Clemency Hearing Is Canceled : Death Penalty: Mother Teresa plans to call Gov. Deukmejian from India to ask that condemned killer Robert Harris not be executed.

Gov. George Deukmejian announced Wednesday that he has canceled next week’s clemency hearing for condemned killer Robert Alton Harris, saying he was merely carrying out the convicted murderer’s wishes.

Meanwhile, the celebrated champion of the poor and dying, Mother Teresa, jumped into the fight to save Harris’ life. Working through a Jesuit seminarian from Berkeley, the Nobel laureate, who is based in India, got Deukmejian to agree to talk to her by telephone early next week, possibly Monday, so she can personally plead for Harris’ life.

In San Diego, the father of one of the two teen-age boys Harris killed in 1978 said that if Harris really has sent the victims’ families a message in recent weeks, he has not received it. “I haven’t got diddly-squat,” said Steve Baker, a San Diego police detective.

Harris, 37, convicted of the murders of Baker’s son, Michael, and Michael’s friend, John Mayeski, is in line to be the first person executed in California in 23 years.

In a brief statement, Deukmejian noted that he had received a letter from Harris Tuesday in which the murderer, who is scheduled to be executed April 3, withdrew his request for executive clemency.

“Since there is now no request for clemency before me, the hearing which was scheduled for March 27 is hereby canceled,” Deukmejian said.

Robert Gore, Deukmejian’s press secretary, noted that Harris’ avenues for a reprieve from the death penalty now lie entirely with the courts. “The governor has the authority to grant a temporary reprieve, but right now there is no reason to do so because there are still judicial proceedings pending, and one has not been requested,” Gore said.

Harris, in his letter to the governor, said he was withdrawing his request for clemency because he did not believe he would get a fair hearing from Deukmejian, a leading advocate of the death penalty.

Charles M. Sevilla, one of Harris’ San Diego attorneys, declined Wednesday to comment on Deukmejian’s action.

In his letter to Deukmejian, Harris also mentioned that while he had “nothing” to say to the governor or the press, he did have “something to say” to the Baker and Mayeski families but had “already done that privately.”

After Harris’ letter to the governor, dated Monday, was released Tuesday afternoon, Sevilla said that “a couple weeks ago” Harris sent a “private communication to the Baker family.”

Sevilla has declined to release details of the “communication,” saying that what Harris said was between him and the families.

But Steve Baker said Wednesday that he knew nothing about it.

“Well, if he did (send it), I didn’t get it,” Baker said Wednesday. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

John Mayeski’s mother, Kathryn Mayeski Sanders, 68, a retired civilian electronics technician with the Navy, said Tuesday that Harris has had “no contact with us at all.”

Harris was arrested July 5, 1978, by Steve Baker, who did not know at the time that Harris’ victims included his son. Harris killed both 16-year-old boys after stealing their car for use in a bank robbery.

Gore, the governor’s press secretary, confirmed that Deukmejian has agreed to speak with Mother Teresa early next week, but he said the exact day had not been set. The Roman Catholic nun would speak to the governor from Calcutta, where she works among the poor and those who are near death. “We are working with her representatives. It is just a matter of coordinating their two schedules,” Gore said.

The press secretary said Deukmejian is not worried about being put on the spot by the woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and is considered a living saint by her followers because of her work among the people she calls “the poorest of the poor.”

“He is a public figure, and he is prepared to talk about his views,” Gore said.

In the past, pleas for mercy on behalf of convicted murders by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have gone unheeded.

Mother Teresa, along with Jimmy Carter and other international figures, in 1986 appealed unsuccessfully for clemency in the case of James Terry Roach, a South Carolina man who was put to death for the murder of two teen-agers. Pope John Paul II was turned down by two different Florida governors when he pleaded for the lives of murderers who were put to death in 1983 and 1987.

In the Harris case, the intermediary for Mother Teresa is John Dear, a seminarian at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley.