Caryl Chessman was a small-fry criminal. But he became an international crime celebrity when he was condemned to die not for murder but for two sexual assaults committed during a Los Angeles crime ...

In 1956 the author of Chessman and His Nine Lives on Death Row, Terrence W. Cooney, was appointed by the California Supreme Court to argue the death penalty of Caryl Chessman who pleaded guilty to two ...

One reason Californians will be voting, again, about the death penalty, next month, is because of a man named Caryl Chessman. He was called the “Red Light Bandit,” and he was executed in 1960 for ...

Authorities remove Caryl Chessman's handcuffs at a post-conviction court hearing. He became a media star during his long battle to save himself from "that ugly green room" — San Quentin's gas chamber.

Buck Busfield is pondering the finer points of one of the most important phone calls in California political history. It was Feb. 18, 1960, the eve of the long-delayed execution of Caryl Chessman. A ...

One reason Californians will be voting, again, about the death penalty, next month, is because of a man named Caryl Chessman. He was called the “Red Light Bandit,” and he was executed in 1960 for ...

(Editor’s Note: A reading of Joe Rodota’s play Chessman, a work in progress, was performed at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento this weekend.) Crime never ceases to intrigue, especially its ...

When convict Caryl Chessman went to his death in California’s gas chamber last Monday, he did so against the strenuous protests of hundreds of New Yorkers who met in Greenwich Village two days earlier ...

California’s evolution into a cultural melange in the latter half of the 20th century posed a question that still looms: Can such a complex society achieve the broad social consensus that’s a ...

Toward midnight the lights still burned in California’s state capitol in Sacramento. Cecil Poole, clemency secretary to Governor Edmund Brown, rummaged through the bales of telegrams that flooded the ...