San Quentin Prison has housed California's only death row for
male inmates since 1937. (Michael Glogowski-Walldorf: Flickr) In
February of 1960, Gov. Pat Brown had a tough decision to make.
His office was being flooded by clemency appeals for death row
inmate Carryl Chessman. Convicted of kidnapping, robbery and
rape, Chessman maintained his innocence. “Well I don’t know if I
ever had hope,” Chessman said in an interview then. “It’s like a
soldier out in the field, the battlefield. I don’t know if he
has hope or not; he just keeps slogging forward as much as
possible and then waits for the results.” Letters and calls
poured into the governor’s office on Chessman’s behalf. As Pat
Brown recalled in a 1986 KQED documentary, the most urgent
appeal to stop the execution came from his own family. “My son
asked me to do it and said ‘Dad, this man didn’t kill anybody. I
think you should commute it to life imprisonment,’” Brown said.
In 1972 the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death
penalty unconstitutio