( In June 1948, 27-year-old petty criminal Caryl Chessman...)
In June 1948, 27-year-old petty criminal Caryl Chessman was sentenced in California on two counts of sexual assault, receiving two death sentences as punishment in a case that remains one of the most baffling episodes in American legal history. Maintaining his innocence of these crimes, Chessman lived in Cell 2455, a four-by-ten foot space on Death Row in San Quentin for the twelve years between his sentencing and eventual execution. He spent this time, punctuated by eight separate stays of execution, writing this memoir — a moving and pitiless account of his life in crime and the early life that produced it. Chessman's clarity of mind and ability to bring his thoughts directly to the page, even within the stifling walls of San Quentin, help make this work the most literate and authentic expose ever written by a criminal about his crimes.
https://www.amazon.com/Cell-2455-Death-Row-Condemned/dp/0786718153?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0786718153
Caryl Whittier Chessman was born on May 27, 1921 in St. Joseph, Michigan, United States. He was the only child of Serl Whittier Chessman, an ambitious laborer who worked at a variety of jobs, and Hallie Cottle. Soon after Caryl's birth the family moved to Glendale, California, where Serl opened a gasoline station. In 1927 Caryl almost died of pneumonia. His aptitude for music was ended the following year by encephalitis, which left him tone deaf and possibly affected his personality.
At Glendale High School Caryl did not feel accepted, being nicknamed "Hooknose, " still puny, weakened by diphtheria when fifteen, and humilated by his family's poverty and sickness. It was among the school's troublemakers that he gained approval by stealing automobiles, learning to drive with great skill and daring, and committing burglaries.
He became temperamental and occasionally capriciously cruel. An automobile accident in 1931 left Caryl's aunt dead, his mother paralyzed from the waist down, and Chessman with a smashed nose and distorted lower lip that marred his appearance for the rest of his life. Medical bills combined with the Great Depression, then at its worst, caused Serl to lose his gas station. After trying a series of occupations he ended up on relief and attempted suicide. His antisocial behavior was deliberate and unremitting, and he dramatized himself as a challenger of the law enforcement authorities. Arrested at sixteen in 1937 for auto theft, he was to spend less than one and a half years of the remaining twenty-three of his life as a free man. During his brief periods of freedom, he committed robbery, burglary, and other crimes. Committed to reform school, roadwork camp, and prison in 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1941, each time Chessman's good behavior obtained early release or a chance to escape. A conviction in 1943 imprisoned him until the end of 1947. In January 1948, about a month after Chessman had been released on parole from Folsom Prison, there occurred in rapid succession a series of crimes in Los Angeles for which Chessman was held largely responsible. In some of the crimes a car with a red spotlight was used to impersonate police in approaching parked couples in lovers' lanes for robbery and sexual assault. On May 21, 1948, a jury in the superior court of Los Angeles found Chessman guilty of seventeen felonies, including two violations of California's "Little Lindbergh" kidnapping law of 1933, which allowed the death penalty. In the trial he insisted on acting as his own defense counsel, with some resulting disadvantages, although he was often skillful in the role. Acknowledging his criminal background, he maintained, however, that the sex crimes of the "red light bandit" were unlike any crime in his own past, that the evidence was faulty, and that the prosecution's insistence on the death penalty required a strained, technical application of the state's kidnapping law to what were essentially only robbery and sexual assault. The prosecutor was successful in blurring such distinctions, making the most of Chessman's reputation as a criminal and sex pervert to urge the death penalty. Following his conviction, Chessman and a growing army of supporters fought for twelve years against his execution. While carrying on his legal battle from his cell, Chessman wrote four books, one of them fictional, all based on his experiences. They were widely read and acclaimed, bringing public sympathy and money for his costly litigation. Cell 2455, Death Row (1954) went through six printings by the end of 1955. It was translated into several languages and was the basis of a film produced in 1955. One avenue of appeal was cut off in 1950 when the California Supreme Court upheld the kidnapping charge against Chessman's accomplice in some of the crimes. But Chessman demanded a new trial, claiming that his appeal could not be considered fairly because the court reporter's record of the trial was incomplete, inaccurate, and fraudulently affected by the prosecution. The reporter died shortly after the trial, and his notes were almost indecipherable. In 1959 both state and federal supreme courts decided that the revised transcript was sufficiently accurate and complete, largely because it was not much more imperfect than many other trial records of the time. During the months preceding Chessman's execution, petitions poured in from many parts of the world asking that he be spared. Many of his supporters accepted his guilt but did not think he deserved the death penalty, while others opposed capital punishment on principle. At one point Governor Edmund G. Brown, the day before the execution date, granted a sixty-day reprieve and convened a special session of the legislature to consider abolishing capital punishment. But it failed to act. The execution was postponed eight times, but the ninth date was kept and Chessman died in the gas chamber at San Quentin. The twelve-year delay was partly a result of the death of the court reporter, which gave Chessman his major legal issue and time in which to place his case before the public and raise money for litigation by his writing. The closer examination that the U. S. Supreme Court began to give the Chessman case in 1955 may have been partly on account of his public recognition. It has been said that the Court could and should have disposed of all aspects of the transcript controversy in 1950 when it first encountered it, but that it did not consider it fully until seven years later.
( In June 1948, 27-year-old petty criminal Caryl Chessman...)
Twice he married girls who in vain hoped to reform him. The first marriage was annulled after a few months in late 1939. His second marriage in 1940 ended in divorce in 1947.
