Oversight led to automatic appeals in death row cases

In California, every death sentence is appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court -- and Rush Griffin is the reason.

Griffin, 19, was convicted of robbing and murdering a USC medical student more than 70 years ago.

He was hanged after a clerical error left the state Supreme Court unaware that an appeal had been filed and a letter sent to San Quentin went unread by the warden.

The Los Angeles Times covered the student’s 1934 slaying but not Griffin’s trial. His 1935 execution rated just one sentence in the newspaper.

On April 8, 1935 -- days after the execution -- a special messenger from the Los Angeles County Clerk’s Office delivered the appeal and trial transcript to the state Supreme Court in San Francisco.

The next day, a Times front page headline blared: “Delay Costs Slayer Life; Appeal Papers Too Late.”

“There is nothing this court can do now,” Supreme Court Justice Emmett Seawell told the Sacramento Bee Republican newspaper. “This man is too late for us to consider his appeal.”

Within days, the letter to San Quentin about the appeal turned up in an acting warden’s office, where it had been overlooked and filed away.

The outcry about the errors prompted the Legislature to change the law to require automatic appeals to avoid similar miscommunication.

This account of Griffin’s case is drawn from California newspapers and a California Court of Appeal opinion issued on behalf of Griffin’s accomplice more than five months after the execution.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 12, 1934, Griffin confronted medical student Laurence L. Lyon near 8th and Linden streets. Griffin intended to rob Lyon and perhaps take his car, police believed. Griffin’s roommate, Willie Smith, 24, stood lookout.

It’s unclear what Lyon was doing there around 2:30 a.m. He had been at a party earlier on the city’s Westside. Friends testified that they had dropped him off at his residence, what was then the Phi Chi fraternity house, at 1:20 a.m., near the USC campus -- about two miles from the crime scene.

The friends saw Lyon’s car in front of the fraternity. Police believed that Lyon might have gone for a late-night drive when he became a robbery victim.

How Griffin lured Lyon out of the car -- if he did -- is a mystery too. Perhaps Lyon had pulled over on his own.

Several witnesses told police that they were awakened by two men arguing on the street below their apartment building. Two residents rose from their beds, looked out their windows and saw a black man beat, shoot and rob a white man.

One of the witnesses, Dennis Wells, identified Griffin as the shooter and Smith as the man who stood nearby and watched. Other witnesses told police they had seen the two men earlier in the evening showing off two guns in a neighborhood bar.

As Lyon lay on the sidewalk, shot in the head, witnesses watched Griffin turn over Lyon’s body and search his pockets. No one saw Griffin take Lyon’s wallet, but it was found beneath Griffin’s apartment window.

Within hours, police knocked down the door of Griffin’s and Smith’s apartment, where they found Griffin’s bloody clothes. The men were arrested when they returned home later.

Griffin told police that he had Smith’s gun and his own during the robbery. “When I stopped this man Lyon, he grabbed one of the guns and shot at me. He missed. I fired back and hit him. It was self-defense.”

At the coroner’s inquest, Griffin admitted taking Lyon’s wallet but said he lost it “somewhere on the way home.” He insisted that he had never looked inside.

Later, at his trial in January 1935, Griffin denied taking the wallet. “I don’t remember picking it up,” he testified.

Judge Charles Fricke presided over the trial, in which Griffin was convicted of robbing and murdering Lyon, a graduate of Yale and Columbia universities.

Smith, who was tried with Griffin, was convicted of being an accomplice.

On Jan. 21, 1935, Fricke sentenced Griffin to death and Smith to life. The same day, public defender Richard Bird filed Griffin’s appeal with the Superior Court.

The Superior Court clerk sent a letter dated Jan. 29 to San Quentin Warden James Holohan, citing Griffin’s appeal and enclosing his death warrant. But a deputy clerk failed to notify the state Supreme Court of the appeal and failed to send a copy of the trial transcript.

That was a significant omission because the Supreme Court routinely notified San Quentin that, in essence, executions were stayed while the court considered an appeal.

On Jan. 31, Clinton Duffy, the secretary to acting San Quentin Warden Julian H. Alco, acknowledged in a letter to the Superior Court clerk that he had received the death warrant and the notification of appeal. The regular warden, James Holohan, was on leave, recovering from a severe beating and head injury inflicted during a prison break.

“I guess Alco did not see it,” Duffy told The Times in mid-April 1935, after the letter’s existence had been revealed.

In March 1935, Holohan returned to work at San Quentin. In 1936, he wrote in The Times that he had telephoned the state Supreme Court about Griffin.

“No, they told me, no appeal had been filed. I called the governor’s office, the hour before the hanging. There was no clemency. I paid my last visit to the doomed man,” he wrote.

“Griffin had no more idea than I that an appeal had been filed,” Holohan wrote. “He readily admitted his guilt to me [and signed a statement]. His one great concern was for his confederate, Willie Smith,” whom Griffin insisted “had no blood on his hands and should not have to pay such a high penalty.”

And that was how Griffin was hanged more than two months after the prison was notified of his appeal. “The letter had been buried in the files,” Holohan wrote.

The trial judge, Fricke, was careful not to blame any one individual. He told the press it was a “slip-up.”

Nevertheless, a Superior Court deputy clerk was suspended without pay for several days pending an investigation. He received no punishment beyond the suspension.

In April 1935, Times columnist Harry Carr wrote: “The fact that Rush Griffin probably needed hanging on general principles doesn’t seem to alter the case. Carelessness in any public office is more dangerous than dishonesty. There are very few government offices where the discipline is severe enough.”

In May 1935, a special Senate committee reported on the “mistake hanging.” The committee held hearings at San Quentin and in Los Angeles and found that “existing procedures of law are woefully inadequate.” It recommended that there be an automatic appeal in all death penalty cases and that the execution date not be set until the trial judge had been notified that the death sentence had been affirmed.

The Legislature passed the bill, 79 to 0. Gov. Frank Merriam signed it into law on July 20, 1935.

Although the ramifications of the case were significant, Griffin is virtually forgotten today, except in some legal circles. U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Arthur L. Alarcon, 81, for one, still talks about the landmark case.

“When I became a deputy district attorney in 1952, I was told that a Superior Court deputy clerk had placed the notice of appeal on top of an open roll-top desk and that it slipped down behind it and was forgotten by the clerk,” he said.

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cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com