Even Earl Liston, the once-proud designer of Eaton gas chambers, who had since retired from the company, seemed to have changed his tune with regard to the appeal of gas executions. After Oregon voters turned out against the death penalty in a November 1964 referendum, a Portland bar owner was seeking to acquire the old gas chamber as a novelty attraction. Liston professed his disdain. “I’d put that thing on a ship and dump it five hundred miles at sea,” he said. “I don’t believe in capital punishment and I never have.”55
CHAPTER 10
THE BATTLE OVER CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
By the early 1960s American capital punishment was being attacked on several fronts. The stream of books, movies, and news reports against the death penalty continued, and some churches and other religious organizations also voiced their opposition. Numerous Western nations continued to pressure the United States to end its executions, and America’s cold war adversaries and their proxies had a field day harping on inequities and excesses in American criminal justice. These factors contributed to changing public attitudes. After 1953, Gallup polls began to show a continuing decline in public support for capital punishment, from 70 percent in 1953 to a low of 42 percent in 1966.1
The change in attitudes was also reflected in an expanding multipronged campaign to abolish the death penalty. Although Governor Brown’s legislative attempt had failed in California, other lawmaking efforts of the era were more successful. Delaware ended hanging in 1958 but restored it in 1961. Kansas observed a moratorium in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when its Republican governor said, “I just don’t like killing people.” In 1964 Oregon voters strongly supported a referendum ending capital punishment in that state. New York’s lawmakers moved to establish a moratorium in 1965, and some other states followed suit. A legislative campaign to abolish the death penalty in New Mexico was also successful. From 1964 to 1966, five states either totally abolished capital punishment or severely limited its use, bringing to thirteen the number of states that had effectively repealed the death penalty, and several more followed closely. In 1966 a constitutional amendment abolishing capital punishment was rejected in Colorado. The federal government had carried out only one execution in ten years, and Senator Philip A. Hart of Michigan had a bill pending to abolish it for all federal crimes.
Many judges, prosecutors, and juries had become more reluctant to impose the death penalty than they had been in the past. Compared to a total of 158 persons received on American death rows in 1935, the number had dropped to 75 each year in 1944 and 1945, during World War II, and to 79 in 1950, at the start of the Korean conflict. In the wake of the Chessman execution, the number dropped from 140 to 103 from 1961 to 1962, and in 1965 it fell to 86 as 62 prisoners were reprieved from their death sentences. At the end of 1965 there were 331 prisoners awaiting execution in the United States, and the average length of time they were spending on death row was rapidly increasing.2 American executions plummeted dramatically, from 56 in 1960 to 42 in 1961, 47 in 1962, 21 in 1963, 15 in 1964, 7 in 1965, and only 1 in 1966.3 Lynching had also become almost extinct. For the first time in American history it seemed likely that the death penalty was about to become a thing of the past.
On April 12, 1967, however, these hopes appeared to be in jeopardy as California prepared to carry out its first gassing in four years. Protesters completed an all-night vigil outside the home and office of Brown’s conservative Republican replacement, Governor Ronald Reagan, trying to get him to grant executive clemency to Aaron Mitchell, a thirty-seven-year-old black man convicted of slaying a Sacramento policeman during a robbery in 1963. Reagan staunchly refused. “Here was a case in which every legal avenue had been tried—the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the California Supreme Court twice,” he said. “The law is the law, and it must be upheld.”4
Five hundred demonstrators gathered outside San Quentin, some of them fastening flowers to the gate and singing mournful folk songs. George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi leader, caused a fracas when he appeared with a sign supporting the execution. Amid the furor, the fifty-eight official witnesses were let in to assume their posts. California’s Episcopal bishop, C. Kilmer Myers, had requested churches throughout the state toll their bells at the scheduled hour of Mitchell’s execution. Media organizations rushed to prepare background features.
Meanwhile, in the holding cell, Mitchell’s behavior had turned bizarre. The guards found him stark naked, and his left arm was covered with blood where he had cut himself. His eyes were wild, and his hair, which had always been neatly combed, stood up at odd angles. “The state never executes the person who committed the crime,” the prison chaplain who was with him later observed. “The one who finally steps into the gas chamber is by no means the same person who entered death row years earlier. To believe so is to ignore the terrible forces that mold, strengthen, shatter a man in the surrealistic world of the condemned.”
When Chaplain Byron Eshelman entered Mitchell’s cell and inquired about his condition, the doomed prisoner replied, “You’re not Jesus Christ,” and he later kept saying, “I am Jesus Christ, this is the blood of Jesus Christ. I am Jesus Christ, this is the blood of Jesus Christ.” The doctor and three psychiatrists examined him in the cell and held up his bloody arm to test for catatonic tension. When they left him, he asked, “Can I put my arm down?” to which one doctor simply replied, “Put your arm any way you want.” Later guards came in, wrestled him down, and pulled on his clothes. When they tried to cover his wound, he resisted, saying, “You don’t want to help me, you just wanna kill me.” As they dragged him to the gas chamber he let out a piercing shriek that chilled the witnesses gathering in the nearby room. The guards thrust him into the chair and slapped on the eight thick straps, binding him tight. Then the escorts stepped out and the heavy Eaton door was clamped shut, leaving him to twist and squirm. “I am Jesus Christ!” Mitchell said.
Moments later, the lever clicked, releasing the poison pellets into the acid, and blowers began sucking the lethal gas upward all around him. Outside the prison some demonstrators wailed or cheered as smoke curled from the chimney above the death chamber that some called “the smokehouse.”5
Howard Brodie, a veteran news artist, had received permission from Warden Lawrence Wilson to attend the execution. Now he found himself just across the glass from Mitchell’s struggling body. Working as fast as he could, Brodie summoned all his skill and composure to hurriedly sketch the sight just four feet away. “I did not want to believe what was happening in front of me,” Brodie later declared. “His mouth was constantly moving. Bubbles of saliva formed on his lips. His chest was heaving…. His clenched hands showed the extraordinary duress that he suffered. Aaron sat tense, heart pounding, and mouth opening and closing, for many minutes, long enough to burn into my memory the images that I used for my drawing, images which have remained with me for 25 years.”6 Another witness, who had been told by prison authorities that the proof of a painless death could be spotted in a person’s hands, was shocked to note that Mitchell died “with clenched fists, the skin taut over his knuckles,” adding, “I don’t believe those hands ever relaxed.”7
