Death Penalty Foes Resume Lonely Vigil at San Quentin : Capital punishment: Robert Alton Harris’ scheduled execution on April 3 is double-edged sword. Abolitionists oppose it but realize it puts issue in forefront.

For the first time in 23 years they are back, keeping vigil in 12-hour shifts outside San Quentin prison. With their coffee, candles and placards, they stand quietly next to the home of California’s gas chamber.

Stephen Souza, a 35-year-old Marin County man, is among those who have been bearing witness to their cause outside the prison, where on April 3 California is set to execute convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris. It will be the state’s first execution since 1967.

As Souza sat bundled in a heavy jacket and sleeping bag one night last week, he said: “I have written letters to dictators around the world condemning their human rights violations. Now, I have to do more than write.”

He plans to fast during the final 10 days leading to the scheduled execution.

Souza, a swimming pool cleaner, is part of a hodgepodge of clerics, lawyers, civil libertarians, friends of men on Death Row and even a few paroled murderers who make up the movement to end the death penalty. They call themselves abolitionists.

For years, their fight has been a lonely one. Now, the abolitionists find that the scheduled execution of Harris is a double-edged sword for their movement. While they clearly do not want the execution to take place, they know that its specter has heightened awareness of their cause. And, if the death sentence is carried out, the movement stands to win new supporters.

“I feel sorry that this is going to happen to Robert Harris,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “I don’t believe it’s good for his life to be sacrificed. But it’s going to give us the opportunity to talk about why the death penalty is wrong.”

Echoed Robert Bryan, a San Francisco lawyer and co-chair of the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: “It’s going to raise consciousness in California about what it means to take someone’s life. It’s going to force people to think about a very unpleasant thing.”

On the night before the execution, abolitionists intend to gather at San Quentin for their trademark protest: a candlelight vigil. The prospect of large demonstrations for and against the death penalty has prompted the state Department of Corrections to consider holding the execution at 3 a.m., rather than the traditional hour of 10 a.m., so as not to interfere with the morning commute into San Francisco.

“People have a legal and lawful right to assemble. But people have a right to commute, too,” said Lt. Cal White, a San Quentin spokesman.

Meanwhile, the abolitionists hope to move past the stock protest at the prison gate. They are trying to take on the look of a political campaign. That means news conferences, celebrity testimonials, maybe even a few television spots.

“We have to get a message to 29 million people (in California). You can’t do that by holding speaking events at which 30 people show up,” said lawyer Michael Laurence, director of an anti-death penalty project established by the ACLU of Northern California.

Given California’s prominence, abolitionists are counting on major figures to join the crusade against capital punishment. Names being tossed about range from Mother Teresa to rock musician Sting.

Death penalty foes say the scheduled execution of Harris, convicted in the 1978 slaying of two San Diego teen-agers, has galvanized their movement because the potential impact of a “state killing” in California is huge.

“California is a critical state,” said Alice Miller, the New York-based director of the Amnesty International-USA campaign against the death penalty, which is urging members worldwide to write letters to state officials and newspapers denouncing the execution.

Miller said she believes an execution in California, with its renown as a trend-setter, will give “permission to kill” to other nations. She also expressed concern that Harris’ execution may add to the pressure to institute a death penalty in New York, and could lead to executions in other Northern states that up to now have not carried out death sentences.

In all, 37 states have capital punishment sentencing statutes. In the United States, about 2,200 people are under sentence of death, including 274 in California. But for the most part, executions have been confined to the South.

Southern states have carried out all but 11 of 121 executions since 1977, when Gary Gilmore was shot by a Utah firing squad. Gilmore was the first person executed after the U.S. Supreme Court, which had struck down capital punishment laws in 1972, held in 1976 that the death penalty could be constitutional.

“Now that it has reached California--and you think of California as a state made up of sophisticated, educated people--you become aware that it’s not just a Southern problem,” Ripston said.

The campaign opposing Harris’ scheduled execution generally is being orchestrated by larger, established organizations such as the ACLU and Amnesty International. For these groups, the death penalty is one of many issues they focus on.

“We tend to do the thing that is immediately upon us,” Ripston said. Last year, abortion rights became the pressing issue for civil libertarians when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could limit abortions. “Now, suddenly, we realize we have to do something about the death penalty,” she said.

But with polls showing that the vast majority of Californians support the death penalty, few people in the movement believe they can abolish capital punishment anytime soon, and not in time to spare 37-year-old Harris.

After 11 years on Death Row, Harris is running short of options. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal of his death sentence in January. A separate appeal is pending before the California Supreme Court. Gov. George Deukmejian has scheduled a clemency hearing for March 27. If the state court and governor deny him relief, his attorneys would be forced to scramble to find a judge who might stay the April 3 execution.

Kern County Dist. Atty. Edward R. Jagels, a prominent supporter of capital punishment, believes the abolitionists have failed to win over the majority of the population because only the most coldblooded murderers are condemned. Most other killers receive prison sentences of life without parole, or less.

“Opponents are left to defend the absolute worst criminals that society has produced,” Jagels said.

Referring to the details of the murders Harris committed, Jagels said, “The average person looks at Harris and says, ‘He murdered two teen-agers simply because he wanted their car, and then he ate their hamburger,’ and they ask, ‘What other penalty is appropriate?’ ”

Harris’ lawyers and his handful of friends contend he is a changed man who is sorry for his crime. They also cite the abuse he endured as a child, together with brain damage, as explanations for his actions.

But so far, the campaign opposing his scheduled execution has not attempted to generate public sympathy for him. Instead, the campaign has focused on arguments that the death penalty is inhumane, does not deter murder and serves no other useful purpose. These death penalty opponents assert that life sentences without possibility of parole are a preferable alternative to executions.

Other death penalty foes, for whom the movement is all-consuming, take more liberal views. Don Anthony White, for example, is convinced that many murderers--perhaps Harris included--can be paroled and live successfully if they are given proper counseling while in prison.

The raspy-voiced White works for American Friends Service Committee out of a cramped and smoke-filled office on an edge of downtown Oakland not yet reached by urban renewal.

The fate of condemned men is especially real to White. He spent four years on Washington state’s Death Row for the 1959 beating death of a 68-year-old woman and the fatal stabbing of a 49-year-old man. He once came so close to the gallows--Washington’s method of execution was hanging then--that he was measured for a noose.

“I had done something terrible. It was the end of the road,” White said, recalling the desolation he felt as his execution neared. “What can you do? You can’t run away and say, ‘I’ll see you next week.’ You’ve lost everything.”

White won a reprieve, then a new trial in which he was resentenced to life in prison. The subject of a book, “To Die Is Not Enough,” he was was paroled in 1987. As he and his friends see it, White is living proof that a man can be reformed.

White spends much of his time corresponding with prisoners, getting them soap or toothpaste. He also hopes to “make them start dealing with” their crime. His message, he says, is simple: “There’s no pride in what you’ve done. Deal with it, honestly.”

Another committed death penalty foe is Joe M. Doss. As a lawyer in Louisiana, Doss pressed the appeal of a drug addict named Earnest Knighton Jr., convicted of murdering a convenience store clerk in a robbery. In 1984, the man was put to death.

“I was trying to get through to the governor when they pulled the switch,” Doss recalled. A few days later, Doss, who also is an Episcopal priest, spoke at the man’s funeral.

In 1987, after arriving at his new parish in Palo Alto, Doss helped found the group, Death Penalty Focus. The group, which remains little known to the public, is trying to gather $20,000 to hire a director. Currently, its work is all done by volunteers.

“All the education has been one-sided,” Doss said, acknowledging that those who oppose capital punishment have not been able to get their message out.

He said churches must share the blame. Noting that every major denomination opposes the death penalty, he said clerics have done “an abysmal job” by failing to speak from the pulpit against capital punishment. He attributed their failure to sermonize to their knowledge that most parishioners support capital punishment.

“You know it’s going to get you in trouble,” he said, “so you pass on it and you go on and talk about sexism or racism.”

Another soldier in the movement is Janice Gay. She has marched against the death penalty, spoken out against it from the Capitol steps in Sacramento, and is a member of the Northern California Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. The group recently raised $10,000 and hired a two-day-a-week organizer.

Gay also has carried out some very personal and solitary demonstrations. She held one last June, the day she married Kenneth Gay, who is condemned for his role in the killing of Los Angeles Police Officer Paul Verna in June, 1983.

A few years ago, she had noticed Gay’s name in a Christian magazine that listed prisoners looking for pen pals. In time, she visited. Eventually, she said she fell in love and won approval from San Quentin officials to marry him.

“That’s my honeymoon--me, myself and I,” she said, showing off photos a friend had taken. On her car the day of her wedding, she had written, “Just married, they want to kill my groom, abolish the death penalty,” and drove to Fisherman’s Wharf. She recalled that people were curious, concerned and generally nice that day. But on other occasions, she has been hooted for carrying her placards.

“I hope it helps,” she said of her activities. “He tells me, ‘Babe, it probably won’t.’ He gets discouraged. He said, ‘You’ll get hundreds of people out to save the whales, or clean up the birds, but no one cares that they’re going to sit a man down and kill him.’ ”

In the end, the abolitionists believe, public opinion will shift only after executions become routine. With polls consistently showing that the majority of people strongly support capital punishment, “No politician will come out against it,” said former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., perhaps the patriarch of the movement to end capital punishment in California.

“It will take a long time to abolish the death penalty in California,” Brown said. “After they have executed 10 or 15, and the homicide rate is about the same, people will begin to change. They’ll get a little horrified at the state doing it.”

Prosecutor Jagels, who supports the death penalty, agreed. He predicted that there may even be a slight shift in opinion if Harris is executed, largely because of accounts of “his last hours and his return to Christ and interviews with his mother who says he was mistreated by his father.”

“Society is ambivalent,” Jagels said. “There are a number of people who favor it as a theory, but really don’t want to see it imposed. There is some of that in all of us.”

DEATH PENALTY IN THE UNITED STATES Since 1930, when the government first began collecting data on executions, 3,963 people have been executed. Since 1976, the year the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 104 people have been executed. A total of 12 states have carried out executions since the court ruling.

NOTORIOUS EXECUTION CASES

Gary Gilmore’s execution in Utah in 1977 was the country’s first in 10 years. The murderer was convicted of an execution-style slaying of a 25-year-old male motel clerk during a robbery on July 20, 1976 in Provo, Utah.

While waiting to be executed, Gilmore, 35, made his desire to die clear by suicide attempts and fasting, thus attracting media attention.

In response to Bessie Gilmore’s pleas for her son’s life to be spared, the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 3, 1976, temporarily blocked the execution set for that day. Only 10 days later, though, the Court terminated the stay, clearing the way for the Provo court to set a new date.

Gilmore’s wish to die was granted on Jan. 17, 1977, when four bullets from .30-caliber rifles hit his chest, killing him two minutes after the bullets passed through him.

Ted Bundy was a college graduate and a law student. He was also a mass murderer, and on Jan. 24, 1989, became the most resent person executed in the country. Though Bundy, 42 when killed, was convicted of only three Florida murders, he was under the sentence of death for the Chi Omega murders, a rampage through a Florida State University sorority house. And in the last few days before his death, he provided details to as many as 50 murders in nine states.

Technically, Bundy died for the 1978 murder of 12-year-old Kimberely Leach of Salt Lake City, whom he left to die under a collapsed hog shed.

Bundy was on death row for nearly 10 years. The night before his death, the U.S. Supreme Court voted three seperate times against Bundy’s pleas to stay alive.

Executions State Since 1930 1976 to’89 Alabama 138 7 Arizona 38 Arkansas 118 California 292 Colorado 47 Connecticut 21 Delaware 12 Florida 189 20 Georgia 379 14 Idaho 3 Illinois 90 Indiana 43 2 Iowa 18 Kansas 15 Kentucky 103 Louisiana 151 18 Maryland 68 Massachusetts 27 Mississippi 157 4 Missouri 62 1 Montana 6 Nebraska 31 Nevada 31 4 New Hampshire 1 New Jersey 74 New Mexico 6 New York 329 North Carolina 266 3 Ohio 172 Oklahoma 60 Oregon 19 Pennsylvania 152 South Carolina 164 2 South Dakota 1 Tennessee 93 Texas 326 34 Utah 16 3 Vermont 4 Virginia 99 8 West Virginia 40 Washington 47 Washington, D.C. 40 Wyoming 7

The following states have never had a death penalty conviction: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.