Fred Caploe ’53 is a man with strong beliefs in social justice and peace. As an attorney for a condemned death row inmate, a former civil rights lawyer, and a veteran of both the Navy and the Peace Corps, Caploe has spent nearly five decades working for what he believes in.

“I grew up under the Eleanor Roosevelt kind of philosophy,” Caploe says. “If you’ve got more than the other guy, then you share.”

That philosophy has helped keep Keith E. Adcox out of the gas chamber for 20 years.

In 1983, Adcox was sentenced to death for the murder of a California fisherman.

That same year, California Governor George Deukmejian abolished a state program that provided legal services to convicted criminals—a change made over the objections of the state bar.

According to Caploe, the state public defender’s office handled almost all capital cases, but those on death row were not getting representation in the appeals process.

The result was “very predictable,” Caploe says. “There was a big need for lawyers to take on these capital cases.”

A group of lawyers set up a program to allow private attorneys to represent capital defendants who would otherwise be unrepresented, and Caploe signed on.

From 1984 until the present, Caploe has defended Adcox in post-conviction habeas corpus proceedings, successfully putting off the execution.

He describes this ongoing work as “helping to prevent misguided public officials and their like-minded constituents from perpetrating an involuntary, state-sponsored death.”

In the Navy

As a student, Caploe was more interested in his studies than activism, he remembers. It was during his time in the Navy, following graduation, that he developed his liberal views about the world.

A native of Dorchester, Mass., Caploe attended Boston Latin High School and Brookline High School before arriving at Harvard, where he concentrated in fine arts and minored in social relations.

But after nearly two decades in Massachusetts, Caploe says he was eager to get out and see the world. The Navy was a great way to travel around the globe on the government’s dollar, Caploe says, so after graduation he joined up and served from April 1953 to August 1956.

Caploe enjoyed meeting Navy men from many walks of life and seeing different areas of the world, but he says that three and a half years in a military institution was “not really my cup of tea.”