State Urges High Court to Deny New Harris Appeal : Death Penalty: In remarkably blunt language, prosecutors told the justices that the killer’s April 3 execution date should stand.

Robert Alton Harris should die as scheduled April 3 in the gas chamber at San Quentin, the state’s lawyers said Friday, and they urged the California Supreme Court to reject Harris’ latest appeal as nothing more than a collection of old and recycled claims.

In a legal brief filled with remarkably blunt language, the state attorney general’s office said that Harris, convicted of the 1978 murders of two teen-age San Diego boys, had long ago failed to offer anything new that would suggest he was not fairly tried and sentenced.

“Enough is enough,” Louis R. Hanoian, a deputy attorney general from San Diego, said in the brief. “It is time to execute the sentence long ago imposed and repeatedly upheld.”

The April 3 date, set earlier this week by a San Diego Superior Court judge, actually is Harris’ fourth scheduled execution date, but his first in eight years. Harris, whose case has progressed further through the court system than any of the more than 270 other prisoners on Death Row, is in line to become the first person executed in California in 23 years.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court flatly rejected a broad challenge to Harris’ death sentence, the fourth time it has rejected a Harris appeal. The California Supreme Court upheld Harris’ death sentence in 1981.

Shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court rejection, Harris’ San Diego lawyers, Charles M. Sevilla and Michael McCabe, filed a new appeal with the California Supreme Court, contending in part that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to kill Harris because he had changed for the better in prison.

Responding Friday to that new appeal, the attorney general’s office rejected that claim as “a final act of desperation” and one the procedural rules do not allow.

Even if Harris has changed, Hanoian said, the rules allow the California Supreme Court on this appeal to make certain only that Harris received a fair trial. If Harris wanted to describe how he had become a “caring human being,” the proper way to do that was to tell it to Gov. George Deukmejian and ask him to commute the sentence to life in prison, Hanoian said.

It is extremely unlikely that Deukmejian would seriously consider such a request, legal experts have said.

Hanoian was equally scornful of Harris’ 10 other claims, including one that it would be cruel to kill Harris after making him endure Death Row for 11 years. Since Harris orchestrated the delay by repeatedly asking state and federal courts for mercy, that claim was “so preposterous as to leave one breathless,” Hanoian said.

Harris, 37, was arrested July 5, 1978, by Steve Baker, a San Diego police officer who did not know at the time that Harris’ two 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 a 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 finished their half-eaten hamburgers.

Even if the state Supreme Court agrees to hear the new appeal, which it has not yet indicated it will do, Harris must still persuade the court to put off the execution now that the date has been set. Defense attorneys said this week that they would ask the court “fairly soon” to delay the date.