The Last Gasp
Page 23
Such support remained so strong that for a decade or so after the end of World War II the states using lethal gas continued to put prisoners to death with it, albeit usually at a slower pace than before the war. At first, things seemed to go on as before. Indeed, on October 3, 1947, North Carolina carried out its first quintuple gas-chamber execution, putting to death three blacks and two whites (one of them for first-degree burglary) after one of the condemned had tried to prevent his execution by jamming his cell door lock with an ice cream spoon. A few weeks later, on Halloween, the state carried out a quadruple gassing of four black men.
But the pace of executions was slowing. North Carolina’s tally of 111 gassings in the 1940s dropped to only eighteen in the 1950s, signaling a radical turnaround. Colorado’s total plummeted from twenty-two to three, Missouri went from fourteen to nine, and California dropped from eighty-one to seventy-three.
The fact that the number of states employing lethal gas continued to expand struck many observers as a sign of progress, not a cause for alarm. Oklahoma passed a law in 1951 providing for electrocution as the official method of execution until a gas chamber was built, but no gas unit was ever constructed.10
Developments in Mississippi were more complicated. When Mississippi abandoned its portable electric chair for gas in 1954, many progressives initially viewed it as a major step forward, provided that the move did not encourage a return to lynching. There was good reason to worry that it might. Faced with the start of the civil rights movement, white supremacists had gone on the warpath. Both the Ku Klux Klan and many local government officials vowed to defy that year’s landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, as well as any other slights to white status. That summer the battered body of a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was found in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy fan tied to his neck, a victim of racial hatred. And Till was just the beginning.
It was in this tempestuous climate that Mississippi’s new gas chamber sprang forth. The state’s main prison was Parchman Penitentiary, a sprawling former slave plantation. In one of its cotton fields, convicts had been forced to build a bunker surrounded by guard towers and a razor-wire fence. Inside was a solitary confinement wing where troublesome convicts could be isolated and at times beaten, and next to that stood the small redbrick death house that resembled a gas station.11
Designed for Eaton Metal Products Company in Denver by Thomas Clyde Williams, Mississippi’s shiny new hexagonal execution chamber was equipped with one chair and made to kill one person per hour. As set forth in the patent, the inventor had endeavored “to provide a neat, compact mechanism which will humanely execute the criminal or criminals with the least possible delay and confusion, [and] which will allow quick entry after the execution without danger to the attendants.” There were separate rooms for the witnesses, warden, doctor, and executioner. One executioner controlled the whole operation, including the injection of the gas and the quick clearing of the chemicals and gas from the chamber afterward. According to the designer’s description, “While a specific form of the improvement has been described and illustrated herein,” the new version did not depart “from the spirit of the [original] invention.”12 Controls outside the chamber released cyanide pellets into a four-gallon stainless-steel container holding sulfuric acid. Two men were required to operate the chamber—one to serve as official executioner, tripping the controls to start the release of gas, and the other (his assistant) to manipulate the ventilating and neutralizing systems. Eaton’s production manager Gene Clark tested the new unit on site in January 1955. According to the company’s established routine, he made sure the unit was properly installed and later worked with the would-be executioner to test the chamber’s killing power on a pig.13
Three months later Mississippi began carrying out its first human gas-chamber executions at Parchman. Its first occupant, Gerald Gallego, was a white bank robber from Biloxi who had allegedly killed a constable trying to arrest him. Later he had slain a jailer by slitting his throat. Shortly before his death Gallego was described as a blasphemous killer, but at his execution he credited a local Baptist minister for bringing him “back to God.” Reverend Kermit Canterbury called the condemned man’s spiritual resurrection the “greatest conversion I’ve ever seen.” As Gallego went to meet his maker, a chorus of condemned men in C Tier could be heard singing, “Up Above There’s Heaven Bright.”
But when the executioner pulled his fatal lever, nothing happened: the pellets were stuck. The doomed man had to wait in his chair while his killer entered the chamber, fixed the problem, returned to his station, and pulled the lever again. This time the situation was even worse, for only a few of the pellets dropped into the acid, so that Gallego was only sickened, not killed. The executioner had to start from scratch, evacuating the chamber and allowing the gas to disperse and detoxify before he delivered a full load of enough fresh cyanide to ensure Gallego’s demise. Afterward the executioner donned vinyl gloves, a leather apron, and an oxygen mask, and he entered the chamber to dust down the corpse, running his gloved hands through the dead man’s hair and the folds of his clothes to ensure that no cyanide gas remained trapped to later cause problems at the funeral home.14
Mississippi continued its gassings at a brisk pace. The next day, a black man from Louisiana was put to death for mugging a white woman. In five years alone, from 1955 to 1959, Mississippi’s deadly chamber was the site of twenty executions, seventeen of them of black men. One of the rare white men executed, William Alvin Wetzel, was characterized as a “New York mobster” who had been trying to free his imprisoned brother. (Wetzel’s brother had recently been convicted of first-degree murder after killing a North Carolina policeman while he was at large after fleeing a New York mental hospital.)15 Unlike hangings and electrocutions, the new method seemed kind but potent as far as many Mississippians were concerned.
Maryland didn’t adopt lethal gas until 1955, and it carried out its first two gassings in that decade. Both involved black youths convicted of the robbery, rape, and murder of a white woman, giving the case a strong racial flavor.16 New Mexico decided in 1955 to substitute lethal gas for electrocution but did not in fact gas anyone until 1960.
America’s gassings of the 1950s reflected the times. A week before Christmas in 1953, Missouri followed the Rosenbergs’ example when Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Headley (known as the Greenlease Kidnap Killers) were gassed together at Jefferson City. Like the Rosenbergs, they went to their death without revealing their secret—in this case, the whereabouts of the $600,000 ransom they had received after allegedly snatching and killing a six-year-old boy. Justice for them proved swift, and there was no appeal. Before the pair died they chatted together and shared a cigarette while manacled in a detention cell and shadowed by an anxious federal marshal. When it came time for them to be strapped down, however, Hall seemed to be cracking under the pressure while Headley shouted obscenities at their executioners. “Shut the fuck up and take it like a man,” she told her partner.17 After they were bound into their chairs, Bonnie asked her lover if he had enough room.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked.
“Yes, Mama,” he replied.
The guards who had watched over them on death row came by and shook their hands, and then left them alone. They were still talking with each other after the door was shut and the fumes were swirling around them. The woman took ten long minutes to die. “Death of the dissolute playboy and his drunken paramour climaxed the nation’s most horrible kidnapping in twenty years,” wrote one national reporter, trying to milk the sex scandal nature of the case for all it was worth.18
But in the 1950s it was California’s gas chamber that attracted the most attention. Leandress Riley was a thirty-two-year-old one-eyed black man who weighed less than one hundred pounds. One of eleven children of an abusive father and a mentally ill mother who believed her children were possessed by demons, he had run away at age fourteen to fend for himself. On July 1
8, 1949, Riley allegedly shot an innocent bystander who got in his way, for which he was later convicted of robbery and murder. After he was sentenced to die, however, six psychiatrists couldn’t agree if he was sane. Therefore, he had to undergo a special trial. Upon the jury’s nine-to-three vote that he was sane, state law didn’t allow any appeal, and he went to the gas chamber on February 20, 1953.
To everyone’s horror, however, Riley didn’t cooperate, and he even tried to hold onto his cell bars while making “a long shrieking cry.” One prison official who was there later said, “The poor devil [had] slashed his wrists. They couldn’t keep his handcuffs on because his arms were slippery with blood, and we had to almost literally carry him in there, set him in the chair while he was screeching and yelling.” Once inside the chamber Riley became the first inmate in California gas chamber history to wrest himself free from the restraining straps. Guards had to reenter the room to subdue him, after which he held his breath for several minutes before finally expiring. His execution was a nightmare for staff and witnesses alike.19
Gas chamber guards rehearsed their roles in dread of making a mistake. Their supervisors sometimes assigned them to walk selected members of the press through the procedures in advance as well, both to minimize confusion and to try to make the procedures seem more clinical and bureaucratic.20 But errors and the unexpected invariably happened. San Quentin’s prison personnel became accustomed to two or three witnesses fainting during each execution, and others vomiting or otherwise breaking down under the stress.
For one San Quentin staff member the prospect of having to participate in a lethal gassing was especially distressing. John M. Steiner was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who had taken a position at the prison as a psychiatric counselor. However, he refused to witness an execution and, reminded of the horror of the death camps, he ultimately decided he could not work in an institution that executed people by the use of lethal gas.21
Throughout the United States appeals lawyers were becoming more involved in trying to prevent executions, and California received some of the highest-profile media attention into the agonizing delays and suspense that the lawyers’ maneuvering produced. In one San Quentin incident the condemned man nodded off from the fumes just as Governor Goodwin J. Knight’s secretary telephoned in a frantic effort to relay a last-minute stay. Asked if he could halt the execution, the warden could only reply, “No.” He had already released the cyanide pellets.22
Sometimes an execution came back to haunt the executioners long after the gassing was done. For example, the public’s views about the San Quentin execution of Barbara Graham, a thirty-two-year-old white woman, changed dramatically over time as attitudes toward capital punishment evolved. Described as a former B-girl and petty criminal, Graham, who had been married four times and had three young children, got hooked on drugs and was convicted with two male accomplices of suffocating an elderly widow during a robbery. After gaining several stays, she finally entered the gas chamber on June 3, 1955. A hard-boiled wire service reporter who covered her death described her as “deceptively demure” and characterized her demise as “one of the most confused executions in California history” due to all the last-minute machinations.23
Three years after Graham’s gassing United Artists released the movie I Want to Live! directed by Robert Wise. The black-and-white film classic re-created her execution with clinical precision. The film featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Susan Hayward and a background score of cool jazz, but the main subject seemed to be the gas chamber itself. Wise had his production designer, Victor A. Gangelin, photograph the holding cells and gas chamber in complete detail so that his crew would be able to reproduce every aspect back in the studio. Wise’s team also interviewed the prison nurse who had been with Graham that night. The result was extraordinarily powerful. Cleansed of sap, the film’s documentary-like quality contributes to its sense of authenticity. “As the minutes tick off and the tension of last-gasp appeals is sustained through the pacing of death-house formalities against the image of the near-by telephone,” one critic wrote, “attendants go through the grisly business of preparing the gas chamber for its lethal role. Anyone who can sit through this ordeal without shivering and shuddering is made of stone.” It was, he said, “a picture to shake you—and give you pause,” which is exactly what the film did for the image of the gas chamber.24
Figure 12 Scene from I Want to Live! (1958). United Artists.
By 1955 American attitudes toward capital punishment seemed to be changing. Some historians would later attribute this to the early rumblings of the American civil rights movement. From a historical peak in legal executions of 199 in 1935, the nation’s total fell to eighty-two in 1954, and twenty-seven states had no execution at all. Six states—Michigan, Rhode Island, Maine, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—didn’t have a death penalty law in force. And while no state had abolished capital punishment since 1918, leaders of America’s anti–death penalty coalition that year had managed to get abolitionist legislation introduced in thirteen states. None was successful.
But that September Sara R. Ehrmann, executive director of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment and wife of a prominent Boston attorney, Herbert R. Ehrmann (formerly an associate counsel to Sacco and Vanzetti), announced she had detected a “change of attitude” toward the death penalty in the United States. As a result, she decided to step up the campaign against capital punishment by taking her case before the annual meeting of the American Correctional Association held in Des Moines. At the time, twenty-four states used the electric chair, and seven still used the gallows or firing squad, but eleven—more than ever before—had opted for the gas chamber. Interviewed at her tiny office above a print shop, Ehrmann said, “More public officials are speaking out against it. There aren’t as many executions. Juries seem more inclined to recommend leniency. The gas chamber is being substituted for hanging in some states because people think it’s more humane.” She added that whenever a shocking or brutal crime was committed, efforts were made to increase the severity of punishment. “But this brings only a temporary emotional satisfaction,” she concluded. “The fact remains that killing criminals has never succeeded in lessening crimes.”25
One of the corrections leaders Ehrmann knew to oppose capital punishment was Clinton T. Duffy. He had served as San Quentin’s warden from 1940 to 1952, although he had since moved to a post with the parole board. Duffy was a West Coast version of Sing Sing’s famous Warden Lewis Lawes, who had published several best-selling books, hosted a radio show, and inspired several Hollywood movies, even spearheading the nation’s leading anti–capital punishment organization at the same time he was required to carry out more executions than any other warden in American history.26 Like Lawes, Duffy was a professional penologist who believed in rehabilitation as much as he disdained executions. The author of a best-selling book about San Quentin that was made into a major motion picture, he displayed his views about the death penalty in 88 Men and 2 Women, published in 1962.27 “Each of the 150 executions I watched was a separate and distinct ordeal,” he explained, “unsavory, nauseating, and infuriating. I faced them all with dread and look back on them with revulsion.”28 Duffy claimed to hate the death penalty due to its inhumanity and its inequality. “Doomed men rot in a private hell while their cases are being appealed,” he said, “and they continue to rot after a death date is set.” He called executions the “privilege of the poor.”29 Lionized by progressives and Hollywood, Duffy brought enormous stature to the anti–death penalty cause and shifted attention from Sing Sing’s infamous electric chair to San Quentin’s gas chamber.
One individual case in the postwar era exerted a particularly profound effect on American public opinion about the gas chamber and the death penalty in general. Caryl Whittier Chessman was a career petty criminal and convict in California who waged a legendary twelve-year struggle to save his own life, becoming in the process one of the most famous prisoners in his
tory. He spent much of his life in San Quentin under Warden Duffy and Duffy’s successors.
Although Chessman looked as if he might be Jewish, and prison authorities constantly complained he possessed “superior intelligence” along with an “anti-social personality,” he had been born in rural Michigan in 1921 to Baptist parents and was a direct descendant of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. He was raised in difficult family circumstances during the Great Depression. His first institutionalization occurred at age sixteen, when he entered reform school for stealing a car. For the rest of his life, over the next twenty-three years, he would spend all but three in state custody for various infractions. Because he was so smart and unruly, many prison officials considered him a “dangerous individual.”30 After spending all of World War II behind bars, he was paroled in December 1947, but he soon reverted to crime.
In early 1948, at age twenty-six, he allegedly carried out armed robberies and other jobs with some of his ex-convict friends. On the night of January 23 the police spotted him and another parolee in a Ford that appeared to match the description they had just received in an all-points bulletin. Chessman was driving the stolen car without a driver’s license, and he tried to flee. The police fired shots through his rear window during a high-speed chase, and he was eventually cornered and taken into custody. He landed in jail with swollen cheekbones, a dislocated thumb, and extensive scrapes and bruises suffered during his arrest and interrogation, although the police medical report claimed, “inspection reveals no marks, scars or bruises.”31
At that moment the political and social climate of Los Angeles was nothing short of hysterical. The police were waging war against unidentified sexual predators and murderers whom the tabloids dubbed with such monikers as the “Black Dahlia” and the “Red Lipstick Murderer.” Coverage of sex scandals dominated many of the papers. Although Chessman’s guilt or innocence would be debated for decades to come, he was charged with being the notorious “Red Light Bandit” and committing sexual assaults on two young women on local lovers’ lanes.32