The Last Mile?

Across the U.S., some 250 condemned men are languishing behind bars, waiting to be executed for their crimes. Almost all of them could join in the lament of Paul Orville Crump, an inmate of Cook County (Ill.) jail: "I don't want to die. I want to live." To the State of Illinois, Crump is Prisoner 143384, male Negro, age 32--a convicted murderer sentenced to die in the electric chair Aug. 3. Crump's fight for life has stirred the biggest and most surprising outburst of clemency pleas since the Caryl Chessman case two years ago--but for far different reasons.

Nearly the entire staff of Crump's prison is marshaled behind the mounting save-Crump crusade, including the warden, the guards, the doctors, nurses, social workers and psychiatrists. Illinois Governor Otto Kerner has been besieged by requests for clemency from the likes of Billy Graham, Father Charles Dismas Clark (the "hoodlum priest"), state representatives, the former warden of San Quentin prison, the former county sheriff, a host of lawyers, sociologists and teachers. Two Chicago dailies, the American and the News, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, have weighed in with strong editorial support for mercy. A Chicago TV station added dramatic impetus to the cause, airing a three-hour panel discussion direct from the jail--and featuring Crump himself. By unanimous agreement. 300 Chicago ministers sermoned their flocks on salvation for the convicted killer.

Seven Hours from Death. Why this great crusade? Paul Crump's road to crime is no different from that traveled by hundreds of other convicts. One of 13 children raised in the squalor of Chicago's Negro ghetto, Crump learned to fend for himself after his father deserted the family when he was six. He dropped out of high school after only one year, graduated rapidly from stealing bicycles to armed robbery, for which he was dumped into the Illinois state penitentiary for three years when just 16.

After his release, Crump bummed around for several years and went through several jobs. Then, at 23, he got into real trouble. On the morning of March 20, 1953, three hooded gunmen ambushed two payroll clerks and a guard in a corridor of Libby, McNeill & Libby's Chicago plant and robbed them of $20,318. As they fled, one of the bandits gunned down a guard. Within 48 hours, police had rounded up Crump and four other Negroes, including two getaway car drivers. One of the accused, Hudson Tillman, fingered Crump as the murderer, and Crump confessed. He retracted his confession at his trial, but was found guilty and sentenced to death. Tillman, because he turned state's evidence, was sentenced to 17 years in prison, is up for parole next year; the other three men got 199 years each. Over the nine years since then. Crump has steadfastly insisted on his innocence, maintaining that police used brutality to wring a false confession out of him. Because of involved legal technicalities, the fact that Tillman was a known dope addict, and Crump's charge of a forced confession, he has managed to stave off the executioner by carrying his appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, gaining 41 continuances and one retrial (he was convicted again) and evading 14 dates with the chair--one just seven hours away.

Barn Boss. Despite this, the unique aspect of Crump's case is that it does not rest on his guilt or innocence, but on what has happened to him while in jail. Unlike Chessman, who was arrogant and pathologically egotistical to the last, Crump appears to be totally reformed--so remarkably so, in fact, that his attorney, Donald P. Moore, this week is basing his appeal to the state parole board, which will recommend a course to the Governor, on an argument virtually without precedent in legal history: Crump's rehabilitation. Among the 60 persons who have given more than 200 pages of glowing testimony about Crump is Prison Guard Jack Fahey, whose life Crump saved by disarming an inmate during an escape attempt, and Warden Jack Johnson, a Crump admirer, who says that executing Crump "would be committing capital vengeance, not punishment."

It was not always so. When Crump first entered the antiquated, overcrowded county jail, he was described as "savage" and "animalistic," helped instigate a riot himself. But under the guiding hand of beefy, reform-minded Warden Johnson, 44, Crump gradually began to come round. He read voraciously, boned up on law, philosophy, sociology and the Bible (he is a convert to Catholicism). Today Paul Crump reigns as "barn boss" of a cell-block tier housing sick and problem convicts, works long hours administering to their needs. In his tiny cell, cluttered with books and manuscripts, he writes poetry, spices his correspondence with quotes from Nietzsche and William Blake. He has just completed his first novel, Burn, Killer, Burn, to be published, at his request, after his fate has been decided, is hopefully working on his second. "One ought to be ashamed to die," he says, "until he has contributed something in justification of his living."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.