Delays of Execution Frustrate Victims’ Kin

Exasperated with a court system that has refused to pronounce Robert Alton Harris’ case finally over, the families of the two boys he killed said Tuesday that it was too much to hope that Harris actually will be executed any time soon.

Said Steve Baker, a San Diego police detective and father of victim Michael Baker: “There have been so many appeals and the thing has dragged on for so long, I’ve told reporters before that I won’t get excited until I get my plane ticket up to Frisco” to witness the execution at San Quentin.

Still, the families welcomed Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision removing one of the last legal roadblocks to Harris’ execution.

Harris was arrested July 5, 1978, by Steve Baker, then a patrol officer, who did not know that earlier in the day Harris had killed his son and Michael’s friend, John Mayeski.

The 16-year-old boys had been eating hamburgers in the parking lot of a restaurant in San Diego’s Mira Mesa neighborhood when Harris kidnaped them at gunpoint in a scheme to steal their car and use it in a bank robbery. He ordered them to drive to a canyon near Miramar Reservoir, where he killed them, then ate their lunch.

The California Supreme Court upheld Harris’ death sentence 10 years ago. The U.S. Supreme Court refused Tuesday to hear the latest of Harris’ appeals of that sentence, the fourth time the high court has turned down an appeal in the case.

Relatives of the victims scoffed at the arguments in Harris’ last remaining appeal, pending before the California Supreme Court, in which he argues that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to kill him because he had changed for the better in prison.

“You want a rebuttal to that? It was cruel and unusual and unnecessary punishment to take another person’s life, two persons’ lives,” said John Mayeski’s uncle, William Stalder, a retired gardener for the San Diego city schools.

“Why should (Harris) have life and another person not? The (Bible) says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Stalder said.

John’s mother, Kathryn Mayeski Sanders, 68, has remarried and moved to rural northern San Diego County. She said she was “disgusted with the system, for the simple reason that it’s taken so long.

“I can understand that sometimes the wrong person can be accused, but when a man admits it six times and they know he did it, I don’t know what the holdup is,” Sanders said.

Steve Baker, 47, said he wishes Harris’ appeals had been “taken care of in a year’s time.”

“The bottom line for myself, and I think for most of the public and police officers, is you do a crime, you do the time,” Baker said. “Enough’s enough. This is ridiculous. Let’s get this thing done.”

Baker said he has been “guaranteed” an opportunity to be one of the official witnesses at Harris’ execution, should it occur.

Stalder said he’d “like to go up and watch it. I’ve put in my bid for it. Hell, I’d pull the switch.”

But Kathryn Sanders said she was not interested.

“If I was a man, I’d go,” she said. “But I think I’ve gone through enough.”