C–Criminal

Blogging From A to Z

Before I went to kindergarten, after my brothers and sister went to school in the morning, my mom would put my two little sisters to bed for their nap and then she would start doing all of her chores while I sat at the kitchen table and talked to her or. Later, we would watch I Love Lucy. One of the chores that took her a long time was ironing. She would set up the ironing board in a corner of the kitchen and as she ironed, she would listen to the radio. I loved listening to her sing because when she sang, her voice was strong and beautiful and she was happy.

One morning, when I was 4, as she ironed clothes and listened to the radio, I could tell she was sad. She wasn’t singing and the radio wasn’t playing music. Instead, as she ironed, there was a man’s voice, like the man that read the news over the radio, and he was talking slowly and very quietly, almost like he was whispering. As he spoke, tears found their way down my mom’s cheeks. I didn’t know what was going on but then, my mother called me over to her and we both knelt down and prayed. My mom prayed and I listened. She was praying for someone that was dying. After we prayed, we stayed kneeling on the floor, with our eyes closed, even though I wanted to get up because my knees hurt from kneeling for so long. The man on the radio whispered words and then there was silence. I opened my eyes and my mom was crying. I didn’t know what was happening. Then the man on the radio said it was over and the station started to play music again. Quiet music.

I asked my mom why she was crying and she said it was because someone had been killed; someone who should not have been killed. She said it was a man who was in San Quentin. I knew where that was because we lived near there and we drove by it sometimes when we went to San Francisco. I knew it was a place where they took bad people; people that had done bad things, so I didn’t understand why she was crying for a bad man.

Finally, we got up and she went into the bathroom to wash her face. When she came out, she put away the iron and all the clothes even though she wasn’t finished. That morning we turned off the radio and my mom let me watch Lucy and she went to go lie down in her room.

Caryl Chessman was the name I heard that morning and when my dad got home from work, they talked about how he had been killed for doing bad things and how it wasn’t right that he had been killed. I didn’t quite understand it. I wasn’t sure what it meant to be killed. I just knew that my parents were sad because someone bad had died and I didn’t understand it.

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Caryl Chessman was convicted of a number of crimes committed in 1948 in southern California. After many years on Death Row, he exhausted his appeals and was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Federal Penitentiary in the San Francisco Bay Area. His case was instrumental in the abolishment of capital punishment in California and brought worldwide attention to the issue of capital punishment. As I read about him to write this piece, I also read that moments after the process had been started to put him to death, there was a call from a judge staying the execution but the process had already begun and could not be stopped. There were a lot of issues with his sentencing as it seems that the prosecution wrongly applied a kidnapping law to the case. Caryl Chessman had twice dragged his victims away from their car a number of feet. That had been interpreted as kidnapping, making his crimes eligible for the death penalty. He was executed on May 2, 1960.

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