Book Review : Pat Brown, Morality and Death Row

Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor’s Education on Death Row by Edmund (Pat) Brown with Dick Adler (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $18.95, 163 pp.)

To some of us, “Gov. Brown” will always be Edmund (Pat) Brown, the cheerful old pol whose two terms as governor of California saw a boom in the building of hospitals and universities, roads and bridges, dams and aqueducts. At 83, Brown pere is still an old-fashioned liberal, and--unlike his son, the other Gov. Brown--a plain-spoken man with a glad hand, a ready smile, and a warm heart. Still, as we learn in “Public Justice, Private Mercy,” Pat Brown is no less concerned with the morality of power.

“Reading those case reports (of death penalty appeals) filled me with as much anger against the killers as any man alive, but anger is a luxury that a governor can’t afford,” Brown recalls of the days when he wielded the power of executive clemency over capital penalty cases.

“As the last stop on the road to the gas chamber, it was up to me to make sure that the law--even if it was one I disagreed with--was being fairly applied. And in many cases, underneath the terrible details of the crimes themselves and the justifiable anger they created, I found examples of unfairness and unjustice that even the hardest heart couldn’t ignore.”

“Public Justice,” co-written with veteran author and journalist Dick Adler, is Pat Brown’s confessional account of what it is like to choose between life and death for another human being. From 1959 to 1967, Brown’s power of executive clemency was the last resort for condemned prisoners who had exhausted their rights of appeal in the courts. Brown commuted the death sentences of 23 men, and allowed 36 others to go to their deaths in the gas chamber at San Quentin. (By contrast, as Brown pointedly reminds us, the celebrated Earl Warren commuted only six death sentences and let 82 prisoners die during his years as governor.)

There’s a refreshing candor to Brown’s memoir. He admits, for example, that he tried his first (and only) capital case as district attorney of San Francisco--after asking his subordinates “to get me a lead-pipe cinch”--just so he could take credit for a death penalty verdict in the upcoming election. “We haven’t seen Mr. Brown here in court for some time,” the defense attorney told the jury. “You know why Mr. Big Cannon himself is here today? Because if you give my clients the death penalty, Pat Brown will be re-elected.” Brown, to his credit, withdrew his demand for the death penalty, and asked instead for a sentence of life imprisonment. As it turns out, it would be the first in a series of public ordeals over the death penalty.

Some of the most fascinating passages in “Public Justice” are the dozen or so case histories of the condemned men and women themselves, the stuff of hard-boiled detective fiction come to life. John Crooker, for example, was a UCLA student who found his way into the bed of the wealthy young wife for whose family he worked as a houseboy; Crooker stabbed her to death after she spurned him. “Socialite Killed by Houseboy Lover” was the headline. Brown commuted Crooker’s death sentence--and describes how the fully rehabilitated Crooker, now middle-aged and married, stopped by his law office years later just to say thanks.

Then there was Caryl Chessman, the so-called “Red Light Bandit” who used a police-style red beacon to stop cars driven by women, and then robbed and sexually assaulted the women on lonely mountain roads. Chessman, a gifted writer and jailhouse lawyer (but, in Brown’s words, “a nasty, arrogant, unrepentant man”), managed to put off his execution for more than a decade. But the ultimate decision fell to Brown. Brown was burned in effigy when he granted Chessman a brief stay of execution--young Jerry Brown, then a law student at Berkeley, pleaded with his father for the stay--and then condemned by Chessman’s sympathizers when, owing

to certain technical limits on his power of clemency, Brown was forced to let Chessman die after both the legislature and the Supreme Court refused to act on the death penalty.

“It’s hard to say which Caryl Chessman caused me the most trouble--Chessman alive or Chessman dead,” remarks Brown, who blames his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1966--and the end of his political career--on his opposition to the death penalty and “its surrounding aura of weakness and vacillation.”

Brown, the ultimate insider, gives us a vivid and urgent account of the real world of politics. The clemency appeal of a particularly vile child killer named Richard Lindsey, for example, threatened to “doom an important farm labor minimum-wage bill that we had worked hard to produce” --Brown feared that sparing the life of a brutal rapist and murderer would alienate the lawmakers on whose votes he depended.

“I was fighting with a conservative legislature to spend more money on a growing state, to improve its schools and its mental health facilities and its working conditions,” he writes. “Should I risk, did I even have the right to risk, destroying any of that because of one demented criminal?”

Brown concludes “Public Justice” with a short, rather bloodless brief in support of abolishing the death penalty. I was not fully convinced by his arguments, although I was comforted by the thought that a man as decent and generous as Pat Brown enjoyed the power to temper the death penalty. And I was moved by the words that Brown wrote in a public statement on the Chessman case back in 1960:

“Society has both the right and the moral duty to protect itself against its enemies,” Brown stated. “But the naked, simple fact is that the death penalty has been a gross failure. Beyond its horror and incivility, it has neither protected the innocent nor deterred the wicked.” Above all, Brown insisted, the death penalty “is primarily inflicted upon the weak, the poor, the ignorant, and against racial minorities. . . . Here but for the grace of God there might now be on our hands the blood of a man poor, ignorant, friendless--and innocent.”