Oversight led to automatic appeals in death row cases

In California, every death sentence is appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court -- and Rush Griffin is the reason.

Griffin, 19, was convicted of robbing and murdering a USC medical student more than 70 years ago.

He was hanged after a clerical error left the state Supreme Court unaware that an appeal had been filed and a letter sent to San Quentin went unread by the warden.

The Los Angeles Times covered the student's 1934 slaying but not Griffin's trial. His 1935 execution rated just one sentence in the newspaper.

On April 8, 1935 -- days after the execution -- a special messenger from the Los Angeles County Clerk's Office delivered the appeal and trial transcript to the state Supreme Court in San Francisco.

The next day, a Times front page headline blared: "Delay Costs Slayer Life; Appeal Papers Too Late."

"There is nothing this court can do now," Supreme Court Justice Emmett Seawell told the Sacramento Bee Republican newspaper. "This man is too late for us to consider his appeal."

Within days, the letter to San Quentin about the appeal turned up in an acting warden's office, where it had been overlooked and filed away.

The outcry about the errors prompted the Legislature to change the law to require automatic appeals to avoid similar miscommunication.

This account of Griffin's case is drawn from California newspapers and a California Court of Appeal opinion issued on behalf of Griffin's accomplice more than five months after the execution.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 12, 1934, Griffin confronted medical student Laurence L. Lyon near 8th and Linden streets. Griffin intended to rob Lyon and perhaps take his car, police believed. Griffin's roommate, Willie Smith, 24, stood lookout.

It's unclear what Lyon was doing there around 2:30 a.m. He had been at a party earlier on the city's Westside. Friends testified that they had dropped him off at his residence, what was then the Phi Chi fraternity house, at 1:20 a.m., near the USC campus -- about two miles from the crime scene.

The friends saw Lyon's car in front of the fraternity. Police believed that Lyon might have gone for a late-night drive when he became a robbery victim.

How Griffin lured Lyon out of the car -- if he did -- is a mystery too. Perhaps Lyon had pulled over on his own.

Several witnesses told police that they were awakened by two men arguing on the street below their apartment building. Two residents rose from their beds, looked out their windows and saw a black man beat, shoot and rob a white man.