Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  I would be allowed out in the corridor with the other condemned men for a two-hour exercise and recreational period each day (and the other twenty-two hours a day I would remain locked tight in my cell). During the two-hour period I could walk, talk, play checkers, chess or cards. But no horseplay or fighting. Breach of any rule could mean a suspension of this privilege of coming out into the corridor, perhaps confinement in a “quiet” cell at the far end of the Row or in the isolation unit on the other side of the building.

  I would be allowed to bathe twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday mornings. On these mornings I would be issued clean clothes and would turn in my dirty clothes.

  I had been issued a set of earphones with a rather long cord. These plugged in at the jack fastened to the back wall of the cell. Programs were selected at a master control booth in another part of the prison. The earphones would be on from seven in the morning until eleven at night (and presently one side of the double jack is left on all night for those who cannot sleep). If I monkeyed with my set I would see the earphones taken from the cell and otherwise would be disciplined.

  A set of sheets and a pair of pajamas had been issued to me. Every Friday morning I would hang these on my cell bars to be picked up, sent to the laundry and returned that afternoon. (Later the Row was furnished prison-made bathrobes—called spook robes by the doomed —to be worn to the shower.)

  I would be allowed to write and receive a reasonable number of letters from approved friends, relatives and attorneys, and to have supervised visits from them.

  I could order up to fifteen dollars’ worth of canteen ducats every month, provided I had money on the books, and could purchase tobacco, candy and other items with these ducats from the institutional canteen.

  Library books and daily papers were furnished the men on the Row. The daily papers were passed along from cell to cell. Also the Catholic Chaplain visited the Row every Saturday afternoon and passed out several of the popular magazines. I could subscribe to a newspaper or magazines, if I wished, and have the subscription price deducted from my account.

  I would be permitted to talk to the men in the other cells around me, but loud talking or noise of any other kind was prohibited. When the lights were blinked at 10:30 p.m. this meant silence until the next morning.

  So long as the men on the Row remained on good behavior, they were shown a sixteen-millimeter film every Thursday at the far end of the corridor during the exercise period.

  Did I have any questions? No, I did not.

  The paunchy officer left. A minute or two later he returned and handed me a package of cigarettes. “From your friend up the line,” he said.

  The “friend up the line” the floor officer had reference to was a man I’d known for many years.

  My cell, I saw, had been recently swept and mopped. I pitched in and gave it a good scrubbing, made my bed and arranged the few cell articles I had been issued on the shelf above the bed.

  With no especial enthusiasm, I visually inspected all that was visible of my world.

  On the ceiling directly in front of the cell was an electric light. (It burns twenty-four hours a day.) High up on the vertical bars separating the Row corridor from the gun walk behind it, and also directly in front of the cell, was an office-size electric clock. (Its mate fronts a cell on the upper end of the corridor.) I looked thoughtfully at its white face, black numerals and black hour and minute hands. I watched the red sweep second hand completely encircle the clock face before I turned away. The time was twenty minutes after eleven. In another ten minutes the exercise period would begin. During those ten minutes I paced slowly back and forth the length of the cell, smoking and thinking. Wondering.

  What lay ahead?

  What possibly could lay ahead?

  It was Saturday morning, July 3, 1948, and little did I dream that before this ordeal would be over I would have spent more time on Death Row under death sentence than any other condemned man ever previously had.

  Years and years were fated to pass in slow and violent procession. And you would read in your newspaper about a doomed man named Caryl Chessman and perhaps when you did you would wonder what sort of strange creature he could be.

  Sometimes Chessman would wonder himself.

  Sometimes what was happening to him didn’t seem as though it could possibly be real.

  But it was.

  “This place really puts it on your mind,” I was told by a doomed man the day of my arrival.

  “In that case,” I replied with a grin, “this place and I are going to be putting it on each other’s minds.”

  And that is precisely what “we” did, for years on end. Yet it took many, many months before the real, the deeper meaning of those words became brutally clear to me. At the time I made no effort to understand them. Why should I? I was interested in survival, not psychological data.

  When you dance you have to remember that the fiddler may demand payment. At first I watched men take that last walk by my cell without batting an eyelash. In the eyes of some—those who couldn’t help identifying themselves with the fate of all the other doomed— that made me a cold fish. I was supposed to get all worked up emotionally every time they marched some condemned man off to his death. A few actually got indignant because I didn’t weep and wail.

  “Look,” I said, “you characters look out for yourselves and I’ll look out for Chessman. And let’s understand each other: I haven’t got the time or the inclination to feel sorry for Chessman, so I sure as hell haven’t got the time or inclination to feel sorry for anybody else.”

  Row time would be dead time as far as I was concerned. The present didn’t count except insofar as it afforded me the opportunity to slug it out with the state for a future. Meanwhile I wasn’t asking anything except to be left alone. I didn’t give a damn about creature comforts or whether or not anyone regarded Chessman as a good boy or a bad one. I didn’t want anyone holding my hand or feeling sorry for me or worrying about me.

  By deliberate choice, but not affectedly, I was a cold, angry, remote machine. Human warmth was a luxury I didn’t feel I could afford, not then; in this unnatural environment it appeared to be a weakness that could prove fatal. Funny thing, death itself didn’t bother me. But the possibility of failure did. If I let the state win, I would be failing. If I let this place beat me in any way, I would be failing.

  I didn’t intend to fail.

  And I haven’t. Still, you can’t spend more than five years in such a place as Death Row and not change, radically. In time the place gets inside you; it eats its way in; it writhes around in your innards. And once it does, you’ll never be the same again.

  Do you doubt this? Do you think you could spend close to two thousand days, more than sixty months, well over five years, on the Row, fighting defiantly for survival, existing all the while in the very shadow of the gas chamber, and not change? That you could watch approximately half a hundred men take that last dreaded walk by your cell and believe that, in some insidious way, it doesn’t eat at your mind? That you could observe many of the doomed driven either insane or to the borderline of insanity by the stark fear of impending death, and not feel the slugging impact upon your own personality? That you could see men hounded to suicide or attempted suicide by fear and depression and stay wholly impervious to the sickening tug of environment upon your own mental processes? That you could witness your fellow condemned suddenly, savagely attack their neighbors or yourself and personally remain aloofly indifferent to the gargoyle-faced goading of frustration? That you could observe the baffled minds and tortured emotions of others of this condemned fraternity laid naked and raw by the mocking imminence of death, and not experience an inner upheaval, an indwelling turbulence?

  I had made up my mind the Row wouldn’t change me, wouldn’t touch me. It finally did. But don’t mistake “change” for “break.” I didn’t break. And I didn’t suddenly “see the light.” I am suspicious of those who say they have. Successive crises can strengthen
and constructively change the personality of even society’s Chessmans, but this change doesn’t take place in a magic moment midst the blinding glare of revelation. Revelation, when born of one crisis piled upon the other, can merely light the way; it cannot effortlessly waft you to a brighter and happier land. There remains a long journey to be made, a trying journey, and it is you alone who must make it.

  December 2, 1949, the Protestant Chaplain brought me a telegram.

  “Is there anything I can do?” the Chaplain asked.

  “No,” I said. “There is nothing anyone can do.”

  My mother was dead. She had died of cancer—and a broken heart. She had died, I learned later, expressing her faith in me.

  I smoked. I paced the floor. I thought what once had been. I looked around at what was. My mother was dead. After endless years of pain and poverty, she was dead. And her son was on Death Row waiting to die. And her husband was an old and broken man.

  My dad flew up to see me. He was sick and sad and he missed Hallie, the gentle Hallie who had suffered so much.

  “Mom’s found peace now,” my dad said, and that was doubtless true.

  But what a cruel price she had paid for peace.

  My mother was dead.

  Something in me was dead, too. I doubted, then, if that something would ever be reborn.

  • 32 •

  “The Check on Chessman”

  I came to the Row with one driving, dominant goal—to conjure up a legal miracle and leave the Row alive. To fight my way off the Row. To cheat the executioner out of his day off and his hundred-dollar fee.

  Guilt or innocence aside, to my mind there was something peculiarly ignominious in gulping hydrocyanic acid gas fumes when signaled to do so and while being gaped at by “at least twelve reputable citizens,” as required by law. Those twelve reputable citizens would simply have to do their gaping at somebody else.

  And I must add that the fact that the law permitted me to have five friends or relatives in attendance offered no inducement to me to pay a visit to the time machine. Having friends or relatives present seemed a little too ghoulish even for my toughened sensibilities.

  To get right down to it, no matter how nicely, efficiently or scientifically the state proposed to dispatch me into the Great Beyond, my psyche still balked at the prospect of such a departure with all the willful, stubborn obstinacy of a Missouri mule.

  Dying in the gas chamber simply didn’t make sense; not so far as I was concerned. Why, I asked myself, should I die there? Why should I passively submit to the mandate of the state if, somehow, I could fight free? If I had a potential bag full of tricks, why should I hesitate to use them? What else should or could society expect? Society hadn’t apologized to me when it declared my life forfeit. Why should I apologize to society for fighting for existence?

  I boiled down my problem of survival to its simplest terms. I took a long, piercing look at exactly what confronted me. The people of the State of California, speaking through their judicial processes, had decreed I must die. They had charged me with the commission of crimes punishable with death. They had convicted me. They had pronounced what the courts are pleased to call “solemn judgments” of death against me. They had imprisoned me in a formidably barred and guarded cell. They would have the death chamber in readiness to snuff out my life as soon as their Supreme Court should affirm the validity of the convictions. They had veteran, hard-fighting attorneys to protect those judgments against legal attack. They had armed guards who watched me day and night with shoot-to-kill orders if I tried to escape.

  In short, they had a “Check on Chessman,” as Fortnight, the California News Magazine, later was to remark while reporting that “The State of California has been playing a game with Caryl Chessman, and his life is the stake in the match.”

  Certainly, then, analogizing my situation to a game of legal chess, with my life the stake in the match, the people of the state, in whose name I was scheduled to die, could not very well take umbrage if I elected to play the game to a decisive conclusion rather than concede loss in despair.

  Shorn of its troublesome moral considerations, what was to be tested was my legal “right” to survive. The decisive question to be answered was not whether I was a good man or a bad one. It was, rather, whether I had been legally and fairly convicted of committing specific crimes denounced by the laws of the state. And I was unable to perceive any reason why I should not put to extreme test the validity of those convictions. On the other hand, I was able to conceive of several persuasive reasons why I should try to return those death sentences unused.

  I would be obliged, I realized, to play this legal chess game according to the rules society, through its judicial and legislative arms, itself had formulated. The arbiters of the game would be society’s own courts. Opposing me would be society’s most skilled legal chess players, old pros who knew all the gambits. They would relentlessly press for a quick victory; that was their job. Mine was to keep from being blitzed into oblivion while I maneuvered myself into position to counterattack.

  Analogies aside, I was literally, physically trapped, and the very nature of the trap wryly amused me. I had to admit there was an unmistakable poetic irony in the way my condemnation had come about. My life had been punctuated with violent episodes, incidents where death had eagerly waited to snatch me if guts, guile or luck had run out. But they had not, and I was still very much alive. The Fates had slyly seen to that. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos had not wasted their precious talents proving the glaringly obvious fact that any foolish mortal can get himself prematurely laid out on a slab in the morgue with no difficulty at all. All one has to do is invent some pretext for awakening the fearful self-destructive impulses which lie dormant in all of us. Do that, and you are on your way.

  I was fully aware I could claim no personal credit for having lived long enough to get myself doomed by the state and brought to the Death Row. And, once here, I didn’t try to kid myself my condemnation suddenly had assumed any cosmic importance. It was just one of those things, and a peculiarly casual one at that. In the patois of the big house, “Ya buys yer ticket and ya takes yer chances.” I had bought my ticket. I had taken my chances. I had taken my chances when, just before my trial had begun, I spurned an offer to plead guilty and accept a sentence of life imprisonment with parole eligibility at the end of seven years.

  So here I was, caged, doomed. And this raised the question: What could I do about it?

  I could and would maintain that I was not the red light bandit, and be rewarded with knowing, skeptical looks, if not downright indignation that I should have the audacity to persist in a claim of innocence. One interviewer blandly assumed my unquestionable guilt and inquired, “Tell me, why did you do it?”

  With a perfectly straight face, I countered, “Tell me, why did you kick your poor old grandmother this morning?”

  The question flustered my interviewer, who managed to stammer, “Why, why, I didn’t.”

  “Well, neither did I.”

  Then I got raised eyebrows and the same old argument. Everybody seems to covet certainty; I simply had to be guilty. Why? Because the courts in this modern day and age function in such a way that it would be impossible for an innocent man to be doomed. Accordingly, there was an element of brash immorality in my claim of innocence. This was so because, since I must be guilty (because I had been convicted), I should be overwhelmed with remorse and should spend full time crying out loudly for forgiveness, between cries of “Unclean! Unclean!”

  Innocence could hardly be regarded as an advantage when looked upon as an impertinence. As wryly observed by Mr. Justice Jesse W. Carter of the California Supreme Court in a recent dissenting opinion, “If lack of penitence is shown by clinging to one’s honest assertion of innocence, then innocence is a crime rather than a virtue.”

  Just before sentencing me to death, Judge Charles W. Fricke had asked me the traditional question: “Is there any legal cause why sentence should not now b
e pronounced?”

  And I had promptly replied, “The defendant is absolutely innocent of these charges.”

  “That,” His Honor had said, “is not a legal cause. That is merely an assertion.”

  Legally speaking, Judge Fricke was correct. Even patently guilty, justly convicted felons can say they are innocent, and often do. Proving innocence is another matter. I had one chance and failed. A jury convicted me. To be sure, I claimed, illegally; and I have persisted in that claim. But right then, when I stood before the man who would pronounce judgment against me, I was, without qualification, legally guilty. From that point on, because the law declares they must, the numerous courts to which I have been have indulged every presumption in favor of the validity and correctness of the jury’s verdict. From that point on, the burden has been on me to prove otherwise. Moreover, reviewing courts decide only questions of law; they do not decide questions of fact, and guilt or innocence is such a question.

  If there is any evidence contained in the trial record from which the jury could rationally have “inferred” guilt, regardless of how much evidence the defendant may have introduced to show his innocence, the reviewing court to which an appeal is taken from a judgment of conviction of crime will and must allow the conviction to stand unless it appears that the conviction was obtained illegally or unfairly (in a well-defined constitutional sense).

  And once a judgment of conviction has been upheld upon appeal and becomes final, it is only vulnerable to what is called collateral attack; that is, by a petition for a writ of habeas corpus or coram nobis, or a motion to vacate. Each of these actions has its own special function to correct a particular kind of legal wrong, but they have this in common: they lie (are available) only when the trial court had no “jurisdiction” to pronounce judgment. This can mean when it is conclusively shown the conviction was had in flagrant disregard of a defendant’s fundamental constitutional rights and appellate review either was not available or proved inadequate to protect those rights.