Letters From Alcatraz - Michael Esslinger [114]
Despite many court appeals and pleas for executive clemency, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison in New York. They became the first U.S. civilians to suffer the death penalty in an espionage trial, and the controversial case received worldwide attention. Some supporters claimed that the political climate in the country had made a fair trial impossible, while others questioned the value of the information that had been transmitted to the Soviet Union, arguing that the death penalty was too severe in this case. President Eisenhower was unsympathetic and unyielding, stating: “I can only say, that by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.”
No other spy case has had such global ramifications. The description of the Rosenbergs’ executions reverberated throughout the world, and would forever call into question the cruel process of death by electrocution. The Associated Press printed a disturbing and vivid account of Ethel’s death, which ultimately weakened public support for capital punishment.
Morton Sobell arrived at Alcatraz on November 26, 1952, as inmate AZ-996. His background as an engineer was not parallel to the criminal histories shared by his new neighbors and he seemed an unusual candidate for the island prison. The administration had worried that because of the nature of his crimes, Sobell could be targeted by the other inmates who by nature were extremely patriotic. But Sobell was also Hoover’s archenemy, and this would in fact earn him a special status amongst the inmate population. In his personal memoir entitled On Doing Time, Sobell recounted his experiences in seemingly unbiased detail. He wrote that the environment at Alcatraz was different from that of any other prison he had seen. The inmates seemed unusually curious, and the guard staff was openly courteous, initially going as far as to address him as “Mr. Sobell.” Like most other new “fish,” he was placed in B Block for a quarantine cycle and it would be several weeks before he was given a job assignment.
Sobell also commented that the population at Alcatraz seemed unusually subdued when he first arrived and that the prison was “like a tomb of living souls. ” Unlike many of the other inmates he was able to adjust to his environment at Alcatraz and used his idle cell time productively by reading extensively from the prison library. Sobell was eventually moved to a cell located at the far corner of C Block. Warden Swope frequently stopped at Sobell’s cell when giving tours to special visitors. He commented during an interview, that without fail, every time the Warden would bring people by as they were touring the prison, they’d catch him sitting on the toilet. He would later reside on the top tier in cell #C-342, where it was significantly warmer and he had a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
On March 7, 1958, Sobell was received at Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, and then on May 30, 1963 he was transferred to the Medical Facility for Federal Inmates in Springfield Missouri. At Springfield Sobell developed a close friendship with Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” and would later be the one to find him dead of natural causes in his cell. Sobell was transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania on January 30, 1965, and was finally released on January 14, 1969.
Sobell in 2001 returning to Alcatraz as a visitor.
Roy Gardner
Roy Gardner
In the late 1930’s Roy Gardner was known as one of the last notorious train robbers from the old western era, and in the first years after Alcatraz became a