Harris’ April 3 Execution Date Should Stand, Attorneys Insist

Robert Alton Harris should die as scheduled on April 3 in the gas chamber at San Quentin, the state’s lawyers said Friday, urging 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. If he goes to the gas chamber, Harris would become the first person executed in California in 23 years.

Shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a broad challenge to Harris’ death sentence last month, his San Diego lawyers 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, the attorney general’s office rejected that claim as “a final act of desperation”--one the procedural rules did not allow.

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.