Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  From another house-squad worker Whit learned that the sneaky one was prowling Miss Turner’s room and that the prim lady was evincing an unusual interest in the sneaky one’s activities. Whit cornered the sneaky one at the first opportunity and said, “I hear stuff has been missing from the rooms upstairs and that they’ve got you under suspicion because you’ve been seen sneaking into them.”

  “I ain’t been taking nothing,” the sneaky one whined. “I just been looking.”

  “For what?” Whit demanded. To emphasize his demand, he said, “You think that old bag is going to stick her neck out for you when they put you in the brick yard?”

  “They ain’t gonna put me there,” the sneaky one said. “They’re gonna give me a parole if I let ’em know when I find a bottle of beer in Miss Turner’s room.”

  Whit fought the impulse to smash the sneaky one in his face. “So that’s it,” he said.

  “Sure,” the sneaky one said. “I’m just trying to help myself.”

  I’m just trying to help myself! More famous last words. A new kind of Brazen Age—when commissary punks would betray their mothers for a price, for any slight advantage.

  “Then go right ahead,” Whit said, as if the fact the sneaky one was simply trying to help himself explained and justified all. “By all means, go right ahead.”

  “And you ain’t gonna say nothing to Miss Turner?”

  “Why, no,” Whit said. “Why should I?”

  It took a couple of days for the sneaky one to get his nerve back. Whit, in the meantime, connived a bottle of root beer and waited, saying nothing to the friendly lady, Miss Turner, because his code declared he could not. When he got the signal from his friend assigned to the upstairs house squad, he snitched the door key to Miss Turner’s room from her purse, grabbed the bottle of root beer from where he had hidden it and raced unobserved up the back stairs. His friend had gone up the front stairs. Reaching the top floor, this youngster had kicked up a diversionary fuss, thus enabling Whit to duck unseen into Miss Turner’s room, remove from a tiny ice chest the bottle in question (it was discreetly wrapped in a wet towel), put the bottle of root beer in its place, dash down the back stairs and cache the beer. On his way to Miss Turner’s office he observed the prim lady closeted with the assistant superintendent in the latter’s office, and he grinned.

  He found the friendly lady busy at a filing cabinet. “You know, Miss Turner, I have a funny feeling that in about another minute or two you will be called in by the assistant superintendent and asked if there isn’t a bottle of beer in your room.”

  The friendly lady blanched.

  “Naturally,” Whit continued, “since there isn’t, you’ll laugh when he asks you. You’ll tell him what is there is a bottle of root beer. You’ll become mildly indignant that anyone thinks otherwise, and you will insist he go with you to your room and see for himself.”

  Then Whit handed the friendly lady her door key, turned and walked away. Moments later the friendly lady was informed the assistant superintendent wanted to speak to her.

  For a considerable time thereafter the prim lady was conspicuously red of face, and the sneaky one, needless to add, did not get his parole.

  And so it was that a grin became Whit’s trade-mark, and hate and guile the tools of his trade. Whit was still grinning the day of his release on parole. He was grinning when, a few days prior to leaving the school, he delivered the final speech at the supper held for those scheduled for parole release during the next thirty days. He glowingly lauded all the school had done for him. He warmly thanked its personnel for what they had taught him, particularly singling out for praise the important lessons learned from The Supervisors regarding a “respect for authority,” and the necessity for “high moral standards” as exemplified in the person and daily life of the prim lady. He assured them all that the training he had received, coupled with his experiences at the school, would stay with him and influence him throughout his life. And he hoped one day to repay them for all they had done for him.

  Miss Turner alone, of all those present, recognized the real meaning of Whit’s glittering words. The prim lady, accepting those words at face value, preened herself. “Wasn’t that simply the nicest talk! I’m just positive now, after listening to him, the boy will make good. And I feel ever so proud, to know we are rendering such a worth-while service to society by helping these unfortunate, misguided young men and showing them the right way.”

  One supervisor did not share the prim lady’s enthusiasm. If anything, he then appeared more dour than ever. “Don’t be too sure about that one,” he said glumly. “He’s too smart for his own good. And don’t let that grin or those words of his fool you. He’s not grinning inside, unless it’s at us. He talks nice. But when he doesn’t know he’s being watched, he looks as mean and deadly as a cobra. Mark my words. We’ll be hearing more about that one. He’ll come to no good end.”

  And, seemingly, the prophecy has been proved correct. The man now confined to Cell 2455 quite clearly has “come to no good end.” After nine years of criminal violence and penal servitude following his release from reform school, he has come to the Condemned Row at California’s San Quentin Prison—twice sentenced to death, fifteen times to terms of imprisonment ranging from a life sentence without possibility of parole on down to an indeterminate sentence of from one to ten years. And on top of that, his present discharge date on prior, unexpired commitments to prison is December 10, 2009. Of course, he will not have to worry about serving all that time if and when the state’s professional technicians of death once manage to strap him down in one of the gas cell’s two chairs.

  But, being keenly aware of the infallible efficiency of that squat, ugly, green chamber, he has exhibited a conspicuously obstinate disinclination to go near it. Patently, however, disinclination alone is not enough to thwart the will of the state; for if it were, the executioner’s art would soon become a lost one. Yet add to disinclination ruthless self-discipline, bulldog tenacity, the knack of using words, a willingness to gamble boldly, a calculating mind impervious to defeat after defeat, and a mobilized triumvirate of legal skill, imaginative opportunism and intellectual craft—do that and you have the materials from which may be fashioned weapons with which, in the judicial arena, you can wage lively battle for survival, asking no quarter and giving none.

  Singlehandedly, for the last more than five years of his life, the beleaguered man in Cell 2455 has stood alone in the cold shadow of the state’s gas chamber. By tirelessly wielding legal bludgeon and rapier, he has so far defied the Grim Reaper, stubbornly refusing to acquiesce to California’s demand that he forfeit his life, the only possession he has left. Each time the net has been drawn tightly around him he has found a hole in it or a way to slash his way through it. Time after time he has taken the offensive and sought from one court or another a finding that he was, in the legal sense, wrongly and unconstitutionally convicted; time after time he has sought to have the sentences of death and imprisonment vacated and a new trial ordered. Rebuffed, he has retreated, trading space for time, to borrow the language of the military tactician, and figured out another angle of attack. Not long ago he came within three days of being executed, and at the time this book is being written he is engaged in what undoubtedly is a final and decisive court battle. He must win or die.

  In answering a recent collateral legal action he instituted against prison officials to test the area and extent of his legal rights in representing himself, an assistant to the California Attorney General characterized Cell 2455’s present occupant as “a man who regards the law as a plaything” and, further, one who has made a “mockery of the law.” Bay Area dailies have branded him a “chronic troublemaker” on the Row. The San Francisco Chronicle, in reporting his filing of an earlier petition for habeas corpus in a federal court, wrote: “He has led riots and participated in fights and other infractions of prison rules during his tenure in death row and has kept his case almost continually before the courts.�
�� In a feature story the San Francisco Examiner has profiled him as a “hunching 190 pound man . . . brilliant, but absolutely ruthless and callous.” The Los Angeles Daily News was the first to tag him a “criminal genius.”

  The majority opinion of the California Supreme Court affirming the death and other judgments pronounced against him stated the evidence adduced at his trial indicates he is a “clever professional criminal” with a “self-admitted violent criminal past and [a] present dangerous, antisocial state of mind.”

  The foregoing is not, to be sure, a pretty or a flattering sketch, but a harsh and a shocking one. Inevitably the time came when society was obliged, in the judgment of its servants, to test decisively his right to survive.

  That time came unexpectedly. A curious, incredible set of circumstances brought him to the Row, psychically a mighty grim place, and it is here he has waged a long, relentless battle for survival against almost hopeless odds.

  This account of his life and probable death could be brought to abrupt conclusion by trumpeting an obvious and oft-trumpeted moral —CRIME DOESN’T PAY!—and then letting it go at that. But law-abiding citizens already know this and a large segment of the so-called criminal element (those apprehended for their penal misdeeds) have heard these resounding words so often they have become wholly meaningless.

  So let us try a new tack. At least tentatively, let us accept the thought that the only thing the execution of the man in Cell 2455 will prove is that he will be dead. And then let us ask: What will his being dead prove?

  The problem of dealing with crime and criminals obviously will not die with him. The harsh fact is that society can execute him and his kind until it wallows neck deep in their blood and still there will be crime. Still there will be “criminals.”

  Social vengeance—disguised as justice—is therefore a monumentally futile thing and society needlessly confounds itself by exacting it.

  This writer knows.

  He, you see, is himself the occupant of Cell 2455!

  This is his own story, told in his own words, written while he waits to die.

  PART TWO

  CUILIBET IN ARTE SUA PERITO EST CREDENDUM

  • 15 •

  A Peculiar Art

  Yes, the Whit in Part One of our book is I—Caryl Whittier Chessman—San Quentin #66565—status, condemned. Or, as some would say, Doomed!

  And, yes, there is much more of Whit’s—my—story to be told.

  It is the story of a grinning, brooding young criminal psychopath in defiantly willing bondage to his psychopathy, and is thus an account of a war that is fought too often, too violently, too purposelessly and at too staggering a cost to its thousands upon thousands of combatants and casualties and victims.

  It is time we recognized this war for what it is: An externalized, sometimes nicely subtle and oftentimes crudely savage Armageddon of an embattled personality that uncompromisingly seeks either its destruction or its liberation from an internal horror.

  Factual truth can equal reality in a way that is an ugly, damning indictment of those responsible for it. Such is the case with this war that is fought in the jungle, under jungle law. And this being so, it undoubtedly explains why most of you cling so tenaciously to those dangerous, crime-perpetuating fictions we hear at every turn. They’re so neat and comforting and plausible—and wrong.

  You can’t win! Get that through your thick skull! You can’t win! Crime doesn’t pay!

  But who’s kidding whom?

  “. . . often crime does pay. According to an FBI report, only 13% of the nation’s criminals ever end up in jail.” So states Time Magazine in its March 9, 1953 issue (p. 62). The staggering implications of that statistic are driven home when one pauses to consider the appalling number of major crimes committed within the nation each year.

  Two million crimes committed in the United States in 1952, according to J. Edgar Hoover, and only 13 per cent of the nation’s criminals ever end up in jail I Think of that for a moment. Think of what it means to you.

  I personally know of one busy commercial gentleman to whom the crime rate meant nothing until his shiny new car was stolen (used in a series of robberies, then driven into a mountain lake and hence never recovered). Waxing more indignant with each passing day that the police were unable to find his car, he confronted the chief of the auto-theft detail and querulously demanded, “If Dick Tracy can catch ‘em, why can’t you?”

  “Mister,” said the patient chief, “that’s a long story.”

  “Well, it seems to me,” announced the outraged citizen, “that we are entitled to some protection. We taxpayers, that is. Here we pay you perfectly good money to protect us and now you can’t even catch the man who stole my car.”

  “We’re doing all we can,” said the chief.

  The busy commercial gentleman humphed suspiciously at this. “And I suppose if you do catch him, all he’ll get is a slap on the wrist and then be turned loose.”

  “What punishment he gets,” explained the chief, “is up to the judge.”

  “Well, if you ask me, he should be taught a lesson he won’t forget. I say lock him up and throw away the key!”

  Most people experience no difficulty at all in shrugging off the crime problem—until they are the victim of a crime. Then it’s an entirely different story. Then they want to know what’s the matter with the police and everyone else concerned with dealing with the problem in one capacity or another. Without putting forth the least effort to try to see the problem in context or to grasp the most rudimentary facts about it, they are willing to hurl indictments, hand down summary judgments and adopt a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” philosophy.

  As a result, the uninformed, the cynical, and political opportunists are forever clamoring for law enforcement to “declare war on the underworld.”

  Crack down! Go into action! Get tough! Move in! Smash!

  Words.

  Today the country’s jails and prisons are bursting at their penal seams—and with but 13% of those who commit major crimes!

  It has apparently never occurred to those who loudly argue for an aggressive, ruthless, warlike, put-’em-behind-bars-and-let-’em-rot-there policy to combat crime that not only is law enforcement able to apprehend but a small fraction of the men who commit major crimes—even with the miracle aids of modern scientific crime detecting methods—but that if all those who committed major crimes were somehow caught it would be literally impossible to jail them after arrest, try them and then imprison them.

  It would be impossible, that is, unless we built and maintained eight times the number of jails, criminal courtrooms and prisons we have today!

  Thus, in final analysis, it may well be to our ultimate advantage that law enforcement catches so relatively few criminals.

  Austin MacCormick, one of this country’s most respected criminolo-gists, has noted that thousands of professional criminals live in luxury and safety, and “. . . you and I and the police do not know who they are.”

  But, in many instances, I do. I have known many of these professionals, men who robbed, forged, burgled or killed for a living, men, too, mixed up in the rackets, in organized gambling, prostitution, dope-dealing.

  I know, as well, how often pure chance has led to one man’s capture, while it has kept another man out of jail. I know that, in many cities, “juice” as well as chance and cunning can keep you out of jail. “Juice” is money paid the police for protection. And I know, too, about the fix and how it works. I know that the right kind of money and knowing the right people, having the proper connections, can often square the beef against you, whether it’s petty theft or murder. I know that organized crime can’t exist without at least tacit approval from some members of law enforcement in the area where its calculating practitioners attempt to carry on their parasitic operations.

  Those best equipped to know have time and again exposed as dangerous nonsense the theory that crime may be controlled by conducting a lawless, reign-of-terro
r campaign against those suspected of being criminals. Such “wars” don’t solve social problems; they create them.

  The main reason we continue to be plagued by our crime problem is that we perversely refuse to see it for what it is and persist in deluding ourselves by clinging to dangerous fictions about it!

  We have the intestinal fortitude and the sense, so let us face a few blunt facts. Let us stop being so neurotically moral and so indignantly righteous that we dare not be honest. We should cease worrying that our virtue will flee out the back door if we open the front door to factual reality. Instead of denying there is such a thing as a dishonest or brutal cop, let’s get rid of him and his kind. And let’s recognize that often crime does pay, handsomely. The professional criminal knows this, so why should you, the honest citizen, foolishly deny it? And should any self-appointed guardian of your morals insist that it is necessary to keep whooping it up that Crime doesn’t pay! on the ground that to discontinue doing so would result in our young people turning in mass to crime, tell that foolish worthy to go climb a tree, because it just isn’t so. Besides, things will have reached a sorry pass indeed when society claims that it can protect itself from itself only by force, fear and hypocrisy.

  Let us reject such sinister nonsense.

  Let us open our eyes to reality. A lawless administration of the law can beget only more lawlessness. And here again the proof is not lacking. One need look no further than the transcript of testimony before that Senate investigating group popularly known as the Kefauver Committee.

  Prisoners are people, and so are those accused of crime, and policemen and district attorneys and judges and jailers and criminologists and penologists and ordinary and extraordinary citizens.