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Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1978 (Berkeley: U California P, 2001), xi + 209 pp., $45.00 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).
While in San Quentin awaiting execution during the 1950s, Caryl Chessman became a household name for Cell 2455 Death Row and other best-selling autobiographical books. Prominent social scientists hailed his publications as powerful evidence of the "rehabilitative ideal" in liberal penology. Equally prominent literary lions roared with appreciation for a toughtalking rebel who hated authority with a capital "A", as Chessman always spelled it. Surely here was someone who did not deserve to die.
Yet as historian Theodore Hamm makes clear in his incisive new book, Chessman was an unlikely martyr for postwar death penalty abolitionism. A working class kid who could claim the poet John Greenleaf Whittier as an ancestor, Chessman ran wild at an early age and landed in San Quentin when he was barely old enough to vote. In 1948, during a brief stint outside of prison walls, he was charged with the sexual crimes of the so-called "red light bandit," a notorious rapist whose deeds, coming on the heels of the gruesome Black Dahlia murder, created an atmosphere of sex crime hysteria in postwar Los Angeles. Convicted for nonlethal sexual assaults on two young women, Chessman spent the next dozen years on death row, where he wrote his way to the center of international debate on the death penalty.
Hamm begins...