CHESSMAN CASE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29145, 4 March 1960, Page 13

CHESSMAN CASE

New Death Date Set

(N'.Z. Press Association—Copyright) LOS ANGELES, March 3.

Caryl Chessman’s new appointment with the gas chamber is May 2. Superior Judge Clement Nye set the date yesterday for the condemned sex terrorist over the vigorous objection of Chessman’s attorneys.

The lawyers claimed a new execution date could not be set until a 60-day reprieve, granted last February 19, by Governor Edmund Brown had expired. Judge Nye said the sentence was legal because the new execution date was after the end of the 60-day period.

Governor Brown today formally stayed the executions of three men who had been condemned to die during March in the San Quentin gas chamber. He had said at the time he gave Chessman his eighth reprieve that he would postpone all executions until the Legislature acted on death penalty legislation. Mr Brown yesterday introduced into the Legislature a bill to end capital punishment in California. The death penalty, he said, neither protected the innocent nor deterred the wicked.

In a 1500-word message to the legislators, Mr Brown said that “the naked, simple fact is that the death penalty has been a gross failure.”

He said its most glaring weakness was that “in California, as elsewhere, it is primarily inflicted upon the weak, the poor, the ignorant and against racial minorities.”

Seldom, he said, “are those with funds or prestige convicted of capital offences, and even more seldom are they executed.” The bill would replace - the death penalty with life imprisonment, without possibility of parole.