able to postpone the execution of his sentence...
...Phase Six: Brown repeatedly rejected clemency arguments with the statement, "My hands are tied...
...The Los Angeles Times editorially snapped at four local veteran court reporters, including its own, who publicly had endorsed clemency and had signed an amicus curia brief on behalf of Chessman with the United States Supreme Court...
...Because the girl was ill, the suspect was brought to her home and made to stand on the sidewalk while she studied him from a second-story window...
...That was the month he won a court reprieve fifteen and a half hours before his scheduled execution...
...The son of a crippled mother and an ineffectual father who twice attempted suicide, Chessman became a reckless delinquent...
...The local community had developed so much hatred and fear of him that it became a considerable political risk to see any merit at all in his defense...
...With the press screaming for our scalps, we'd soon be replaced by the old-style fanatics who used to run prisons in this state...
...But if we in the prison and parole system were to free such men when we wanted to, the press would set up an uproar that would cost us our jobs...
...Phase Four: California newspapers that had barely mentioned Governor Brown's full-fledged commutations to murderers now proclaimed the mere postponement of Chessman's execution with headlines nearly as big as those used to announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor...
...No definite link ever was established between the two events...
...The California press reacted with what seemed to be a desperate counterattack...
...In either case they lose interest in maintaining long-strained family ties...
...He told me he hoped "some day to graduate from my current level of pamphleteer to that of a serious novelist...
...And I saw...
...But my desk wouldn't print Chessman's strong points...
...Under California's "Little Lindbergh Act," Chessman was accused of kidnaping with bodily injury for the purpose of robbery...
...The editorial writers would accuse us of 'coddling criminals.' So we frequently keep our men beyond the point of rehabilitation, just to satisfy the uneducated public's desire that every offender 'pay his debt.' "Such prisoners either become resentful or institutionalized...
...Even if it is determined that the Governor failed in a moral obligation to oppose the mob regardless of consequences, there never can be any doubt that the press was at least partly responsible for the fact that there was a mob...
...But there was even more than a reasonable doubt...
...And Chessman's I.Q...
...It is my opinion," Dr...
...He told another reporter: "I don't like to think that everything I've done will go down the drain because of Chessman...
...Chessman's unpopularity in law-enforcement circles was intensified by his persistent charges of police brutality and prosecution fraud, accusations he included in his internationally circulated books...
...When we finally do release them, they're often much more dangerous than they originally were...
...A large portion of the press indirectly stops us from doing a proper job of protecting the public," the warden said...
...Most of the civilized world knows it's wrong to kill that man...
...In a society dedicated to the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he seemed compelled to weigh Chessman's life against potential damage to a political program affecting millions of persons...
...It was hurriedly put together, but it was an objective and informative piece of work...
...Perhaps one of the main reasons was that many members of the working press simply had no chance to acquire a full, sophisticated understanding of the case...
...The reporters were Nadine Mason of the Times, Eleanor Garner Black of the Examiner, James A. Crenshaw of the Herald Express, and Chester Washington of the Mirror...
...It was not difficult for her to determine which of the men looking up at her was the suspect...
...The central figure of authority in the closing months of the case was California's Governor Edmund G. Brown, at that time hopeful for nomination to the Presidency of the...
...It is possible, then, that history's judgment will be that irresponsible molders of mass opinion gave Brown no choice but to let Chessman die...
...These details were a mental challenge to the nation's most astute legal scholars, let alone reporters and rewrite men...
...When Fraser was called to the witness stand, Chessman elicited from him numerous admissions that he had failed to transcribe the dead stenographer's symbols and that he had changed or added symbols...
...Chessman further established that Fraser had a long record of arrests for drunkenness and drunken driving...
...And, by the time the state gave the appellant his "day in court," it simply may have been too late...
...Brown commented to me: "I've never seen so many people want a person killed...
...Readers of California periodicals were assured that Chessman was "a criminal who never did a decent thing in his life" (Santa Monica Outlook), "a stealthy, vicious animal" (columnist Flaherty), "a madman" (Hollywood Close-up), "a psychopathic degenerate" (Santa Monica Outlook), and "a depraved fiend" (Sacramento Bee...
...The court action is still going on...
...The international clemency movement was led by clergymen, not Communists...
...The journalistic sound and fury at the close of the case made it difficult to believe that Chessman originally had been a minor news personality...
...The belief that Chessman had remained alive more than a decade solely as a result of discovering "legal loopholes" was expressed in these words by several California newspapers and newscasters and some national magazines...
...And it should be of special concern to a world in possession of suicidal bombs that can be ignited in the heat of a relatively minor emotional outburst...
...Three days after that editorial, Brown announced that he had been "unable to find a basis for clemency...
...This phase is almost completely ignored by the press...
...The question of what really killed the thirty-eight-year-old convict-author is more than academic...
...Although he already had been reduced to ashes, he was indicted anew as a "loathsome criminal" and a "horror thug...
...Thompson wrote to Governor Brown October 13, 1959, in reference to his examination of the girl a decade earlier, "that this patient was so mentally ill that her schizophrenic psychosis would have developed regardless of any alleged attempted rape...
...there was a positive belief in Chessman's innocence among such friends of the man as Dr...
...The two major morning newspapers in Los Angeles, the Times and the Examiner, published slightly rewritten versions of the "exclusive" the following day...
...During the next six years, the distortion about the girl's mental illness was repeated by scores of newspapers, newscasters, and news magazines throughout the nation...
...In one of the allegedly capital crimes, a $50 holdup and sex attack, the "Red Light Bandit" had moved a woman from her escort's car to his vehicle...
...The most complicated aspect of the Chessman story involved the constitutional arguments that kept the case and Chessman alive for so many years...
...If the state judge who presided at this hearing, Walter R. Evans, had agreed with Chessman that the Fraser transcript should be voided, it would have been a resounding slap in the face of California officialdom...
...Brown granted a sixty-day reprieve, later advising a newsman that he long had been "doubting the righteousness" of his original denial of clemency...
...George N. Thompson, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California...
...A striking example of current ramifications—in relation to crime prevention—was outlined for me early in 1960 by the warden of a well-known California prison...
...And that was the month that the California newspapers began to display prominently the most inflammatory distortion of the entire case...
...The "lucky" prisoner had to wait nine years in a small death cell, surviving six execution dates, before the United States Supreme Court ruled that California had not granted him his constitutional rights...
...Bill Thomas, feature writer on the Los Angeles Mirror, fixed the responsibility for burgeoning clemency sentiment on a "Chessman cult" that was diabolically circulating the falsehood that the convict-author was a genius...
...United States...
...The Los Angeles Times editorialized that "there has never been a reasonable doubt, even among his friends, of Chessman's guilt...
...In response to his steadfast refusal to act, the Los Angeles Examiner wrote: "We salute and commend the governor...
...As it was, the public was kept pretty much in the dark...
...The mother confided that the press had been wrong in quoting her as saying that she believed news of Chessman's death would help restore sanity to the girl...
...In the course of the hearing, Chessman uncovered more than 2,000 errors in Fraser's transcript...
...For almost twelve years I've been fighting for a new trial so I can prove my innocence," he told me when I visited him January 25, 1960...
...But Chessman won a stay from the United States Supreme Court...
...The approval of the record had been made by the trial judge, the late Charles W. Fricke, in the presence of the prosecutor, Mr...
...Associate Warden Walter D. Achuff informed me that the effigy in question had been found hanging outside the prison grounds, at an abandoned guard tower which was a rendezvous for the town's idle teenagers...
...The potential damage of journalistic sensationalism can be quite extensive...
...The four journalists had been antagonistic toward Chessman until they began covering the hearings...
...And the abductions patently had been for the purpose of carnal abuse, not robbery...
...I did...
...Jaik Rosenstein, editor of Hollywood Close-up magazine, blamed the eighth reprieve on "Communists throughout the world...
...He was flayed on radio, television, and lecture platforms, and booed at public appearances...
...The prisoner appeared in the film, Justice and Caryl Chessman, only in silent, news-reel-style footage...
...Our replacements probably would do more damage than we are being forced to do...
...Chessman's first fifteen years of life were marked by extreme poverty and acute attacks of bronchial asthma, encephalitis, and diphtheria...
...To begin with, it is widely believed that no condemned man ever had more opportunity to vindicate himself...
...More than two million signatures arrived from the single metropolitan center of Sao Paulo, Brazil...
...The magazine had not bothered to check its assumption with Chessman...
...He was polite and cooperative...
...You wait and see if the newspapers have their way...
...Chessman's detractors did not take into account his pioneering educational projects on behalf of illiterate convicts during a prior term at San Quentin (for which he was strongly commended to me by the wife of the then warden Clinton Duffy), his legal assistance to other condemned men, and an autobiography hailed by literary critics as a milestone in criminological literature...
...So the distortion survived, with the Los Angeles Mirror misinforming its readers as late as a month before the execution that Mary Alice's mother was "convinced her daughter will recover when Chessman is dead...
...No one detected viciousness...
...Thompson was a consultant to the State Superior Court in Los Angeles at the time the girl's psychosis became known to the authorities...
...There are scores of men in this institution who are psychologically ready for parole in a very short time under our set-up of indeterminate sentences...
...The strange expose started out as a copyright "exclusive" on the front page of the afternoon Los Angeles Herald Express...
...of 130 actually had been the doing of awtj-Chessman periodicals throughout the state and nation, including Thomas' own newspaper...
...The rest of the film consisted of narration by Quentin Reynolds and statements delivered by persons who opposed or approved the execution...
...The editorial failed to note that the maverick journalists had covered the entire 1957-8 transcript hearing, which lasted three times as long as the trial and which focused on the details of Chessman's contentions that his constitutional rights had been denied him...
...Yet even a casual examination of Chessman's allegedly lucky streak reveals a life of almost unrelieved tragedy...
...For if press-induced hysteria rather than objective legal procedures determined the outcome of the case, there is cause to be concerned about the destructive potential of such a powerful force at other times and places...
...If I weren't in uniform, I'd be out in front of the prison, helping all those people to demonstrate against this thing...
...Yet there never was any demonstration of animosity against Chessman among San Quentin's inmate population...
...Perhaps, then, it should not have been surprising that many journalists responded to the challenge by falling back on that handy headline cliche, the "legal loophole...
...I tried to cover the hearing fairly," a reporter for one of the Los Angeles papers told me...
...This is the story of the hysteria surrounding the Chessman case and the apparent journalistic origins of that social madness, a case study of errors and distortions which, through repetition in the press over a period of years, won acceptance by millions of persons as indisputable facts...
...The local press greeted this venture by exposing it...
...One of the demonstrators, a former prison psychiatrist named Isidore Ziferstein, asked the Governor if he really stood for or against clemency...
...According to a typical version of the distortion, from the Los Angeles Mirror, "his vicious sex crimes have driven one of his victims into a madhouse...
...Continuing with the denigration of Chessman's character, Time reported that his "prickly, demanding ego" had prevented him from asking for a commutation...
...It is possible that rape was committed by a "Red Light Bandit...
...It might have meant a new trial for Chessman...
...This evokes the compelling question of why the number of local newsmen who adapted to the facts was so tragically small...
...During a period of intense anti-Chessman hysteria, in December, 1959, one segment of the Los Angeles press could be observed in the act of biting its own tail...
...They usually must pursue a number of potential stories each day...
...But, in both offenses for which Chessman was condemned, the victims persuaded the bandit not to pursue coitus, but rather submitted to other demands...
...For years the target of ugly headlines and ferocious editorials, Chessman had become a symbol of crime itself...
...The press repeatedly had referred to Chessman as a "criminal genius," a phrase originally applied to him in an oration, delivered to the trial jury by the prosecutor...
...Unlike reporters in movie and television dramas, most newsmen cannot devote their full time to a single assignment...
...Fraser had been recommended for the $10,000 transcription assignment by the prosecutor, who happened to be Fraser's uncle-in-law...
...In support of this ambition, Chessman displayed a remarkable knowledge of literature, psychology, philosophy, religion, history, politics, and science...
...The article stated that Chessman had been allowed to become a "movie star," and that this apparent conspiracy had been engineered "with the connivance if not the approval" of prison officials...
...Brown responded, "That is a very difficult question, and I don't know how to answer it...
...While I have a chance of going free, I can't work up any enthusiasm for pleading with anyone for the privilege of spending the rest of my life in the prison courtyard...
...Judge Evans might have become known in the Los Angeles press as "the man who turned the creature loose...
...It is a tragedy of newsmen who perpetuated the virulent myths and then moved on in the faith that ideas so widely accepted about such a well-known man must have been substantially true...
...Leavy, and a substitute court stenographer, Stanley Fraser...
...Moreover, I became acquainted with two television commentators and a magazine editor who experienced similar conversions when they obtained first-hand knowledge of the story...
...But the California press launched an anti-clemency campaign against Chessman, with the Los Angeles Times editorially suggesting that the Governor "have some reservations about turning the creature loose on the community...
...And if you think I'm exaggerating about the power of the sensational press, you just watch what happens to Chessman...
...and Time magazine published the grimly ambiguous statement that "the girl later sank into schizophrenia...
...Then, even while a Federal judge was placing a call to the San Quentin warden to order a half-hour reprieve to consider further court action, Chessman was sealed in the gas chamber and slain in a manner prescribed by law...
...Chessman's name first became a major factor in newsstand sales in May, 1954, six years after his conviction and sentence...
...But there is evidence suggesting that the true cause of Chessman's death may have been an overdose of journalistic sensationalism...
...I talked with many other reporters and professional persons who visited Chessman, including death-row physician William F. Graves...
...As a political leader de^ pendent on votes and obligated to a party organization that had enabled him to rise to power, there was no doubt that he had been forced to make his decision under extremely unfavorable conditions...
...In the words of columnist Vincent X. Flaherty of the Los Angeles Examiner, '-no felon ever had a greater run of luck...
...The Los Angeles Herald Express editorially ascribed the intensified clemency campaign to "a giant wave of blubbering sentimentality...
...That was the month his first book, Cell 2455, Death Row, was published...
...Alongside the editorial was a cartoon that depicted the girl sitting disconsolate and alone in a dark, cell-like room that was supposed to represent her hospital environment...
...Finally, some journalists may have avoided the facts in the Chessman case because they were as fearful of mass hysteria as was Governor Brown...
...But many California newspapers made the connection appear indisputable by falsely reporting that the girl had entered the institution "shortly after the attack," or by evasively stating that she had gone to the hospital "after the crime...
...He always treated everyone with respect, regardless of the person's importance to him...
...She admitted that she never had found a doctor who agreed with her...
...But perhaps the public would have accepted the startling news if the newspapers had published the full details and implications of Chessman's victories at the hearing...
...The cartoon caption read: "No Reprieve for Her...
...On May 2, two hours before the scheduled execution, Brown was confronted by clemency demonstrators outside the executive mansion...
...While Chessman was dying, a San Quentin guard told me that "they're killing a man who became a worthwhile human being...
...He exhibited a profound remorse for his early life of crime, and he expressed an intense desire to dedicate his intellectual talent to creative pursuits...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
