Killer Harris Is Ordered to Die in Gas Chamber April 3

Robert Alton Harris, convicted of the 1978 murders of two teen-age San Diego boys, was ordered Monday to die April 3 in the gas chamber at San Quentin, setting the stage for California’s first execution in 23 years.

San Diego County Superior Court Judge Jesus Rodriguez announced the date at a four-minute hearing Monday, a procedural formality that had been expected since last month’s rejection by the U.S. Supreme Court of a broad challenge to Harris’ death sentence.

The April 3 date actually is Harris’ fourth scheduled execution date but his first in eight years, San Diego prosecutors said. This time around, after more than 10 years of appeals, even Harris’ lawyers conceded that the end may be near. “We’re really up against the gun now,” attorney Charles M. Sevilla said.

Sevilla said he and Charles M. McCabe, Harris’ other lawyer, would file a request “fairly soon” with the California Supreme Court to put off the execution while it considers a new appeal the attorneys filed Jan. 5.

In that appeal, Harris contends that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to kill Harris because he has changed for the better in prison. Even if the state Supreme Court agrees to hear the new appeal, Harris still must persuade the panel to put off the execution now that a date has been set.

“We hope the court is not losing patience with us,” McCabe said. “. . . We are not simply trying to delay the inevitable. There are strong constitutional issues that need to be resolved.”

Prosecutors contend that Harris, whose appeals have been turned down four times by the U.S. Supreme Court and whose death sentence was affirmed in 1981 by the California Supreme Court, long ago exhausted any conceivable legal grounds for appeal.

But Louis R. Hanoian, a deputy attorney general, said it is possible Harris’ lawyers could orchestrate further delay. If the state Supreme Court rejects Harris’ new appeal, defense lawyers are virtually certain to turn to the federal courts for mercy, Hanoian said.

Sevilla said Monday that he recognized “a lot rides on this case.” If Harris actually is put to death, Sevilla said, an “emotional barrier will be broken which will psychologically open the doors for many more (executions) to come.”

Harris, 37, said in an interview last week with a San Diego radio station that his “spirits are up,” but that he tries not to think about San Quentin’s gas chamber. Still, he said, “If it does come to me dying, then I’ll just have to die.”

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 own 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.