Execution of Caryl Chessman

Your summary of California’s 1960 execution of the probably innocent Caryl Chessman for committing holdups then legally classified as capital kidnapping (“Stories That Shaped the Century,” Nov. 12) repeated a widely published falsehood that Gov. Pat Brown “was powerless to stop it.”

As a criminological writer who was one of the defense investigators for the accused “red-light bandit,” I joined former California Atty. Gen. Robert W. Kenny and others in personally pleading with Gov. Brown to extend his gas-chamber reprieve an additional 30 days so that a scheduled replacement on the state Supreme Court would have resulted in a 4-to-3 vote granting Brown authority to commute despite the legal bar of Chessman’s prior felony record.

Brown, who publicly hid behind the half-truth that his hands were tied by the existing Supreme Court’s 4-to-3 vote against clemency, privately admitted to me that he would take the extreme political risk of issuing the extended reprieve only if I somehow could persuade The Times or one of L.A.’s other three metropolitan newspapers to disavow their editorial drumbeat demanding Chessman’s death. I failed. Chessman died proclaiming his innocence. And Pat Brown lived on to defeat gubernatorial challenger Richard Nixon.

But Brown, a religious opponent of capital punishment who knew Chessman had been the victim of a witch hunt partially led by bigots who wrongly assumed Chessman was Jewish, confided to me that he was condemned to live with a guilty conscience.

MARK DAVIDSON

Pasadena