Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Authorities remove Caryl Chessman's handcuffs at a post-conviction court hearing. He became a media star during his long battle to ...

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 ...

On this day, May 2, in 1960, Caryl Whittier Chessman went to the gas chamber in California’s San Quentin Prison. Chessman — also known as the “Red Light Bandit” — was once a cause celebre for the ...

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 ...

Moments after the deathly pale figure moved for the last time, his head slumped on his chest, one of the associate wardens broke the silence in San Quentin’s execution witness room, announced firmly: ...

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 ...