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Once he emerged from obscurity, Chessman inevitably became a symbolic cause for opponents of capital punishment (see box), all the more so because he was not convicted of killing anybody. French Singer Georgie Vienette, official of an anti-capital-punishment organization, traveled from Paris to Governor Brown's office in Sacramento to plead personally for Chessman's life. Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Nelson Hungria, principal author of the Brazilian penal code (no capital punishment), declared that "Caryl Chessman is the most eloquent assurance of the need to wipe out once and for all the death penalty, that ugly stain on civilization." Much of the save-Chessman agitation around the world has little or no connection with the general debate over capital punishment. It arises partly out of compassion, sometimes tinged with admiration, for his twelve-year battle to stave off execution—his self-publicized role as underdog, fighting alone against the impersonal power of the state, his sheer persistence in teaching himself law, drafting appeals, writs and briefs in a double-locked Death Row cell, smuggling out one writ on sheets of toilet paper, concealing the manuscript of a book by typing it lightly on carbon paper after prison authorities ordered him not to write any more for publication. But the No. 1 argument of the spare-Chessman camp is that he has already suffered enough. Such phrases as "long agony" and "legal torture" and "abominable suspense" abound in European editorials on the Chessman case.
Most Europeans seem strangely unaware that U.S. courts have postponed Chessman's execution not to torment him but to safeguard his legal rights, to listen, at his own resourceful and persistent urging, to his own appeals on his own behalf.
Intricate Combination. The vigor and eloquence of the appeals, delivered from the unique platform of Death Row, have caught the public ear as they once caught the ear of cops, judges and social workers when Chessman began his life of crime back in the 1930s. Caryl Chessman was a bumbling criminal, but he had a special genius: he has always known by instinct the intricate combinations that lead to the law's heart. In his teens he won second chances (for more crime) with a patter of contrition and redemption. ("I now see crime in its true light. I feel a keen desire to rid myself completely of it.") In reform school, jail and prison he worked so diligently at worthy projects, e.g., once he wrote a constitution and bylaws for a youngsters' anti-dope league, that he impressed detention and parole authorities.
With it all, Caryl Chessman was—and is—arrogant, self-centered and pathologically egotistical. At San Quentin, he greeted one of his lawyers—who arrived an hour late for an appointment after winning another legal delay—with a snarling "Where have you been, you son of a bitch?" Said a former Los Angeles plainclothesman who got to know him well: "His ego is so apparent that it almost reaches out and grabs you by the throat."