California Revives The Death Penalty

THE LAST TIME A PRISONER DIED IN SAN QUENTIN’S gas chamber, Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. But Governor Pete Wilson’s rejection of an appeal for clemency by Robert Alton Harris may end the long hiatus. Harris, 39, was convicted in 1979 of shooting two San Diego teenagers to death. Prosecutors told the jury that Harris taunted the victims before they died, laughed at them after he pulled the trigger, then calmly ate the hamburgers they had bought for lunch. Said Wilson: “The decision of the jury was correct.”

Harris’ execution was scheduled for this week but may be delayed by a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge. Assuming that California clears away this last obstacle, the execution would be the state’s first in 25 years. It would also end Harris’ 13-year odyssey through state and federal courts. His case broke no new legal ground: he was an adult at the time of the crime, and race was not a factor. Neither was his mental condition — until January. His attorney, Howard Friedman, told Wilson in the final clemency appeal that newly discovered evidence showed that Harris had suffered “organic brain damage” due to child abuse and fetal alcohol syndrome. If the trial jury had known that, Friedman argued, it might have given him life imprisonment without parole. But while Wilson conceded that Harris’ childhood had been “a living nightmare,” he said it “does not alter his responsibility for his acts.”

In California the death penalty is supported by 4 out of 5 citizens, and one of them is Wilson, who was mayor of San Diego at the time of the Harris murders as well as an outspoken supporter of limits on appeals. Since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, only five non-Southern states (Illinois, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Indiana) have executed prisoners. Many opponents are now worried that California could open the way to more. But few legal experts expect a surge of executions because of the arduous appeals process that is automatically launched in every capital case. Even in California, experts say, most of the appeals by the 328 other inmates on death row have a long way to go, and Harris will probably be the only one put to death this year.

The biggest change is likely to be one of perception. “I don’t think it will open up the legal floodgates, but it may open emotional and political ones,” said Sacramento attorney Quin Denvir, who currently represents three inmates on death row. “In the past, jurors thought that if they sentenced someone to death, they’d never really get it. Now everyone in the system will see that the death penalty means the state will actually gas a person. Before it was more theoretical than real. Now the theory ends and reality begins.”