Harris Describes Himself as ‘Caring Human Being’

Condemned killer Robert Alton Harris said he is prepared to be executed but should not be put to death because it would be senseless to kill someone who has changed in prison into a “very caring human being.”

Harris, 37, convicted of the 1978 murders of two teen-age San Diego boys, also said his “spirits are up,” even as he watches his appeals run out, but he tries not to think about San Quentin’s gas chamber.

“I don’t harp on it, I don’t really think about it,” he said. “I live a day at a time.”

In an interview with a San Diego radio station, Harris said the two killings are not “something I have relished over.”

“I’m very tore up about this,” Harris told reporters for radio station KFMB. “Not only did they die on that day, I did, too.”

Harris, whose case has progressed farther through the court system than any of the 272 other prisoners on California’s Death Row, spoke with the radio station on Wednesday, calling after the station asked him for an interview, news director Cliff Albert said.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a broad challenge to Harris’ death sentence, moving him a giant step closer to becoming the first person executed in California in 23 years.

A San Diego Superior Court judge is expected at a hearing Monday to set Harris’ execution date, sometime in March or April. Harris filed a new appeal last month with the California Supreme Court, arguing, in part, that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to kill him because he had changed for the better in prison.

Even if the state Supreme Court hears Harris’ new appeal, Harris must still find a judge who will agree to put off the execution once the date is set.

In a wide-ranging interview with the radio station, Harris held out hope for that new appeal. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has turned him down four times and the California Supreme Court upheld his death sentence in 1981, Harris said he and his San Diego lawyers, Charles M. Sevilla and Michael McCabe, remain optimistic.

“We’re hoping that there’s some judges that are still judges and that will look at this case and say this man does have this right, and we should look at this case a little closer,” Harris said.

Shouts, metal banging on metal and the other sounds of prison life could clearly be heard in the background during the interview. Harris said prison life is “just an everyday, same-thing existence.”

Inmates play table tennis and cards and lift weights, he said. His primary complaint, he said, is with prison food, which “I wouldn’t feed my dog on the street. The food is so degrading.”

Since he’s been on Death Row, Harris said he has been puzzled by the way newspapers, radio and television reporters have depicted him.

“All the years I’ve seen myself on TV and I’ve read articles and (they’ve) made me out to be such a monster,” he said.

He is no monster, he said. “I’m a very caring human being, that’s who I am.”

Because of the public’s perception of him, Harris said, there are “all these people out there that want me dead--they don’t even know me.”

“The people’s fear is so strong, and it’s not justice they’re seeking,” Harris said. “It’s vengeance.”

Harris was arrested July 5, 1978, by Steve Baker, a San Diego police officer who did not know at the time that Harris’ victims were Baker’s son, Michael, and Michael’s friend, John Mayeski.

The 16-year-old boys had been eating hamburgers in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in San Diego’s Mira Mesa neighborhood when Harris kidnaped them at gunpoint so he could 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. Later, he ate their hamburgers.

“You wish you could go back and do it all over again, and it would be different, and it wouldn’t be this way or that way, but you can’t,” Harris said. “You have to go with what you have now.”

When Harris called KFMB on Wednesday, he said he wanted $15,000 to talk, news director Albert said. “We said no, he talked anyway,” Albert said Friday.

To confirm that the voice at the other end of the phone really was Harris, Albert played the tape Thursday, the day after the interview, for lawyers Sevilla and McCabe, who said it was their client, Albert said.

On Thursday, the station also arranged for prison officials to get Harris to call KFMB, and he confirmed that it was he who called the day before, Albert said.

KFMB split the Harris interview into a three-part series that ran at various times Friday, Albert said.

The series concluded with Harris ruminating about the state of the “rat-eat-rat” world. “Seeing what’s happening in the world today shows me that, if there’s a God, there’s an SOB,” he said.

A case in point, he said, is the way the death penalty was imposed, far too arbitrarily.