The Ninth Date

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: ''That's all, gentlemen."

The 60 witnesses, two-thirds of them newsmen, filed out to report that Caryl Chessman, sentenced to die twelve years ago for kidnaping for robbery with bodily harm, had kept his ninth appointment in San Quentin's gas chamber.

In the U.S., where Chessman's long battle of appeals was generally viewed as an unprecedented testing of the patience of justice, there was little emotional reaction. Abroad, he was still the symbol of the crusade against capital punishment. In Lisbon, demonstrators hurled rocks, broke windows in the U.S. embassy. Elsewhere in the city, white-collar workers donned black ties of protest. In Montevideo, Uruguay, a crowd of 100 students gathered outside the U.S. embassy shouting "Murderers," "Assassins," and shaking fists at embassy aides who looked out windows. In Pretoria, South Africa, university students marched to the U.S. embassy, raised a banner reading "American Justice Is Corrupt" (executions for capital crimes in South Africa totaled 70 in 1958). Britain's Manchester Guardian termed the execution an outrage "because capital punishment itself is an outrage, not because of the special circumstances of the Chessman case."

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