But was it possible to tell—coherently, convincingly and dramatically—what I believed should and must be told?
With a relentless fixity of purpose, I set to work to find out. Now I have my answer. Consequently, there is little—and yet much—left to be said.
A month before I was scheduled to die that June morning in 1952, a panel of three San Quentin psychiatrists interviewed me in the sergeant’s office at the east end of the corridor and just outside the birdcage-like enclosure leading into the Row proper. This interview was a formality, since its purpose was to inquire into the question of whether I was legally sane (and hence liable for execution), and all three psychiatrists knew me. They knew me, to put it simply, as a character who did inexplicable and seemingly crazy things but who was not crazy in the legal sense. They also knew I would never feign insanity in an effort to avoid execution.
The interview was not stiff or formal. We exchanged amenities. I was invited to be seated in a chair facing them. I lit a cigarette. They spoke pleasantly, and did not treat me as though I were a noxious sort of bug under a microscope.
My long record of juvenile and adult crime was mentioned and then discussed. Yes, I had been in reform schools, jails and prisons most of my life. Yes, I had committed many, many crimes and had ample warning of what to expect if I kept on. Yes, I had kept on nevertheless. No, I was not guilty of the crimes for which I had been sentenced to death. I was not the red light bandit, but I would not belabor the claim. I was simply mentioning it as part of a paradoxical picture. Yes, I would say I was not the red light bandit even if I were.
One of the doctors commented that simply punishing or even capitally punishing the young offender did not seem to be the answer. It was not. Punishment itself just made him worse, more rebellious. Legally executing him only proved someone had failed to reach him in time.
What did I think was the answer? The question was flattering, but I didn’t think I could spout out the answer in a few words. I wasn’t even sure I knew the answer if there was more to it than what they already knew. All I knew I had learned from experience, and that had been largely a rugged, seemingly one-dimensional experience. I ventured the thought that perhaps after one spends a while in a jungle world he gets so he cannot or does not want to believe there is anything better, or that it is attainable in any case. Maybe hate has a lot to do with it. Hate for everybody, himself and psychiatrists included. God included. Maybe an X factor, on the other hand, is the key to this form of psychopathy.
I told them I could “say” it much better on paper. I thought I would like to try. What did they think of the idea? They all thought it was a good idea.
In spare moments, I began to draft the story of my life. I tried to tell a story of how a psychopathic hate is born and what it can do; I ended by letting Hate tell the story. And I saw convincing proof Hate was not a very good storyteller. I found myself running out of days, so I tore up what I had written.
Was life nothing but a battle in the jungle? Would it go on senselessly until I was finally destroyed?
I paced the floor of my cage. Smoking. Thinking. The time was 2:50 a.m. Only now it wasn’t late any more; at least it wasn’t too late. Yet bodi society and I had paid a needlessly terrible price to get Caryl Chessman to this hour of his life.
The price I had paid was two death sentences and a figurative million years’ time to serve under maximum supervision if the death sentences were ever set aside. I had paid by spending more than thirteen years of my life behind bars, in reform schools, jails and prisons, on the Death Row. I had paid by giving up friends, a beautiful young wife, a normal life—everything, in fact, but life itself. And now I had only a most tenuous lease on the sole possession I had left, with the odds a conservative two hundred to one that an appointment in the green room still awaited me.
On the other hand, my so-called “life of crime” had cost society a conservative half a million dollars when totaled. Since my last arrest alone, it had cost the state thousands upon thousands of dollars merely to try to take my life, to liquidate what it regarded as a bad investment.
I realized then, with a new awareness, what a staggering price this was, and how society and I both and equally were on the losing end. I realized, too, that society well could say: “We heartily agree. But what else could we have done with you? What else can we do with any man like you?”
And that was what sorely troubled Warden Harley Teets. It was what had prompted him to demand an accounting, if I could give it. I knew he didn’t want a lot of excuses. He didn’t want me to say, “I’m sorry. I’ve been a bad boy. Now I’ll be a good boy.” He wanted to know why. And so did the psychiatrists. I saw that same unvoiced question in the eyes of the members of California’s Adult Authority when they visited the Row. These men, and many like them, hold positions of grave social responsibility. They must deal with the convicted felon when he is brought to prison. They must decide when he is ready and equipped for release. They want to help him because in doing so they are helping society, and their view is the right one: the most sensible way to help the man in prison is to give him the opportunity to help himself. But some of the institutionalized sneer at the idea they need help. These are the ones called aggressive psychopathic personalities. These are society’s terrible problem children. They hate and rob and kill and defy and curse and throw away their lives.
And that isn’t what they want at all, but they get trapped.
I knew then, walking back and forth, back and forth, that this was an awful social tragedy. For criminal violence is definitely reactive, and in every man is the ability to be either good or bad. It is, moreover, an ability that may atrophy but is never lost. Why, then, did society persist in needlessly confounding itself? Perhaps because it was overstocked with Pollyannas, professional do-gooders, amateur optimists, social evangelists, vise-turners, polemicists of vengeance, horror hucksters and the like. But the problem remained one of finding reasons and not fault. Blame-fixing for its own sake was a profitless practice.
I was one of the trees in this dark and forbidding forest. I knew what it meant to live beyond the reach of other men or God. I had “proved” everything I had felt the need to prove: that I couldn’t be scared or broken or driven to my knees, that I didn’t give a damn. But here is where the tragedy lies: this felt need is compulsive and negative only. It is a need to prove one can do without—without love, without faith, without belief, without warmth, without friends, without freedom. This negative need to prove becomes progressively greater and greater; a ruthless tyrant, it comes to dominate; it grows brash and boldly demanding. If not checked, the ultimate (conscious or unconscious) need is to prove that one can do without even life itself.
Whether in its first or final stage, it is essentially a self-destructive, probably masochistic need and is therefore more often satisfied than eliminated or even temporarily held in check by punishment. For that reason the use of punishment as a correctional device is self-defeating. And that is why the idea of social vengeance and places like Death Row merely tend to create and to aggravate a problem that is at once immense, vexing beyond expression, appallingly ramified and often decried vociferously—yet so little and so seldom understood.
Unwittingly, the public creates and puts into deadly operation a Darwinian law of survival for the criminal. The smartest, the cleverest or the luckiest murderer is not caught at all. It is even possible that a perfectly innocent citizen will be charged with his crime. Of those apprehended, the shrewdest will escape execution, if not always, at least most of the time. If sociological and related “laws” have any validity, then, by killing off the hapless and less resourceful of the murderers, we are perfecting the strain. And if the suggestion is sophistic, the reason for capital punishment is equally so.
Many responsible citizens are familiar with the facts above set out—if not all of the inferences to be drawn from those facts—and yet hold to the belief capital punishment is a necessary evil because it acts as a deterrent to those individuals who otherwise would commit crimes punishable by death. Those who cling to this notion take a pretty dim view of their fellow man and necessarily commit themselves to the proposition that, at heart, he is a homicidal brute who can only be held in check by fear and force. That notion is wrong, actually and morally. Guilt or innocence aside, the story of my own life is proof that the doctrine of total depravity is both wrong and dangerous when applied to social relations and relationships, and that fear of being put to death does not deter the criminally inclined from committing capital crimes. If it did, a neat solution to crime would be at hand: make all crimes punishable by death and then there would be no more crime.
Several states do not have a capital punishment law, yet their per capita murder rate is no higher than those states with such a law. Each year California executes nearly as many men as any other state in the Union, yet hundreds of homicides continue to be committed within its borders each year.
Four dozen men have taken that last walk by my cell and I am yet to have the first one tell me he gave thought to the possible consequences of his act. Contrary to popular belief, most homicides simply aren’t the result of cunning planning or long thought. Many of those I watched being marched off to the execution chamber were young men who were of the opinion that taking money from honest citizens at the point of a gun was an easy way to make a living. They were shocked numb when their banditry was resisted and they pulled the trigger of their gun in their anxiety to get away. They were real life Walter Mittys who hadn’t meant to play for keeps. They learned too late that when you buck society you aren’t playing a fun game.
In addition to the necessary evil argument offered to justify capital punishment, less responsible and more cynical citizens are satisfied to have legal executions because they offer a “cheap” solution to the problem of what to do with criminals. They point out that a criminal can be put to death for less than two hundred dollars, whereas maintaining him in one of its prisons costs California slightly over a thousand dollars a year.
There are several answers to this bargain rate idea of what to do with the criminal wrongdoer. I shall limit myself to two. First, there are fewer than thirty men on the Row at the present time, while there are more than twelve thousand men committed to and serving terms of imprisonment in California’s prisons. Hence, it is difficult to see how any substantial savings can be realized unless the whole bunch of them are done away with. And before we can do away with all of them we first will have to do away with all statutory and constitutional safeguards and we must develop an unprecedented bloodlust, as well as an unprecedented police state where absolute power to destroy is held by the few. The trouble with all this is that the advocate of the bargain rate solution to the crime problem may then find that his master regards him as a criminal who should be expended in the interest of another sort of economy.
Don’t get the idea Death Row is a nice place. It isn’t. It’s a rugged, tough, ugly place, and not because prison officials make it that way. They don’t. Its stupid horror is inherent, built in.
Let me briefly tell you something more about it. First, select at random between twenty and thirty men between the ages of eighteen and seventy-two. Their physical size or shape is immaterial. Put them in a situation beyond their capacity to control, or neglect to plant some essential seed in their minds which fills them with an awful sense of inadequacy. Causally or casually condemn them. Give them only a tantalizingly slim chance of survival in the courts or with the governor. Confine them closely in a special, isolated section of the prison. For a time each day let them commingle. Periodically march them off and execute them, one by one, or two by two. Replace the ones executed.
Do that and you have created the Condemned Row—with all its tragic pathos, its gripping tensions, its smoldering resentments, its flaring violence, its courageous, its cringing, its constantly clashing personalities, its secret hopes, its fear. Do that and you have created a limbo-like place where men are held suspended between two worlds, this one, and the next. Do that and you have erected a monument to futility. A social abattoir. That is Death Row. It is nothing more.
The Row’s surface casualness is as deceptive as quicksand. For days or weeks at a time all will be quiet and orderly. Then tension will generate, a corrosive tension capable of eating its way inside you, in many ways an unintelligible tension. Nitroglycerine is known to be unpredictable, to explode suddenly, without apparent agitation, into violence. It is this quality the explosive and the Row have in common —ordinarily both when handled sensibly remain in a quiescent state. Yet both, without apparent reason, without extrinsically discernible provocation, are capable of exploding with an abrupt and shocking violence.
The seeming reason for such cyclic, savage spiritual convulsions is not elusive. The slugging impact of a death sentence upon the psyche is often terrible and always tormenting, with the result that as often as the Death Row ennobles it degrades. Some men reach the point where they would literally sell or sell out their own mothers for another day of life, and the knowledge that this is so can make you want to vomit.
With rare exception, the newly arrived condemned man does not want to die, at least not consciously. At least not in the gas chamber. At least not today, or tomorrow. Yet he finds himself suddenly thrust into a nightmarish microcosm where the spectre of death is all around him. He learns the man celling next to him has but two weeks to live. His first Thursday afternoon here he watches three burly guards march one of his neighbors off to his death. He reads in the newspapers that still another condemned man’s death sentence has been upheld on appeal.
He realizes then he is up against a deadly serious proposition. He is jarred, abruptly, into full realization why he is here—to die!
Sure, the Row makes the doomed man think; it wakes him up—when it’s too late.
And it does even more: it incites in the mind of the young rebel, the psychopath, a hate. A terrible hate diat he turns against himself and his kind. For Authority is constantly threatening him widi the Row, holding it over his head. And he fights back at that threat with a vicious, destructive anger.
He says, as I did: To hell with the Row, the gas chamber! He “proves” society can’t extort submissive conformity.
Admittedly, he’s as hard to “cure” as he is easy to recognize. And quite a few of his kind are clever chameleons who, once imprisoned, give every indication of having responded to a correctional training and treatment program only so they can win release and continue, on an increasingly more violent scale, their personal war against society.
Failing to understand the nature of their destructive affliction, the public is often so angered by the seeming senselessness of their violent conduct diat it clamors for revenge and thinks hotly in terms of fighting them. But you do not kill cancer by killing, angrily fighting or severely punishing those found to be afflicted with diis dread disease, and so neidier do you kill the causes of an even more dreadful social malady by waging a war against those suffering from it.
Rather, you seek out, determine and if possible eliminate the causes of the disease, not its victims. And at the same time your goal must also be to evolve a way effectively to treat and help the afflicted.
All diis, of course, is a job for specialists. Effectively helping the “criminal psychopath,” as well as all other men committed to their custody and care, is a job specialists in California’s Department of Corrections (and other state and federal correctional agencies) have tackled. It’s about as tough a job as can be undertaken, and one requiring the full cooperation and understanding of the public.
As well as any other human being, I know the enormity of that job. I know what it means to be eaten spiritually away, to hate and doubt and fight and sneer.
Not too long ago I was told, “Chessman, nothing can cure you but a pound of cyanide.”
I grinned. “Thank you, Sigmund Freud.”
That is how indifferent and sardonic you can get.
But there are periods of self-doubt and times when you know yourself for what you really are—an angry, hating, fighting failure. Usually then you curse your doubt and blaspheme the imagery of the self you see. A voice from within tells you not to waste time mocking yourself but to continue on your merry way to Hell. However, circumstances can combine in such a way that you refuse to heed the voice any longer. You fiercely resolve you will find a way to liberate yourself from the Thing that subjugates you.
The Thing is psychopathic bondage.
It is now late winter ot the year 1954. Many months have passed since my appointment with the executioner was last suspended and I began work on my book. Much—more than half—of that time has necessarily been spent in litigating the case, in fighting all the while tor survival. For the “race for life,” the deadly competition with the executioner has continued without letup. Still, every minute I could spare, beg, borrow or steal from the legal work I have employed to write this book.
Prohibitive odds once again insist, and now more clamorously than evei, that I soon will be put to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber. But odds don’t tell the story, and odds can lie.
On Thursday, May 28, 1953, one day following my thirty-second birthday, the United States Court of Appeals decided the appeal by upholding the District Court’s summary denial of my petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
This was bitterly disappointing news.
Apparently I had been asking too much. It was obvious the federal courts had adopted and were adhering to a strict “Hands off!” policy.
From June to November—five more months of careful planning, endless research, writing and rewriting.
The petition was filed.
And then . . . the Supreme Court slammed the door in my face for the fourth time.
I filed the necessary application for what is called a further stay of mandate.
Next, I prepared and mailed to the Supreme Court an application for extension of time from December 29, 1953, to January 15, 1954, to file the petition for rehearing.
That petition was granted.
The petition for rehearing was denied. My stay was terminated. Another date for execution will soon be fixed.
I refuse to throw in the sponge. I still hope to survive. I intend to keep fighting until I win or until the gas chamber door slams shut in my face. Accordingly, I have never for an instant stopped digging for evidence, for ammunition. I am prepared to start all over again back in a lower state court with a new proceeding, a new legal attack.
Failing altogether in the courts, I would like to ask the governor for executive clemency. I think that I am now worth more to society alive than dead. The long years lived in this crucible called Death Row have carried me beyond bitterness, beyond hate, beyond savage animal violence. Death Row has compelled me to study as I have never studied before, to accept disciplines I never would have accepted otherwise and to gain a penetrating insight into all phases of this problem of crime that I am determined to translate into worthwhile contributions toward ultimate solution of that problem. This book is a beginning contribution; I would like to believe that it also signals the beginning for me of a journey back from outer darkness. Yet I realize that I may well be out beyond the point of no return.
I should add most emphatically that I thank myself alone for my plight; I certainly don’t blame the courts or the governor for it. Obviously the courts didn’t invent Caryl Chessman, the “psychopath” with the violent criminal past. They only dealt with him—a man, they were repeatedly warned, who was cunning, sinister, dangerous, and who, it seemed, gave not a damn for courts or society or anyone or anything, his articulate protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Talk is cheap, and claims of innocence are no novelty. A Chessman waiting to die, a Chessman confronted with the imminence of death, a Chessman bent upon cheating the executionei and who can do so only with the aid of some court—isn’t such a Chessman apt to make any claim he believes will serve his ends? Can’t such claims be conveniently ignored, brushed aside, in the interests of justice?
And Chessman—this Chessman with which the courts have been dealing for these many years—he is but one of a constantly growing criminal horde. Isn’t it possible that his execution will serve as a grim deterrent to the others? That it will serve a useful purpose?
No, it isn’t possible; it isn’t remotely possible. His execution will deter no one, it will gain society nothing, it will prove nothing. It will simply mean that he will be dead and that, in his case, the problem he typifies has been evaded. That will leave us right back where we started, with a corpse, a liquidated half-million-dollar investment, and at least two more recruits to the criminal ranks ready and eager to take the dead Chessman’s place.
You can hardly call that progress, can you?
All right, then let’s meet head-on the problem of our Chessmans. Let’s see if there isn’t something constructive we can do about them.
Let’s recognize that the personal fate of Chessman may not be of importance to anyone but Chessman himself. But let’s recognize that the thousands of youngsters following in the footsteps of Chessman are of prime importance to all of us.
So there is a little more, a little more than just the life of a man about to die; more than a tale of blazing guns, screaming tires, reform-school educations, and the plop! in the pan beneath my final chair.
The winter day outside is gray. A driving rain lashes the barred windows. Gusts of wind vent their strange fury against the building.
It’s late afternoon and outside it is beginning to turn dark. The face of Death Row is a scowling, brooding face.
Night soon will be here. For me, it may be a night that will never end.
Does that matter?
Do your Chessmans matter?
The decision is yours.
THE END