JUSTICE: The Quality of Mercy

Toward midnight the lights still burned in California's state capitol in Sacramento. Cecil Poole, clemency secretary to Governor Edmund Brown, rummaged through the bales of telegrams that flooded the executive offices. MY DAUGHTERS WILL NOT BE SAFE UNTIL HE IS DEAD, read one. DON'T BE SWAYED BY ALL THE BLEEDING HEARTS, declared another. Then Poole picked up another telegram, read it and reached for the phone. A few minutes later, he carried the wire into the executive mansion and showed it to Governor "Pat" Brown. It was signed by Roy Rubottom Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and it read:

THROUGH OUR EMBASSY IN MONTEVIDEO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENT OF URUGUAY HAS TONIGHT BROUGHT TO THE URGENT ATTENTION OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT THE GRAVE CONCERN OF THE COUNCIL OVER ANTICIPATED HOSTILE DEMONSTRATIONS OF STUDENT ELEMENTS AND OTHERS TO CHESSMAN EXECUTION WHEN OUR PRESIDENT VISITS URUGUAY MARCH 2.

To Pat Brown, who in hours-long solitude had been agonizing over the Chessman case, Rubottom's wire came as from "the hand of God." The Governor quickly got on the direct phone line to San Quentin Prison on San Francisco Bay, talked to Warden Fred Dickson. Said the warden: "I am at the cell with the condemned man." Ordered Governor Brown: "Well, you can send him back upstairs. I am granting him a 60-day reprieve." In his "holding cell," only 15 paces and ten hours from death in the gas chamber, hawk-nosed Convict Caryl Whittier Chessman, 38, self-admitted hardened criminal, got the news from the warden, asked incredulously: "You're not kidding, are you?"

Climax & Philosophy. In this melodramatic fashion last week came the climax to one of the most remarkable episodes in U.S. criminal annals. The man thus saved —if perhaps only temporarily—was convicted twelve years ago of 17 felonies and sentenced to death on two of those crimes, both of them kidnaping for robbery, with bodily harm. In itself, the man, his crime and his punishment would scarcely cause a ripple of interest beyond the California state line. Yet, in the days preceding the reprieve, concern for the fate of Caryl Chessman had swept itself into a passionate whirlwind that whipped around the globe, gathered up pleas for clemency and dumped them in an overwhelming cascade on Pat Brown's shoulders.

From Brazil came petitions signed by 2,000,000. The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, called for mercy. In France, where dialectical discussion is served with each bottle of wine, the arguments raged as if the Dreyfus case had come alive again; in London, where the press devoted more space to Chessman than to news of the Queen's confinement, the Laborite Herald said: "If he is executed tomorrow, it will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American."

136 & 2455. Strangely enough, the man who created all the noise was neither lawyer, nor governor, nor humanitarian, but the criminal himself. Self-styled descendant of famed Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Caryl Chessman was the son of an unstable Hollywood movie-studio worker.