Capital Punishment

Sept. 30, 2009 Updated June 25, 2010

Caryl Chessman

Convicted in 1948 as “The Red Light Bandit,” Caryl Chessman would become an internationally known “Death Row” author and make the cover of Time Magazine. His appeal attorney came within minutes of preventing his wrongful execution in 1960.

by Randy Radic

Attorney Rosalie Asher’s eleventh-hour appeal to a California Supreme Court judge came within minutes of halting the wrongful execution of Caryl Chessman in 1960.  On May 2, 1960, as Chessman was being strapped into the chair in the gas chamber at San Quentin, Asher was in Sacramento, presenting a motion to Judge Goodman of the California Supreme Court.  Judge Goodman was intrigued by her presentation, which was a photograph of Charles Terranova, who fit the description provided by victims of the “Red Light Bandit.”  Terranova had a record of 13 convictions for crimes committed in the Los Angeles area, along with an FBI rap sheet for armed robbery and attempted rape.  And more importantly, in Chessman’s very first interview with the police after his arrest, Chessman had said, “The guy you’re looking for is Terranova.  The red light and the sexual assaults, that’s all him.”

Judge Goodman said he needed more time to study it.  Rosalie Asher told him there was no time.

Judge Goodman issued a one-hour stay of execution so that he could study the motion.  He instructed his secretary to call the warden at San Quentin.  When told to halt the execution, the assistant warden, Reed Nelson, replied that it was too late.  “The execution has begun.”

The pellets of cyanide had already been dropped into the sulfuric acid, which sat in a bucket beneath Chessman’s legs.  The deadly fumes tendriled up to his mouth and nose.  It took him eight minutes to die.

Three hours later a black hearse from the Harry M. Williams Funeral Home in San Rafael arrived to pick up the blue-green, lifeless body of Caryl Chessman. The following Monday afternoon, Chessman’s corpse was cremated at the Tamalpais Cemetery in San Rafael.  Two people watched as the cremation occurred:  the mortician, and a woman who had placed two red rosebuds on the coffin before it entered the oven.  The woman’s name was Bernice Freeman.  There was no ceremony, no religious rites. 

Ruth Brown

Ruth Brown was only 13 when she went to work as a telephone operator. She worked the night shift. During the day she studied shorthand and bookkeeping and dreamed of growing up and marrying her boss. Not the boss at the telephone company, but some ideal of a wealthy executive with whom she would live happily ever after. Not that Ruth would lack for marriage proposals. Later in life, while on trial for murdering her husband, she would receive a total of 164. 

by Doris Lane

Ruth was 20 in 1915 when she married her employer, the editor of Motor Boating magazine, Albert Snyder. Before marrying Ruth, Snyder had been engaged 10 years to Jessie Guishard and he hadn't exactly gotten over her. When Albert and Ruth set up housekeeping, one of the first pictures to hang on a wall of the family home was Jessie's. When Albert bought a boat he named it after Jessie. When Ruth objected, Albert declared that Jessie was "the finest woman I have ever met."

April 5, 2009

Mumia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a murder he did not commit would have turned almost anyone else into an embittered, defeated man. Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the voice of the voiceless," as he demonstrates yet again in his most recent book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009.)

 by J. Patrick O'Connor

Through hundreds of essays, radio commentaries and now six well-written, meticulously researched books, he has defied the walls that encase him to speak out against oppression. His voice his heard weekly throughout the United States on Pacifica Radio and his writings are read and admired throughout much of the world. From the bowels of Death Row, where 3,600 others languish in the United States, Abu-Jamal presses on for justice, day after day, year after year.

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. opens a tightly shut door into the operations of the U.S. penal system by chronicling the exploits of dozens of jailhouse lawyers – both men and women – who have fought the injustices the courts and the prisons have dealt them and their fellow prisoners. Their accomplishments, against all odds, have been incredible. Their story is a story never before told.

For the vast majority of the 2.3 million prisoners in the United States and for Abu-Jamal himself, the overriding, inescapable reality about the U.S. justice system is that the law is only what a judge says it is.