California's Death Penalty

...In San Diego, for instance, State Senator Hugo Fisher, an opponent of the death penalty, used his influence to stop his supporters from working on the campaign...

...Fleming...

...In light of the pressing time factor, a group of people from the Monterey Peninsula, most of whom had never mixed in politics before, started on their own...

...Here, they felt, was a chance to do something at once idealistic and possible...

...In February 1960, there seemed to be an excellent chance of repealing the state's capital punishment law...

...The liberals seemed to see the public as some sort of enormous, snarling animal, capable at best of agreeing to abolition only after years of an intensive "education" effort...

...If there is such apathy I submit that it comes from and is generated by the liberal leaders...

...In an interview in Naples with Ian Fleming of The Sunday Times (London), Lucky Luciano, the man popularly believed to have been head of America's prewar narcotics traffic talks about the failure of the U.S...

...Consequently volunteers throughout the state, especially students and housewives, came into the campaign by the hundreds and the most heartening thing was that many of them had always shied away from political involvement of any kind...

...They discovered that, according to law, the Monterey petition was the only one allowed in the field and that there were questions about the legality of its wording...

...IN Los ANGEUS the Friends Committee on Legislation operated most effectively...

...Liberals want an end to loyalty oaths, but not many raise the issue before the public.They want recognition of Red China, they want a seat for that country in the United Nations, yet again they fear open discussion of the issue...

...Liberals seem to have become afraid to exert imaginative leadership, to make decisions, to live with any degree of consistency for their beliefs...

...the question of capital punishment was in the air...

...He Sure Ought to Know...

...So the middleman, the traffickers, will go out of business, and then you have no law-enforcement problem and no smuggling...

...Brown had been hung on a hook by the State Department which had asked for the reprieve for the sole reason that Ike was going to visit South America...

...also, they mystically foresaw, this defeat would set their attempts back ten years...

...When I came into the campaign in March at the request of Fritjof Thygeson, a socialist and an A.F...

...II The petition movement failed miserably...

...And Cole Blease, a lobbyist for the FCL and later for the American Civil Liberties Union, said at a meeting in April that he was sure the people would reject the measure if it came before them...

...He told them that the voters would defeat the abolition measure at the polls...

...Fisher seemed horrified at the idea of the people voting on the matter...

...ACTION CAME FAST that first month...

...men's associations or from the state's many reactionary newspapers...

...In many cases liberals want disarmament —unilaterally if need be—yet are re luctant or afraid to talk about it...

...You see, Mr...

...However, civil liberties attorney Francis Heisler argued that a judge wouldn't rule against the obvious wishes of 450,000 people who had signed in good faith...

...People all over the world were demanding that Chessman be freed...

...But they chose the road they knew to be less right...

...He insisted that the Legislature would not touch the issue for years if the people voted abolition down— as he was sure they would...

...Thirty people sat down in the road to San Quentin the morning of Chessapathy man's gassing, briefly halting traffic as a means of protest...

...to cope with addiction...

...The point is, Mr...

...The FCL has done much to advance civil rights causes over the years, but it exists basically for the purpose of lobbying and it therefore must inherently distrust the idea of the people deciding anything...

...If Chessman died, the State Department felt, there might be trouble during the visit...

...The response in other parts of the state was similar, and we were doing it without much money...

...Petition workers in the Los Angeles area would call potential supporters who had both influence and money...

...The petition, it appeared, was their answer...

...So every time you go to the clinic . . . you get tapered off a fraction, a very small fraction...

...The local television stations wanted interviews and news shots...

...Stamps and phone bills were paid for mostly by donations of one or two dollars and no one who worked on the campaign received any pay...

...The city's two reactionary dailies were calling us for stories...

...This fear and indecisiveness breeds cynicism...

...Whether the voters—as the liberals insisted— would have retained capital punishment is not the question here...

...It came instead from the Democratic Party, from the politicians, from liberal organizations— from individuals and groups who actually favored abolition of the death penalty...

...During the petition cam paign, with human lives in question, the liberals' tactics often betrayed a nervous concern that Democratic can didates in this election year would be embarrassed—forced into talking about capital punishment publicly—if the measure went to the people...

...They drew up a petition, filed the necessary $200 with the attorney general, printed thousands of petitions at their own expense, and began circulating them...

...Fleming, that if you can get your drugs for nothing, you won't have to rob or murder somebody for the money to buy the stuff...

...In February, when Brown reprieved Chessman, he said, "I want the people of California, through the legislature, to express themselves once more on capital punishment...

...They seemed to be waiting for us, wanting to do something but not knowing how or what to do...

...Fleming, it's just the way you spend the money—on setting up clinics or on law enforcement that cannot work and only makes the problem worse.' " ("In and Around Brazen Naples," The Sunday Times, Aug...

...In San Diego County, within two weeks, an apartment was donated for use as an office, a sponsor guaranteed that the telephone bill would be paid if we couldn't meet it, we had five mimeograph machines, a printing press and paper at our disposal...

...Under the leadership of Richard Drinnon and Christian Bay, the professors and the Bay Area committee got going in March...

...The distressing thing is not so much how or why the campaign failed, but what its failure shows about the climate of liberalism...

...San Francisco Supervisor Al Zirpoli, head of the northern section of the lobbying Californians Against Capital Punishment, angrily warned a Stiles Hall gathering against the petition, saying that "the people are ridden with superstition and fear...

...In the Bay Area strong pressures came from the Democratic Party, the FCL, and from individual legislators...

...Governor Edmund Brown had just reprieved Caryl Chessman for sixty days...

...Washington is spending billions of dollars every year trying to stamp out the traffic, but that is not the way to stop it...

...It's all the fault of the American Government...

...It was being argued on buses, in the office, over coffee, at luncheons, even at Rotary Club meetings...

...Here was a movement in which amateurs, with little or no experience in the political arena, could beat the professionals without resorting to the usual manipulative tactics of billboards, spot commercials and lobbying...

...They knew for a certainty that if the measure went to the people it would be defeated...

...Many Democrats had taken the cue from their liberal governor...

...It did not come, as anticipated, from district attorneys' associations or from police...

...And do you know what, Mr...

...And Brown told the press a number of times that if the people voted on the issue in November, he thought capital punishment would be retained...

...THE RECENT FAILURE to abolish the death penalty in California by initiative petition reveals something about liberal politics today...

...They would receive at least a show of interest, but upon phoning the supporter back would be told that the FCL had contacted them and that they no longer favored the idea...

...In California they want the end of the death penalty, but they want it quietly...

...Hundreds more would have joined had there been anything but last-minute preparations...

...The end of California's death penalty appears to be years away unless sit-downs take place on the road to San Quentin (as has been rumored) in large enough numbers to bring about a popular clamor stronger than that which accompanied Chessman to the gas chamber less than a year ago...

...It requires considerable cynicism—or moral weakness— to be afraid of the voters when human lives are in jeopardy...

...They are not handling this narcotics problem right, which is why it goes on getting worse every year...

...and he had the power to declare another moratorium —as governors of at least three other states have done—on the death penalty...

...28, 1960...

...The Los Angeles organization never really got started...

...Senate, there already existed scores of anti-death penalty groups...

...This allowed him to make the fantastic claim, just before Chessman's extermination, that he'd "done everything possible" and that "my hands are tied...

...They want to do away with investi gating committees yet they leave Rep resentative James Roosevelt addressing a near-empty House when he advocates such a thing...

...And yet today, in California, Chesster man's martyrdom has been pushed into the recesses of many consciences, and the executions go on...

...Requests for speakers were coming in...

...This could very well be an outgrowth of a learned distrust and fear—even a fear of democracy itself...

...The wording, Heisler said in a widely circulated letter, did not misrepresent the intent of the petition and he pointed to previous cases in which judges held petitions legal if there was no misrepresentation...

...This was not true, of course...

...He had the power to recommend clemency to the State Supreme Court which never in California history had refused to concur with such a recommendation...

...On the other hand, he said, an anti-death penalty bill would probably squeeze out of the senate committee next year, and in "four or five years" it would be passed...

...THE MYTH SAYS the people are cynical and apathetic...

...This despite the fact that the most recent Gallup poll showed that only 51 percent of the American pub lic favors the death penalty...

...Brown wanted to get off that hook and, knowing the issue would be killed in committee, he tossed the whole business to the Legislature...

...McCarthyism did much to implant this fear and in the early 1950's liberals took sheland learned to wait, to settle for moderation, caution, restraint...

...Episcopalian Bishop James A. Pike, who has been outspoken against capital punishment and Chessman's execution, declined to sponsor a later and different kind of petition arguing that since executions had been going on for thousands of years, and in California since I850, a more judicious approach to abolition wouldn't be out of place...

...of L. organizer in the Bay Area who two years before had run for the U.S...

...Some times the FCL would be the first to get in touch with the potential supporters...

...Davis set up The People Against Capital Punishment, Inc., and asked the professors to start organizing...

...One man, after hearing Fisher's persuasive arguments, burned his petitions and their 150 signatures...

...Newspapers, magazines and television stations, particularly in California, were carrying discussions about the issue...

...Italics mine...

...Had the liberal groups worked as hard for the petition as they did against it, California might have abolished the death penalty this past November...

...The death penalty issue, because it was concerned with the saving of human lives, might transcend conventional politics...

...But the academic mind is often hesitant and indecisive, and the professors were slow in agreeing to plans of action...

...We were getting phone calls from fifteen to twenty people a day who wanted to help, to circulate petitions, drive cars, do secretarial work...

...In this atmosphere of controversy, George T. Davis, one of Chessman's attorneys, a group of University of California professors, and some prominent abolitionists began consideration of the immensely formidable task of collecting the signatures of 450,000 registered voters on petitions to put the question of the death penalty on the November ballot...

...They ought to set up clinics all over the country where you can register as a drug-taker, like you do in England, and go and get your dose for nothing, for free...

...The amateurs were only able to collect about 35,000 signatures...

...In April, however, the strength of the opposition began to be felt and it grew stronger each week...

...So in the end you get cured, see...

...By state law, the signatures had to be gotten and validated by June 20 if the issue was to go on the ballot...