This is a story of two men who were condemned by the state of California.
Both were war heroes. Both had a family history of insanity. Both turned to crime after leaving military service — burglaries, robberies, and finally murder.
Both were treated in state prison institutions for mental illness attributed to their family background and war experiences.
Both argued that their illness compelled them to rob, steal and kill and asked the governor to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment.
Erwin Walker was one of the condemned men. As a lieutenant in charge of a radar unit during World War II, he was among those who swarmed ashore to recapture the tactically vital island of Leyte in the Philippines despite fierce Japanese resistance.
Walker began showing signs of a mental breakdown after his best friend and other soldiers under his command were bayoneted to death in a surprise attack. He was sent home, convinced that he had caused the death by not adequately preparing his men for the possibility of attack.
Walker had no criminal record. But after returning from overseas, he stole six submachine guns and a dozen pistols from an Army warehouse in Los Angeles and set out on a spree of more than two dozen holdups and burglaries.
Walker said he was raising money for construction of a “death ray machine” that would make another war impossible.
Twice Walker shot his way out of police traps, in one instance critically wounding two detectives with a blast of machine gun fire. Two months later, he killed Highway Patrolman Loren Roosevelt by firing six .45 caliber bullets into him.
Walker eventually was captured by three detectives who burst into his apartment, shot him twice, broke the butt of a pistol over his head and forced him to confess as he lay near death.
Despite his war experiences and strong evidence of family insanity, Walker was declared sane by a Marin County jury and sentenced to die in 1947.
The other condemned man was Vietnam War veteran Manuel Babbitt. He won a Purple Heart for wounds he received in the bloody 77-day siege of Khe Sanh in 1968. More than 900 American soldiers were killed in that battle, more than 1500 wounded.
Babbitt, who had suffered from mental illness since childhood, returned from the war afflicted with the then barely recognized post-traumatic stress disorder that has troubled many who fought in Vietnam. During the next 12 years, he committed more than two dozen burglaries and armed robberies.
That landed Babbitt in a state mental institution, where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. A few years after he was released — uncured — Babbitt beat to death 78-year-old Leah Schendel while robbing her Sacramento apartment.
Babbitt said he couldn’t even remember the crime. His lawyer, charged by some of his associates with drinking heavily during Babbitt’s trial and being racially prejudiced against Babbitt, a black man, put up an exceptionally feeble defense before an all-white jury. He introduced almost no evidence of the traumatic effects of the Vietnam War and Babbitt’s history of mental illness.
Babbitt’s appeals from the jury’s death sentence were handled by others. They argued, with the support of expert psychiatric testimony, that he was suffering from a combat-induced flashback when he murdered Leah Schendel.
But not even compelling testimony from other Vietnam veterans describing the severity of their own postwar traumatic stress could sway the appellate courts.
Manuel Babbitt’s execution date was set — May 4, 1999. Only Gov. Gray Davis stood between him and death.
Ultimately, the only hope for Erwin Walker was also a governor — in his case, Gov. Pat Brown. But it took 12 years to come to that.
Just 36 hours before his originally scheduled execution in 1947, a prison guard found Walker unconscious in his cell, a manila envelope over his head, a radio headphone cord tight around his neck. A half-dozen psychiatrists were summoned. They found that Walker had been driven crazy by fear of his impending death and no longer knew “the difference between right and wrong.” Thus he could not legally be put to death.
Walker’s execution was postponed indefinitely while he underwent treatment at Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage and other facilities for the criminally insane that was designed to make him fit for the gas chamber. He was finally declared sane in 1959 and moves made to return him to Death Row.
That’s when Gov. Brown stepped in. He commuted Walker’s sentence to life imprisonment on grounds that he would revert to insanity if he faced execution again.
Walker was freed in 1971 after a new trial before a judge who found that his confession in 1946 had been “clearly involuntary.” Walker, who had studied and worked in a chemical lab at a state prison facility, changed his name, married and went to work as a chemist somewhere in Southern California. He was never again heard from publicly.
Manuel Babbitt, however, died as scheduled — despite his mental illness, despite his clearly unfair trial, despite petitions signed by several thousand Vietnam veterans pleading for clemency and pleas from two jurors who said they would not have voted for his execution had they been told the full extent of his mental problems.
Pat Brown would have understood. He was a governor with compassion, well aware that killing someone in the name of the state does not deter crime, but is simply an unjust act of vengeance.
Brown exercised his power of clemency as often as he could, given the constraints of the law. He commuted the sentences of 22 of the 62 people who were scheduled for execution during his two terms in office, although it hurt him politically, as he knew it would.
Gray Davis is a different governor in a different time. He surely knows the futility of the death penalty — but also obviously knows that playing to the primitive demands for retribution by that vast majority of Californians who support capital punishment can win him votes.
Babbitt was the second condemned prisoner Davis has let die during his brief tenure in office. He won’t be the last. Davis has shown little of the compassion that motivated Pat Brown. His guide is political expediency that has prompted him to proclaim that anyone sentenced to death, whatever the circumstances, must be killed by the state.
People seeking clemency for the condemned, said Davis, “must not have been listening when I was campaigning. If you take someone’s life, forget it.”
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