Crime: Stirrings on Death Row

Just before the door to the octagonal, green gas chamber in California's San Quentin prison clanged shut, the condemned man twisted toward the witnesses. Straining against the eight thick straps that bound him to a chair, he cried: "I am Jesus Christ!" Moments later, a pellet of potassium cyanide was dropped into a solution of dilute sulfuric acid, and blowers began sucking the lethal gas upward. Within twelve minutes, Aaron Mitchell, 37, who was convicted of slaying a Sacramento policeman during a 1963 tavern holdup, was dead. He was the first man to be executed in California in four years and the first in the U.S. this year.

Outside San Quentin's "smokehouse"—so named because smoke curls from the gas chamber's chimney when a man is put to death—almost 500 opponents of capital punishment conducted a demonstration. Other groups picketed Governor Ronald Reagan's office and home. At the request of California's Episcopal Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, several churches tolled their bells at the hour of Mitchell's execution "in penitence for our part in this judicial and legalized murder." But C. Julian Bartlett, the dean of Myers' own Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, declined the request.

Exhausting All Avenues. After refusing a plea for executive clemency, Reagan said: "Here was a case in which every legal avenue had been tried—the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the California Supreme Court twice." Moreover, his predecessor, Governor Edmund Brown, had rejected clemency. Concluded Reagan: "The law is the law, and it must be upheld."

Only one prisoner was put to death in the U.S. last year, and laws on capital punishment are being challenged or set aside. Of the 50 states, 37 have the death penalty, while 13 have either abolished or modified it. The Federal Government has carried out only one execution in ten years, and Michigan Senator Philip A. Hart, whose state killed the death penalty in 1847, has a bill pending that would abolish it for all federal crimes.

There are 404 condemned men, duly convicted and now awaiting execution in penitentiaries. One of them, Rapist William Patrick Clark, 29, who said that he wanted to die, was granted a stay by Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox last week, only 49 minutes before his scheduled electrocution. The same day, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling opened the way to a retrial for two Louisiana Negroes who have been awaiting electrocution since 1953 for the rape of a white woman. In Florida, a Federal District Court judge ordered a rare stay of execution for all of the state's 51 condemned prisoners until at least May 31. On that date, a hearing will be held on an American Civil Liberties Union petition charging that death by electrocution constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the 8th and 14th amendments.

California has another execution scheduled for this week and 59 other men in its death row. "We are treating each one of these cases on its own mer its," says Governor Reagan. "Certainly, if clemency is indicated, no one would be happier than I would if I were able to recommend it."