There had been endless appeals for clemency, and nine of the 11 witnesses who had named him as the killer had withdrawn their testimony. Among those who pleaded for his life was the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But the Davis case affected me particularly strongly because it brought back vivid memories of an almost exactly similar event which I had covered as a young reporter some 50 years earlier – an experience which settled once and for all my total opposition to capital punishment. Until then, I had been broadly hostile, but capable of being swayed in the face of really grave crimes. From 1960 on, I never wavered. The case in question was that of Caryl Chessman, the state was California, the year was 1960, and the jail was San Quentin just outside San Francisco. I was at the time New York correspondent of the old, Beaverbrook Daily Express, and I was in Nevada covering the winter Olympic Games. While on the slopes,
I received a cable suggesting that I pop down to San Francisco for a day or two to cover the impending execution of California’s notorious Red Light Bandit, alias Chessman. The case had become a worldwide cause celebre because Chessman had been on death row in San Quentin for nine years, during which time he had taught himself law, written several books and generally transformed himself from a roughneck petty criminal into a substantial intellectual. Moreover, he persistently denied being the Red Light Bandit.
That individual had become the scourge of California in the late 1940s by driving around the state in a car fitted with a red warning light, following unaccompanied female drivers, forcing them off the road with his red light flashing like a police car, and then robbing and raping them at gunpoint. At the time rape, was a capital offence in California. Chessman, then a petty criminal with a string of minor convictions, was eventually fingered for the crimes, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
By the time I appeared on the scene, Chessman’s trip to the gas chamber had been scheduled umpteen times, but he had always managed to obtain stays of execution from various courts and state governors. This one was held to be the end of the road, with Governor Pat Brown declaring that he would commute the sentence only if Chessman would confess his guilt and express remorse. The stage was set for a major real-life drama.
Chessman, a master public relations man, rose to the occasion by summoning an eve-of-execution press conference – something that couldn’t conceivably happen in this country, but that’s America. So I turned up at the vast San Quentin jail along with a score or so others. The first and only question we had was: would Chessman appeal to Brown, confess his guilt, and live? He ratcheted up the tension several more notches by replying that he hadn’t made up his mind yet, but would decide before the conference ended.
After 45 minutes, someone asked: “Have your made up your mind yet?” He said he had, and that he would appeal yet again, so had anyone got a piece of paper for him to write it on? A dozen sheets from reporters’ notebooks showered down. The cameras focussed on his hand moving across the sheet. It was an appeal, but there was no confession. The press conference was over. As we left, a colleague from the Daily Mail (the only other foreign reporter present) and I were offered a tour of the execution suite. We were shown the bare cage in which Chessman would spend his last night, then the horrible room containing a glass-walled chamber furnished with a strapped seat under which there would be a bucket of acid. A capsule of gas would be dropped into this at the pull of a lever. The sheer crudity of the mechanism seemed more shocking than anything else.
We were then escorted to the main gate of the prison by a guard who told us that none of his colleagues wanted Chessman to die, and none of them wanted to be in the execution team. Then, as we stepped gratefully out into freedom, another guard stepped forward with envelopes addressed to each of us. They contained formal invitations to attend the execution the following morning.
What to do? We decided to cable our foreign desks in London for advice. Back came the inevitable moral cop-out: “Leave it entirely up to you, old boy”. Which, when translated, meant: “Go”. Then came a second cable: “Canst wire copy of invitation fastest.” So we did, and then repaired to the bar in search of Dutch courage. But our morbid midnight conversation was interrupted by a news flash that Governor Brown had granted yet another temporary reprieve.
Back in Blighty, however, our invitations had been plastered over the front pages of our two newspapers. Unsurprisingly, the Governor of San Quentin wasn’t pleased, and he decreed that foreign reporters should never again be invited to one of his deadly parties. It was good news for us. For when Caryl Chessman did finally go to that same gas chamber two months later, still protesting his innocence, we were not participants in the horrible ritual.
I have not the least doubt that Chessman should not have been legally murdered, even if he was the Red Light Bandit – which I strongly doubt. But his fate decided me that the state should never take human life, not least because of what the process does to the people who are required to carry it out. Those who want to do it are not fit to. Those who don’t shouldn’t be asked.
