Capital Punishment And Warden Duffy

88 Men and 2 Women
by Clinton T. Duffy and Al Hirshberg
Doubleday, 1962.

88 Men and 2 Women is a journalistic chronicle of the execution chambers of the sovereign state of California. Its author—a jailer who has won wide respect and even love—tells of numerous instances of hanging and gassing at San Quentin in the last several decades. The extent to which Warden Duffy was betrayed by his collaborator into merely gossiping about judicial killing is uncertain; the mindlessness of the book must, however, be Duffy’s fault. Since he chose—or was persuaded—to avoid writing the brutally honest history of legal slaying which he, better than any other living Ameri...