Another Legal Murder

At 10 o'clock on Monday morning, in the big white jail across the Bay from San Francisco, the American State legally murdered Caryl Chessman.

After 12 nerve-wracking years, which included eight stays-of-execution, the gas chamber claimed its victim. The 'humanitarians' of capitalism guaranteed that Chessman would have a swift and merciful death, provided he breathed in deeply and let the gas get into his lungs.

But how many men have so rejected that deep instinct of self-preservation that they can calmly hasten their own death? Chessman certainly didn't. For eight minutes 45 seconds he tried desperately to live. When the poison gas began to rise around him he writhed and struggled against that inevitable death which his executioners had so scientifically prepared for him.

Chessman's end was violent and agonising. It shatters into a thousand hypocritical pieces the sickening platitudes of those who deny that capitalism is a society based on violence. Capitalism establishes the sacrosant rights of property and enforces its rule by means of the jail-house and the gas-chamber.

For 12 years they killed a little bit of Chessman each day. In his last letter he wrote: 'Death Row is always a place of horrors even for those who are able to hold the horrors at arm's length. For death itself is always your mocking, obscene companion.'

Death Row

In the film 'I Want To Live', Susan Hayward portrayed the unfortunate Barbara Graham—another victim of St. Quentin's green-painted death cell. Who could ever forget in that tragically accurate film, the pathetic hope, the dull resignation and the trapped animal-like helplessness of Barbara Graham as the months of her long wait went by. For that near demented woman they were months that passed so slowly, but yet too fast. No one could wait in Death Row and not die a little under the experience.

Chessman's life stands as a shocking indictment of capitalist society, with its cruel wastage and savage destruction of human beings. Under-privileged, inadequately educated, he turned early to petty crime. He learned quickly that for the children of the poor, Reformatory Schools are places made to break young people's spirit and intimidate them into conformity. It wasn't long before he found himself one of the 'outs'—a reject of society. Capitalism prefers its crooks to work in the State Department and its murderers to wear three stars.

Only when he was in the death cell did society learn that Chessman was a talented human being. With no literary training and no legal experience, he showed that he was capable of defeating the Californian State's best legal brains on eight occasions. During his time in the cells he wrote five books, all best sellers.

In capitalist society there are many people like Chessman, their talents frustrated, their abilities squashed, their aspirations denied. To these people capitalist society offers only the role of the obedient wage slave. It turns with barbaric ferocity on those who will not conform.