One of the corrections leaders Ehrmann knew to oppose capital punishment was Clinton T. Duffy. He had served as San Quentin’s warden from 1940 to 1952, although he had since moved to a post with the parole board. Duffy was a West Coast version of Sing Sing’s famous Warden Lewis Lawes, who had published several best-selling books, hosted a radio show, and inspired several Hollywood movies, even spearheading the nation’s leading anti–capital punishment organization at the same time he was required to carry out more executions than any other warden in American history.26 Like Lawes, Duffy was a professional penologist who believed in rehabilitation as much as he disdained executions. The author of a best-selling book about San Quentin that was made into a major motion picture, he displayed his views about the death penalty in 88 Men and 2 Women, published in 1962.27 “Each of the 150 executions I watched was a separate and distinct ordeal,” he explained, “unsavory, nauseating, and infuriating. I faced them all with dread and look back on them with revulsion.”28 Duffy claimed to hate the death penalty due to its inhumanity and its inequality. “Doomed men rot in a private hell while their cases are being appealed,” he said, “and they continue to rot after a death date is set.” He called executions the “privilege of the poor.”29 Lionized by progressives and Hollywood, Duffy brought enormous stature to the anti–death penalty cause and shifted attention from Sing Sing’s infamous electric chair to San Quentin’s gas chamber.
One individual case in the postwar era exerted a particularly profound effect on American public opinion about the gas chamber and the death penalty in general. Caryl Whittier Chessman was a career petty criminal and convict in California who waged a legendary twelve-year struggle to save his own life, becoming in the process one of the most famous prisoners in history. He spent much of his life in San Quentin under Warden Duffy and Duffy’s successors.
Although Chessman looked as if he might be Jewish, and prison authorities constantly complained he possessed “superior intelligence” along with an “anti-social personality,” he had been born in rural Michigan in 1921 to Baptist parents and was a direct descendant of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. He was raised in difficult family circumstances during the Great Depression. His first institutionalization occurred at age sixteen, when he entered reform school for stealing a car. For the rest of his life, over the next twenty-three years, he would spend all but three in state custody for various infractions. Because he was so smart and unruly, many prison officials considered him a “dangerous individual.”30 After spending all of World War II behind bars, he was paroled in December 1947, but he soon reverted to crime.
In early 1948, at age twenty-six, he allegedly carried out armed robberies and other jobs with some of his ex-convict friends. On the night of January 23 the police spotted him and another parolee in a Ford that appeared to match the description they had just received in an all-points bulletin. Chessman was driving the stolen car without a driver’s license, and he tried to flee. The police fired shots through his rear window during a high-speed chase, and he was eventually cornered and taken into custody. He landed in jail with swollen cheekbones, a dislocated thumb, and extensive scrapes and bruises suffered during his arrest and interrogation, although the police medical report claimed, “inspection reveals no marks, scars or bruises.”31
At that moment the political and social climate of Los Angeles was nothing short of hysterical. The police were waging war against unidentified sexual predators and murderers whom the tabloids dubbed with such monikers as the “Black Dahlia” and the “Red Lipstick Murderer.” Coverage of sex scandals dominated many of the papers. Although Chessman’s guilt or innocence would be debated for decades to come, he was charged with being the notorious “Red Light Bandit” and committing sexual assaults on two young women on local lovers’ lanes.32
Under California’s “Little Lindbergh Law,” a defendant who moved a victim even a few feet, or from one car to another, could be found guilty of kidnapping, and “sodomy” (in these instances, forced fellatio) was considered an unspeakable perversion, so Chessman found himself in very serious trouble. His trial, which took place from April 29 to May 21, 1948, received lurid media coverage. When it was over he was convicted of “kidnapping and sexual assault,” and the judge, Charles Fricke, who had sent more defendants to the gas chamber than any other judge in state history, sentenced him to death.33
Arriving at San Quentin’s death row on July 3, Chessman was searched, photographed, fingerprinted, and issued the prison identification number 66565. Consigned to North Block, fifth floor, he ended up in Cell 2455, a clammy and lifeless concrete tomb that was 10.5 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, and 7.5 feet high, with a solid steel door. The only furnishings were a hard metal cot, a tiny wooden table with an overhanging shelf, a steel commode and sink that were bolted to the wall, and a stool. There was no window to the outside world. The only thing he could glimpse through the bars was a government-issue clock that relentlessly ticked away his remaining time. It was there that he would spend the rest of his life.
One of the most momentous events in his new life occurred a month after his arrival, when he received a typewriter. He used it to tap out his first diary entry. “A fool, incontrovertibly, is a fool is a fool,” he wrote.34 The typewriter proved to be the instrument of Chessman’s salvation. He banged out letters, legal briefs, petitions for writs of certiorari, and, ultimately, a book-length manuscript about the profound personal transformation he was undergoing on death row.
A previous convict on San Quentin’s death row, David Lamson, had successfully challenged his conviction in the Supreme Court and published a popular book, We Who Are About to Die (1935), describing his thirteen-month ordeal on the condemned block. Lamson had not only avoided the hangman’s noose, but he had also cleared his name, his book was made into a classic movie in 1937, and he became a celebrity.35
Although Chessman lacked Lamson’s privileged background, his writing soon attracted the interest of his lawyer, Rosalie Asher, and a literary agent, Joseph E. Longstreth, and others such as the courtroom mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Somehow he managed to avoid execution for six long years, and he was still fighting. In 1954 his memoir was published as Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story. It became a national best seller, selling more than half a million copies and translated into eighteen languages. A year later it appeared in movie theaters as Cell 2455 Death Row, directed by Fred F. Sears and starring William Campbell.36
His autobiography, told in the third person and filled with intimate details about his family and sexuality, received rave reviews and struck a chord with the American public. “No condemned criminal,” one critic wrote, “has ever produced so literate and lucid a piece of selfanalysis.”37 In the meantime, he evaded execution, sometimes by as narrow a margin as a few hours, by invoking scores of hair-splitting but life-saving legal technicalities, which added to his fame as a genius jailhouse lawyer. And somehow he managed to maintain his calmness and grace in the face of the most intense personal, legal, and literary pressures.