Status as condemned prisoners

The condemned status of Perry Smith and Dick transformed the verdict in the Clutter case into a long interval of confinement, appeals, and waiting at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Their sentences were repeatedly postponed through legal challenges, but the reprieves did not end the state’s authority to execute them: after nearly two thousand days on Death Row, both men were hanged in April 1965.

From Verdict to Death Sentence

At the trial’s final session, Judge Tate instructed the jury before the attorneys delivered their closing arguments. The prosecution urged the maximum penalty, arguing that both defendants were equally guilty regardless of which had fired the shotgun. The defense, by contrast, appealed to Christian mercy and argued against capital punishment. After forty minutes of deliberation, the jury returned. Judge Tate read the verdicts while the prisoners stood handcuffed to guards: Dick was convicted of first-degree murder on the first count, and the remaining counts brought three further convictions for him and four for Perry. Each conviction carried the sentence of death.

The reading made the sentence a repeated judicial pronouncement rather than a single abstract decision. Each time Judge Tate stated that the punishment was death, the courtroom heard the same consequence attached to another count. The men remained impassive during the reading. As they were led away, Perry joked to Dick about the jurors’ courage, and both laughed. The moment did not alter their legal position: they had been found guilty and were now condemned prisoners.

Death Row at Lansing

The Kansas State Penitentiary stood in Lansing, in Leavenworth County, Kansas, among a concentration of state, federal, and military prisons. Its Death Row occupied the upper story of a small Segregation and Isolation Building, physically separated from the ordinary prison population. Cells were identical, seven by ten feet, and contained only a cot, toilet, basin, and light that remained on day and night. Narrow, barred windows covered by wire mesh looked onto a dirt lot, a section of prison wall, and a limited patch of sky.

The execution chamber was in a storage room adjoining the Death Row area. Prisoners used the euphemism The Corner for the place where an inmate was taken to be hanged. In April 1960, 190 people in United States prisons were awaiting civil execution; five, including the two men convicted in the Clutter case, were held at Lansing. The book sets their confinement within an institution where condemned men could be pointed out to visitors along the iron walkway, their impending deaths made part of the prison’s ordinary geography.

Six weeks after the verdict, the court’s sentence scheduled Perry and Dick to be taken to the execution chamber just after midnight on May 13, 1960. That date marked a concrete deadline, but it would not be the final one. Their condemned status persisted through years in which each new date could be displaced by another proceeding.

Appeals and Reprieves

In a report to the Kansas Supreme Court, Walter G. Thiele found that the petitioners had received a constitutionally fair trial. The court denied the request to overturn the verdicts and set October 25, 1962, as a new execution date. A federal judge then granted a reprieve to Perry and Dick, allowing them to evade that date. Lowell Lee Andrews, whose case had also been through extensive appeals, was not similarly spared and was scheduled to die the following month.

After Russell Shultz resigned, Kansas City lawyers Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham took over the defense without compensation. They argued that counsel had not been appointed until after the defendants confessed, that their representation at trial was inadequate, that evidence had been seized without a warrant, and that prejudicial publicity should have prompted a change of venue. Their filings delayed three more execution dates: October 25, 1962, August 8, 1963, and February 18, 1965. They brought the case to the United States Supreme Court three times, but the Court declined to grant certiorari on each occasion, leaving the convictions and sentences in place.

In March 1965, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered that the executions take place between midnight and 2:00 a.m. on April 14. A clemency appeal went to the newly elected governor, William Avery, who refused to intervene. The sequence of appeals and reprieves prolonged the condemned status without reversing its central fact: the death sentences remained operative, and the state ultimately fixed another date to carry them out.

Execution and the End of the Status

On the morning of April 14, Alvin Dewey read a newspaper report stating that Dick and Perry had died at the state prison. He had attended the execution as one of roughly twenty witnesses. Perry recognized Dewey when he entered the chamber, but became sober when asked whether he had anything to say. He referred to his opposition to capital punishment, acknowledged that an apology could not undo his actions, and apologized. Before the proceedings continued, he handed his chewing gum to the chaplain.

Dick died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Perry died at 1:19. Their executions ended the legal status that had begun with the jury’s verdict, but the narrative places the final act within the same institutional sequence that shaped their last years: sentence, confinement, repeated postponement, and renewed execution orders. Perry’s final words also set his remorse beside his rejection of capital punishment, while Dewey’s presence connected the execution to the investigation that had brought the men to trial. The condemned status was therefore not merely a label attached to the verdict. It defined the remainder of both men’s lives, governed their place in the prison, and persisted until the scheduled punishment was carried out.