In May 2001, Ruben Patterson, a professional basketball player for the Seattle Supersonics, was convicted of attempted rape after he forced his children's nanny to perform a sex act on him. Patterson's punishment for this offense was a suspended sentence consisting of 15 days of house arrest—presumably without a nanny to assist him with parental duties, as well as a five-game suspension by the National Basketball Association.
n June 1948, a 27-year-old drifter and petty criminal named Caryl Chessman was sentenced in California on two separate counts of what was essentially the same crime to which Ruben Patterson pled guilty. Caryl Chessman's punishment: two death sentences.
In the twelve intervening years between his sentencing and execution, Chessman lived and tirelessly labored in Cell 2455 on Death Row in San Quentin Prison, shaping what has to be one of the most remarkable bodies of work in American legal history: three wide-selling memoirs—Cell 2455 Death Row (1954), Trial by Ordeal (1955), The Face of Justice (1957)—and one novel—The Kid Was A Killer (1960), numerous articles and an unrivaled expertise in American law.
"With extraordinary energy, Chessman made, on the very edge of extinction, one of those startling efforts of personal rehabilitation, salvation of the self," wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in a poignant essay that ran in Partisan Review at the time of Chessman's trip to the gas chamber. "It was this energy that brought him out of darkness to the notice of the Pope, Albert Schweitzer, Mauriac, Dean Pike, Marlon Brando, Steve Allen, and rioting students in Lisbon (Lisbon!)."
source: http://www.gadflyonline.com/10-29-01/ftr-caryl-chessman.html
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