Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America

9. Abolishing the Death Penalty

143 9 Abolishing the Death Penalty in september 1962 Edmund G.Brown and Richard M.Nixon were in the midst of a hard-fought gubernatorial campaign in California. Nixon hoped to revive his political fortunes following a narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, and Brown was fighting for a second term. Polls showed the two men locked in a tight race. Nixon struggled to gain traction via a number of issues. “He tried the old conservative broadsides—taxes too high, regulations too restrictive—but big government was not yet the enemy for Californians,” noted Brown’s biographer, Ethan Rarick. Nixon decided to bore in on the one issue he envisioned as Brown’s main weakness: capital punishment.¹ On September 19 Nixon appeared before a gathering of law enforcement officials in Los Angeles and announced his support for tougher death-penalty laws. Recidivist“dope peddlers”should be eligible for execution,he said:“To me,dope peddling is like kidnapping.Kidnapping has virtually been stopped by virtue of the death penalty—and my authority for that is J. Edgar Hoover. I have a basic disagreement with Brown. . . . We’ve heard too much about the rights of criminals and not enough about respecting the responsibility of the state to protect innocent people.”² 144 ABOLISHING THE DEATH PENALTY In his public response, Brown mocked Nixon.“Maybe he’d like to have the death penalty for every crime, like they did in old England . It didn’t do a bit of good,” he said. But, privately, Brown took his Republican rival’s words to heart. His long-stated opposition to capital punishment could, in fact, end his political career, he realized. California had its liberal tendencies, but the state was also home to the ultraconservative John Birch Society, which gained a following for its obsessive anti-Communism. As much as it pained him, Brown decided to neutralize the issue by allowing condemned inmates to die. In 1962 eleven people went to the gas chamber in California.³ They included one woman. Jurors in Santa Barbara County had condemned Elizabeth Duncan in 1959. Brown “felt a great repugnance about letting a woman die,” he later wrote. The first week of August 1962 he presided over a clemency hearing for Duncan, but announced that he saw no grounds for a sentence commutation. If he feared a reprise of the controversy surrounding Barbara Graham’s execution, he need not have worried. Duncan was no Graham. In her late fifties and matronly, journalists found her repulsive, due in part to the nature of her crime. Duncan was extraordinarily close to her son, Frank. Her possessiveness led Frank to keep his marriage secret. When Duncan discovered she had been duped, she decided to murder her pregnant daughter-in-law and hired two men to carry out the killing. In their effort to be cleverly ironic, reporters dubbed Duncan “Ma.” On August 8, 1962, she became the fourth woman executed in California and the last woman executed in the United States for nearly a quarter century. Newspapers, radio, and television newscasters covered the event but then moved on to other stories. Duncan was soon forgotten.4 In November 1962 Brown won a second term. With the election behind him, he initiated a renewed effort to end the death penalty. The campaign continued virtually unabated until 1972, when first ABOLISHING THE DEATH PENALTY 145 California and then the United States Supreme Court ended executions . By the time abolitionists prevailed, Brown had left office and begun practicing law in Southern California,and former actor Ronald Reagan was governor. Many Californians only dimly recalled Barbara Graham, I Want to Live! and the rancorous arguments over her guilt or innocence. However, Graham had played an important role in keeping the issue of capital punishment alive until abolitionists could begin to close in on a winning strategy. California’s renewed abolition effort began in early 1963, when Brown initiated yet another legislative effort to end capital punishment , this time via a four-year moratorium that would substitute mandatory life imprisonment for execution in most cases.The murder of a police officer,a second conviction for murder,committing murder during a robbery or rape, and killing while incarcerated remained crimes that could still net individuals the death penalty. Three hundred people packed the state capitol on April 9, 1963, to hear testimony on the proposed moratorium. California’s attorney general, Stanley...