(6 of 8)
In the Mazes. Since July 1948, a cell 4 ft. 6 in. wide, 10 ft. 6 in. long and 7 ft. 6 in. high has been Caryl Chessman's world. In it he has, in his own words, "read or skimmed 10,000 legal books, and written between two and three million words." In the opinion of celebrated Liability Lawyer Melvin ("King of Torts") Belli, Chessman has become "one of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers I have met." With the help of various lawyers, self-taught Legal Expert Chessman managed to keep his case dragging back and forth through the courts for twelve years after he was sentenced to death. His major appeals have revolved around the disputed, 2,000-page transcript of his 1948 trial. Court Reporter Ernest Perry died of a heart attack when he had finished transcribing only one-third of his shorthand notes, and his death, plus an error on the part of Judge Fricke, threw the case into a legal limbo.
Fricke's error, as the U.S. Supreme Court saw it, lay in denying Chessman's request to be present at the mid-1949 hearings at which Judge Fricke certified the transcript that a substitute court reporter put together from Perry's notes.
Chessman appealed that denial through the mazes of the courts, and won six stays of execution along the way. In 1957, nearly nine years after Chessman was sentenced to death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the denial violated his constitutional right to due process of law. After new hearings a Superior Court judge ordered more than 2,000 changes in the transcript.
Chessman attacked the revised transcript, again carried his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But last December, after ordering the seventh stay of execution, the court rejected Chessman's appeal for a review of a state court decision upholding the revised transcript. A Superior Court judge set a new execution date, No. 8: Feb. 19, 1960.
The Deathwatch. At any time during the past few years Caryl Chessman might have saved his life by appealing to the Governor of California to exercise executive clemency and commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.**** But Chessman's prickly, demanding ego stands in the way. "Caryl Chessman has not sought executive clemency from me," said Governor Brown last October. "To the contrary, he has declared that he seeks only vindication. This I cannot give him. The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming . . . His attitude has been one of steadfast arrogance and contempt." But with his mail running 10 to 1 in favor of sparing Chessman, and with his own conscience nagging at him, Pat Brown, longtime opponent of capital punishment, agonized over the Chessman case as Feb. 19 drew near. Ten hours before Chessman was to die—he had already been taken to a special deathwatch cell 15 paces from the door of the gas chamber —Brown received a State Department telegram advising him that the government of Uruguay was gravely concerned about the possibility of demonstrations protesting Chessman's execution when President Eisenhower visited Uruguay in early March. Brown promptly decided to grant a 60-day reprieve (TIME, Feb. 29).