It was a time when the San Quentin gas chamber was busy executing convicted felons – sometimes two at a time.
The Rev. Byron E. Eshelman was the spiritual adviser to many of those who breathed their last in the famous prison’s gas chamber beside San Francisco Bay.
After witnessing numerous executions, Eshelman was an outspoken critic of capital punishment. He explains his reasons in a book he wrote, “Death Row Chaplain,” published by Prentice-Hall, Inc. in 1962. (A friend found an autographed copy in a used bookstore and gave it to the writer of this article for Christmas.)
“I have come to believe that the death penalty is fundamentally a symptom of bewilderment and confusion in society,” wrote Eshelman, the San Quentin Protestant chaplain from 1951-71. He had formerly been chaplain at Alcatraz federal prison.
“A culture that resorts to the death penalty as a method of coping with its troubled is evidencing the same desperation, panic and outrage as the emotionally twisted individual who, in his instability, kills a fellow human being,” he added.
“In the 12 years that Lewis E. Lawes was warden at Sing Sing, from 1920 through 1931, he escorted 150 men and one woman to the death chamber,” Eshelman wrote. “His conclusions were essentially the same as I have reached during more than a decade at San Quentin.
“He (Lawes) put it this way: ‘Not only does capital punishment fail in its justification, but no punishment could be invented with so many inherent defects. It is unequal punishment in the way it is applied to the rich and to the poor.’”
One of Eshelman’s key points is that executions wipe out the chance for “rehabilitation” of the condemned prisoner. He cites a number of condemned men he came to know who, he felt, had been rehabilitated while waiting to die.
He also maintained some executed men were clearly insane, but not within the legal definition of insanity.
One case was Leanderess Riley. When Riley’s time to die arrived on Feb. 20, 1953, Eshelman writes, “A guard unlocked his cell. He began a long, shrieking cry. It was a bone chilling wordless cry… The guards needed all their strength to hold him while the doctor taped the end of the stethoscope in place… Leanderess had to be carried to the gas chamber, fighting, writhing all the way.”
After he was strapped into the death chair in the gas chamber, Leanderess managed to free his hands, and had to be strapped in again, tighter this time. Again struggling to free himself, the gas finally did its job and Leanderess breathed his last.
Reporting his view of the death penalty, Eshelman wrote: “We do not execute truly mature, responsible people who have developed genuine capacities for making decisions and exercising self-control. We execute fixated juveniles who in many areas of their personalities cannot be held responsible for their actions… Only when we develop the sensitivity to appreciate the compulsive nature of immaturity will we have sufficient insight to abandon the primitive rite of capital punishment.”
After he retired from San Quentin, Eshelman became a marriage counselor and public speaker. He died in 1989.
Eshelman’s son, Carlton, and daughter, Bonnie, who lived many years at Alcatraz and San Quentin with their dad, still live in Northern California. He is a carpenter who worked on the new San Quentin medical building.