Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [204]
Even in the years before Furman v. Georgia, the process had shown signs of slowing down. It became as expensive and protracted as building a nuclear power plant. No case was as notorious as Caryl Chessman’s. Chessman was sentenced to death in California on June 25, 1948. He had been convicted under the state’s “little Lindbergh” law. He spent almost twelve years on death row. Chessman fought like a tiger for his wasted, unhappy life. He wrote three books on death row, won stay after stay, attracted the support and attention of such movie stars as Marlon Brando and Shirley MacLaine, and became a national symbol of resistance to the death penalty. In the end, he lost. He went to his death on May 2, 1960.
The death penalty, as we have said, has became vastly more popular since Chessman’s execution, as far as the general public is concerned. Today, hardly any politician dares oppose it. Yet popularity does not translate itself into speed. Chessman was considered an unusual case, in his day. But long delay is now the rule, not the exception. Death penalty cases bounce back and forth endlessly between state and federal courts. The defendant has absolutely nothing to lose, and there is a small but devoted corps of lawyers and activists who loath the death penalty and fight it every inch of the way. Jerry Joe Bird died in Texas on June 17, 1991, at 12:21 A.M., of a lethal injection. He was number forty to be executed in Texas (number 147 in the country) since the Supreme Court had resurrected the death penalty. Bird was executed for a crime he had committed in 1974; he had been a resident of death row for seventeen years. Some men have been under the shadow of execution even longer.109
The Supreme Court gets the most headlines; but the death penalty and its case law are an issue in many of the states as well. In California, the voters threw Chief Justice Rose Bird out of office in 1986; one reason, probably the main reason, was the charge that she was undermining the death penalty. The Chief Justice denied the charge; she said (they always do) that she was only following the law. In point of fact, the California Supreme Court had a suspicious habit of reversing death sentence cases—some sixty-four out of sixty-eight, between 1979 and 1986.
After Chief Justice Bird and two colleagues were handed their walking papers, the Republican governor, George Deukmejian, was able to replace them with new judges more likely, he thought, to send evildoers to the gas chamber.ch Yet, for six more years California put nobody to death. Finally, on April 21, 1992, Robert Alton Harris died in the “apple-green gas chamber” while the father of a boy he murdered in 1978 watched him through the glass, six feet away. It took Harris about a minute and a half to die from the gas, but the struggle over his own doomed life had lasted thirteen years.110 On the day that Robert Harris died, the clock was ticking away for 2,500 men and women on death rows across the country—329 of them in California, 315 in Florida, 349 in Texas.111
California was not the only state where a stubborn court thwarted the public clamor for blood. More than a dozen states that have the death penalty have yet to use it, among them New Jersey, Kentucky, and Nebraska. In August 1991, the New Jersey Supreme Court, by a vote of four to three, threw out the death sentence