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Behind the bleak concrete walls of California's San Quentin state prison, a Death Row guard handed a brief note, signed by the warden, to the pale, heavy-browed prisoner in Cell 2455. "Dear Sir," it began.
"On this date I received Death Warrant in your case . . ." The presiding Superior Court judge, the note went on, had set the date for the prisoner's execution, a date seven weeks away: March 28, 1952.
But Death Row Prisoner Caryl Chessman still had a lot of life ahead of him. In the eight years since he read the warden's note, Convict Chessman, 38, has written four books, survived eight different execution dates, outlived the judge who sentenced him to death, and become the world's most famous prisoner, center of impassioned arguments on both sides of the Atlantic. Last week, with Chessman scheduled to die in San Quentin's green octagonal gas chamber next May 2 (execution date No. 9), the California legislature met in Sacramento in a special session called by Governor Edmund Brown, ostensibly to debate capital punishment but in effect to decide the fate of Caryl Whittier Chessman.
"Let Him Live!" The legislature's capital-punishment hearing took place against the stir and clamor of mounting agitation to save Chessman from the "green room," as Death Row inmates call it. An auto caravan pulled into Sacramento bringing 384 University of California faculty signatures on a petition urging abolition of capital punishment. A rodeo rider, billed as a "minuteman," drove his tired horse from San Francisco to Sacramento, picking up save-Chessman signatures along the way. An unemployed schoolteacher named Norbert Nicholas was in the fourth day of a save-Chessman hunger strike in Sacramento. At the capitol building, a sprinkling of demonstrators displayed placards reading STOP INSTITUTIONALIZED MURDER and LOVE, NOT HATE. After the hearing, California beatniks assembled in North Beach for a reading of save-Chessman poems. Letters and telegrams were pouring into Governor Brown's office at an average rate of 1,000 a day, and they ran 3 to 2 in favor of Chessman.
The spare-Chessman movement stirred emotions far beyond the borders of California. Showing in big cities across the U.S., as well as in dozens of movie houses in California, was a 45-minute documentary, Justice and Caryl Chessman, scripted by a sometime San Quentin inmate (forgery), and bent to the cause of clemency for Chessman. On jukeboxes across the land, an imitation folk song called The Ballad of Caryl Chessman was mournfully urging, "Let him live, let him live, let him live!"