Over the next several years Chessman followed up his initial triumph by writing more best-selling books and magazine articles.38 He also was portrayed in movies, news broadcasts, documentary films, and countless articles circulated throughout the world. Accounts depicted him as a psychopath, sex fiend, rebel, wily jailhouse lawyer, con man, fall guy, poster boy for rehabilitation, and literary genius. On March 21, 1960, his likeness appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the gas chamber in the background—an iconic mark of distinction for both him and the chamber at that critical time. His apotheosis from three-time loser to worldwide celebrity amounted to one of the great personal transformations in American history. Chessman’s case, through his writings and all the coverage about him, shined a spotlight on many festering issues in crime and punishment. Foremost was the death penalty, and to a lesser extent the gas chamber in particular.
Like other famous cases before his—Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs—Chessman’s struggle became a political cause célèbre, even though, unlike the others, he was not overtly political. Instead, much of the fight on his behalf was waged on “humanitarian” grounds, although, as one commentator observed, the “cat-and-mouse game” also “provided an outlet for incipient anti-Americanism, as well as the expression of honest doubts about law and justice in the United States.” Some of his supporters included the actors Marlon Brando and Shirley MacLaine, television host Steve Allen, writers Norman Mailer, Aldous Huxley, and Dorothy Parker, and throngs of demonstrators from Rio de Janeiro to London and New York to Sacramento. Every day newspapers throughout the world reported new developments in his drama. The Vatican, through its newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, appealed to the courts and the governor to spare his life. University students in Montevideo threatened to picket President Eisenhower during his visit there unless the execution was stopped. In the face of such pressure, Governor Edmund G. Brown of California, a Democrat, issued a sixty-day reprieve, causing many abolitionists to think they had won.39
But the reprieve set off a political firestorm in the United States. When it was revealed that Brown said his decision had been influenced by the State Department, out of concern for potential embarrassment to Eisenhower during his trip to South America, many American conservatives cried federal interference. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a Republican candidate for president, accused the State Department of being “weak-kneed,” and the pro-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina complained that federal officials had become “less and less able to discern” what was a “domestic” question. When Brown tried to defuse the crisis by proposing legislation to abolish the death penalty in California, his approach triggered more attacks from the political right. Comments by Vice President Richard Nixon in favor of capital punishment were assailed by leaders of Reform Judaism organizations, who said Nixon’s statement “demonstrates an ignorance of the scientific studies which prove that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.”40
By then, thirty-five nations and nine U.S. states had abolished capital punishment, and the trend throughout the Western world seemed to be running against the death penalty.41 An April 1960 poll found that sitting governors outside the South opposed capital punishment by a six-to-one ratio.42 But both houses of the California legislature refused to pass Brown’s abolitionist legislation.
Chessman, meanwhile, continued his barrage of legal appeals, raising one argument after another. The courts rejected them all. On April 30, 1960, he and his attorneys were allowed to hold a long morning news conference at San Quentin. In it the condemned convict steadfastly reasserted his innocence and held out hope for gubernatorial clemency that would save his life.43
But after receiving eight stays of execution, on May 1, 1960, Chessman’s legal luck appeared to have finally run out. Media from around the world rushed to San Quentin, where hundreds of protesters, many of them Catholic, camped out alongside the road with signs saying, “CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS MURDER” and “EACH MAN’S DEATH DIMINISHES ME,” and banners bearing such messages as “THE WORLD IS WATCHING US.” Through that night they continued their vigil.
Chessman’s ninth scheduled appointment in the gas chamber proved to be his last. Sixty witnesses, about two-thirds of them reporters, crammed into the first-floor room adjacent to the execution room. Five guards sat on a bench outside, one for every observation window. Just after 10 A.M. on May 2, Chessman was escorted into the small octagonal steel chamber with its dark green walls and strapped into one of its two sturdy chairs. Wearing a white shirt, new blue jeans, and socks, he showed no emotion. After two guards strapped him in and walked out, he glanced over at two reporters he knew and mouthed out the words, “Tell Rosalie [Asher, his attorney] I said good-bye. It’s all right.” Then he half-smiled. Reporter Harold V. Streeter noted, “He grimaces but managed a deep breath. His face with its hawk-nose and protruding lower lip goes back as though he was looking at the ceiling.”
At 10:03:15, a click was heard and potassium cyanide pellets dropped from a container under the chair into a basin of sulfuric acid solution. Fumes began their ascent. “Now Chessman’s mouth falls wide open,” the AP reporter wrote, in a dispatch sent round the world. “His fingers which once typed out four books and numerous court appeals on his death row typewriter twitch nervously. The head darts involuntarily forward but falls back again. The mouth makes convulsive movements. It almost seemed like it was trying to form a shouted word.” Nearby, the telephone rang and witnesses winced when they heard the mumbled words. Once again, the call had come too late. This time, the notice of a judge’s one-hour reprieve had failed to prevent the execution.44
Another reporter, John R. Babcock, who witnessed Chessman’s execution from only two feet away, later recalled, “The thrashing and gasping continued for five to eight minutes of excruciating agony and pain as he slowly suffocated. After a total of approximately nine minutes, the prison doctor evidently had pronounced Mr. Chessman dead. Next, a metallic voice came over the loudspeaker…. The voice referred to Mr. Chessman by his inmate number rather than his name and gave the details of the exact times at which Mr. Chessman was prepared for execution, brought to the gas chamber, when the pellets were dropped and when he was pronounced dead. Then I distinctly recall the voice saying, ‘that’s all, gentlemen.’”45
Caryl Chessman was thirty-eight years old.
His gassing unleashed a wave of revulsion across the globe and contributed to scores of anti-American outbursts. Students in Uruguay shouted, “Assassins!” Police in Stockholm mobilized to head off vandalism at the U.S. embassy. A headline in Italy read, “Chessman Killed in the Gas Chamber; Cruel America.” Demonstrations also occurred in Brazil, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, France, and other countries.
As one historian later put it, “The fight to save Caryl Chessman [had been] the most important attack on capital punishment in American history.”46 Much of the most heated opposition had occurred abroad, in nations considered friendly to the United States, yet somehow it seemed not to have engendered such an enormous outcry at home. Foreigners seemed to be more agitated about American capital punishment than Americans were. Most Americans remained uneasy or oblivious. The greatest domestic response occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the weeks and months that followed, Chessman’s execution became a rallying cry in Berkeley’s burgeoning Free Speech Movement, and a touchstone for Beatniks’ poems and folksingers’ laments. Author Paul Goodman cited the killing as “violently, sickeningly, sadistic, pornographic, and vindictive.” Prison reformers questioned the wisdom of executing someone who not only hadn’t taken another life but who also had proved such a model of rehabilitation. Young lawyers and activists contemplated what they could do to attack the death penalty itself. And American diplomats worried about how their country’s death-penalty policies might injure America’s standing in the cold war.47