Alcatraz (52 page)

The trial ended up with the prosecution arguing that as conspirators, Shockley, Thompson, and Carnes were as guilty of killing Officer Miller as the man who actually pulled the trigger of the gun. U.S. Attorney Hennessy, however, told the jury that Carnes was “one of the better witnesses for the government. . . . I believe he probably assisted in saving the life of guard Lageson” (although he also disputed the claims that Carnes had jostled Hubbard to spoil his aim at Miller and that Carnes was in the kitchen at the time shots were fired into the cell).
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Judge Goodman instructed the jury that matters of discipline at Alcatraz, how the break was handled, or other matters related to the operation of the prison, were not their concerns.

On December 22, the jury returned verdicts of guilty for all three defendants but recommended life imprisonment for Carnes rather than the death penalty. Judge Goodman then imposed these sentences. As he was being escorted from the courtroom, Miran Thompson shouted at reporters, “It’s just as well! I’d rather have it that way [the gas chamber] than go back to the Rock.” In his cell in the county jail on Christmas, Thompson told the U.S. marshal that he wanted to donate his eyes to a blind war veteran.
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Three days later, Thompson and Shockley were transported to San Quentin’s death row.

Samuel Shockley’s mental health continued to be an issue as he awaited execution. A medical review by the acting chief medical officer at San Quentin concluded that while Shockley had a “borderline defective, inadequate, psychoneurotic, psychopathic, inferior personality,” he knew “fairly well the difference between right and wrong, what he did, and what he is to be punished for,” and therefore should “be executed, despite his mental instability.”
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Several months later, however, two psychiatrists and the prison doctor examined Shockley again, concluding: “He, in our opinion, does not know the nature and character of his offense, nor does he appreciate fully the sentence that is imposed on him. We feel that he is mentally unstable, and there is a large question in our minds, whether he is legally sane.”
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The possibility that an insanity diagnosis might allow Shockley to escape the gas chamber troubled federal authorities. U.S. Attorney Frank Hennessy wrote to the attorney general questioning the “right” of San Quentin officials to conduct examinations into the mental health of Shockley or Thompson, who were federal prisoners. If any further psychiatric examinations were undertaken, argued Hennessy, they should be conducted by persons selected by the attorney general.
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In June Dr. George Johnson from the Stanford University Medical School, and Dr. Justin Fuller, federal medical officer, examined Shockley and concluded that he was attempting to simulate insanity. In July three San Quentin psychiatrists concluded that Shockley understood the nature of the proceedings against him, knew that an execution day had been scheduled, and therefore was sane.
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In the months that followed, Shockley’s and Thompson’s legal advisors proposed that their clients receive executive clemency, and the pardon attorney asked James Bennett to comment on their applications. Bennett argued against the assertion that neither man was in on the planning, citing Thompson’s request for a “lay in” on the day of the escape, and noting (inaccurately) that Shockley, having been involved in an earlier escape attempt with Cretzer, was one of the first men released by Cretzer in D block. Bennett also dismissed Thompson’s claim that conditions at Alcatraz drove him to take desperate action, pointing out that he had been on the Rock for less than seven months.

The matter of the death penalty did, however, give James Bennett cause for soulful reflection:

I have long had grave doubts about the wisdom of capital punishment in any case. I do not think I could qualify to sit on a jury where the death penalty might be imposed. If, however, there are cases where extreme penalty is justified, it seems to me here is one. It is the cruel and wanton killing of Guard Miller and the ruthless shooting of a group of officers who were defenseless hostages that is involved here. This was no accidental shooting or killing under emotional stress. It is the sort of crime almost impossible to understand. How could these or any other men, for that matter, commit such atrocious acts and have so little regard for human life? Unless one feels there is no instance where the supreme penalty should be
exacted, there is little that even the most understanding can say for these two men. There is finally to consider whether commuting such sentences to life imprisonment would hamper the administration of our penal institutions. Setting aside my own feelings about the death penalty, and measuring such action only in the way I know our Wardens and officers feel about this case, I can say unhesitatingly that they would consider it a serious setback to the discipline and well-being of our own service if these men were to suffer in effect no penalty. Since both of them now have life sentences, anything less than the death penalty would be tantamount to excusing them entirely. The increasing number of desperate offenders, kidnappers, and killers who are being sent to our institutions greatly complicate our problems. For men who have little to lose anyway to get the impression they can attack and murder prison officers with impunity would all but destroy the morale of our service and set back tremendously our efforts to develop a rehabilitative program for those prisoners who are cooperative and anxious to regain their self-respect and become useful, law-abiding citizens.
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Miran Thompson’s sentence was appealed to the Circuit Court of Appeals by attorney Melvin Belli, who had been hired by Thompson’s family, but the conviction was upheld. At 10:00
A.M
. on December 3, 1948, Samuel Shockley and Miran Thompson were escorted to the gas chamber. Alcatraz officers, including hostage Robert Baker, Lieutenant Frank Johnson, Officer Joseph Steere, and Captain Weinhold’s replacement, Ralph Tahash, attended at the invitation of the U.S. marshal; Tahash submitted an account of the execution to James Johnston’s successor, Edwin Swope:

Our wait for the proceedings to get under way was very brief. Promptly at 10:00
A.M
. Shockley was led in by three guards. The officers immediately began adjusting the 10 straps, one across the chest, one across the stomach, two on each arm and two on each leg. Shockley’s face was expressionless and uninterested until one of the officers began adjusting the strap across his chest. Shockley then turned his head and a terribly vicious expression came over his face and he spat directly in the face of the officer. His face again became expressionless and he dropped his head and appeared to be staring into his lap.

Thompson was then led in. He walked in very erect and smiled when they instructed him to sit down. He sat very quietly while they strapped him in with a half smile on his face. When the last strap was attached and the officers were leaving the chamber, he turned his face toward Shockley, smiled and spoke. It appeared he was bidding Shockley good-bye, but Shockley did not look up neither did he reply.

The sound of a lever being thrown, the falling of the pellets in a container of water and their gurgling as they contacted the water was quite audible. Thompson began to hold his breath at the first sound as if wanting to prolong his life as he had to take a breath.

The fumes did not hit Shockley as quickly as they did Thompson, but when they did, his reactions were the same as Thompson’s, head and eyes rolling back. His head remained in a half back and half side position for about a minute and then fell forward. After his head fell forward it remained in that position with saliva running from the corners of his mouth—still in seeming defiance even in death. We left the chamber at 10:07.
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Robert Baker found the trip to San Quentin satisfying:

When we got [to the witness area], they lined us up around the circle and I got way over at one end so I could see their faces. You couldn’t hear anything except that the guards came in and went through the motions, but you couldn’t read their lips or anything. The only thing interesting was to me that they did tell ’em take a deep breath and not to hold their breath. We could hear that over a loudspeaker and then one guy did as he was told and he just went to sleep, just like that. . . . I made a statement right there, I said, “Well, it evens things out . . . two of us were killed and five of them.”

Following the executions, the story circulated among the Alcatraz staff that one of the witnesses had given the middle finger salute to the men seated next to each other in the gas chamber. The officers at Alcatraz might have been pleased that justice had been done regarding Coy, Cretzer, Hubbard, Shockley, and Thompson, but they were angry that Carnes had not gone to the gas chamber. As senior officer X put it,

[The officers] were very, very bitter. Carnes was one of the instigators. He was a no good little Son of a Bitch all the way through and he caused nothing but trouble. He would have been executed if the prosecuting attorney had kept his mouth shut but after summing up the evidence, he said if there is anyone of the three that deserves any leniency it’s this boy, he’s only nineteen years old. But he didn’t say this boy of nineteen years had killed two or three people already.

In many ways, the battle of Alcatraz marks the end of what this book has referred to as the gangster era. That era defined the purpose of the new federal prison at Alcatraz as a measure specifically intended to combat
sensational bank robbers and organized crime figures that were the focus of much publicity in the Depression era that ended with World War II. The celebrity figures of Capone, Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde faded from the front pages. As the data in this book show, locking up “public enemies” was the primary business of the prison only for a short period; other troublemaking prisoners in the federal system, particularly those with escape histories or extremely long sentences, constituted the bulk of the population transferred to Alcatraz. Moreover, the composition of the institutional population at Alcatraz (and U.S. prisons in general) was beginning to shift, adding larger numbers of black and other minority offenders to the prison census. Alcatraz would run another fifteen years but would take on a broader range of problems. By 1946 the entire country was moving into what would be a decade of great postwar social change on many levels. The prison world itself would move from the cliché of the “big house” penitentiary intent on control and deterrence to the concept of “correctional treatment,” best embodied in the newly organized California Department of Corrections with the indeterminate sentence and the as yet untested assumption that a variety of psychological and educational programs would lead to the rehabilitation of convicts.

The battle of Alcatraz was not only the most deadly, dramatic, and costly event that had ever occurred in the prison’s short history, it was also one of the most serious disturbances in American penal history. Until the deadly violence at Attica State Prison in New York twenty-five years later, no prison uprising so thoroughly captured the attention of the public, the media, and government officials. An event of such magnitude could not pass without serious consequences.

As the nation was caught up in analysis and disagreements about the prison, its prisoners, and the federal government’s reason for its establishment, Alcatraz administrators made several changes to improve security. Immediately after the revolt was put down, the silent system was reimposed. Inmates accepted it for a few days, understanding the level of anger the staff felt over the deaths and injuries sustained by their fellow officers. Heavy wire mesh screening was placed over the gun gallery bars, cross bars were applied to the gun gallery so that a bar spreader could not separate the bars, and heavy steel plates were installed over the entire west end gun cage from floor to ceiling in D block. Two officers were assigned to the west gun gallery, one on the cell house side and one on the D unit side, and one man was placed in the east gun gallery (a practice that soon stopped). Portholes to allow gunfire from outside were
punched through the walls of the cell house at various places. The barred enclosure that covered the entrance and stairway from the cell house to the basement was made solid with concrete. The hole in the roof through which satchel grenades had been lowered to blow the escapees out of C block was repaired, the interior of the cell house was painted, windows were replaced, and the landscaping improved. The gates and doors between the cell house and the administrative area were reinforced. A window was placed in the door in the gun gallery connected to D block so that officers could look through to the other side. The improved security in the physical plant did little to alleviate the custodial staff’s anxiety, however, because they remembered the confusion that characterized the response of the warden and other administrators and they worried that one of them might become a hostage in the next escape attempt.

In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the nation, the May 1946 drama of armed conflict in the nation’s most visible penitentiary revived the issues surrounding Alcatraz that were somewhat dormant during the war. Bureau of Prisons headquarters had to contend once again not just with questions about the value of a special regime for habitual and incorrigible prisoners, but also with harsh criticism of the prison’s management. As had been the case before, the American Devil’s Island image that had grown up around Alcatraz colored the debates and helped shape public opinion. And it did not help that reporting of the battle itself had been so inaccurate.

In the nation’s newspapers, the bulk of editorial opinion seemed to come down on the side of condemning Alcatraz, its administrators, or some aspect of the American criminal justice system for which the prison could stand as a symbol. As might be expected, many editorials expressed concern about security arrangements and flaws in the training and supervision of guards that allowed inmates to obtain guns inside the cell house. A
Newark News
editorial commented on the prison’s problems, “It must be an ironic reflection for the federal authorities that this lethal riot outdoes the wildest imagination of scenario writers in the most romantic concepts of the composers of radio scripts.”
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Another article, “The Barbarism of Alcatraz” in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, condemned “the queer, perverted sentimentality of jurors which makes them hesitate to condemn a man to death for the atrocious crimes, but does not prevent them from consigning a man to linger out his life in a living death, a slow, anguishing torture of interminable confinement in hopelessness and despair. [In the future, Alcatraz will be regarded] as a curious relic of medieval barbarity extended into modern times.” The writer concluded
however that, “two brave and innocent men who served as guards would not now be dead . . . if society had not been so ‘merciful.’”
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