Mother Teresa Pleas for Life of Harris in Talk to Governor

Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize-winning missionary, made a special plea for the life of convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris during a private telephone call to Gov. George Deukmejian on Monday, but apparently failed to persuade him to halt Harris’ scheduled execution.

In a statement he released after the five-minute conversation, Deukmejian said he emphasized to Mother Teresa that he had a responsibility to carry out the law under which Harris was sentenced to die. The execution, which would be California’s first in 23 years, is scheduled for next Tuesday.

Mother Teresa’s plea came less than two hours after Harris’ lawyers filed a last-ditch appeal with the federal court in San Diego, the first step in the last legal procedure he has left to avoid the scheduled execution.

Harris, convicted of the 1978 murders of two San Diego teen-agers, contended in his legal papers that new psychiatric evidence shows he had suffered from brain damage that played a part in the killings.

Mother Teresa, in her appeal for Harris, asked Deukmejian to “do what Jesus would do if Jesus was in your position,” according to an intermediary who spoke with the nun shortly after her conversation with Deukmejian.

John Dear, a Jesuit seminarian from Berkeley who helped arrange the telephone hookup with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India, afterward described her as “very concerned” and “totally absorbed in praying for the governor to stop the execution.”

The call was placed by Deukmejian to Mother Teresa at her request.

In his statement following the call, Deukmejian said Mother Teresa expressed her views based on religious grounds.

According to the statement, Deukmejian told Mother Teresa that capital punishment “has been fully debated for many years in California” and that the public has voted on two occasions “that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for those who willfully murder another person.”

The governor said he concluded the call “by expressing his respect for Mother Teresa and her work, and thanked her for her views.”

Although a strong proponent of the death penalty, Deukmejian as governor could spare Harris’ life, at least temporarily, even after legal appeals are exhausted.

Deukmejian was alone in his office when he spoke to the Roman Catholic nun, who won the Nobel Prize in 1979 for her work on behalf of the sick and dying in Calcutta’s slums.

Mother Teresa met Harris at San Quentin when she visited Death Row inmates there in 1987. During the visit, she gave him a medal to wear and promised to pray for him.

Her plea Monday on behalf of Harris is part of a growing movement among clergy to save his life. A number of high Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy have already spoken out on behalf of the condemned man. Dear said he and others were attempting to persuade Pope John Paul II to intercede on behalf of Harris.

The new legal appeal filed for Harris essentially set forth the same arguments that failed to persuade the California Supreme Court earlier this month to spare him. U.S. District Judge William B. Enright in San Diego, who handled--and rejected--Harris’ previous appeals in federal court, set a hearing in the case for Wednesday.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Harris’ appeals four times, most recently on Jan. 16. The California Supreme Court upheld Harris’ death sentence in 1981. And this past March 16, the state court declined to grant a formal hearing to Harris to review his claim of new psychiatric evidence about his mental state when he murdered Michael Baker and John Mayeski, both of San Diego, in 1978.

That rejection left Harris with only two avenues for relief, a grant of clemency from Gov. George Deukmejian or a reprieve from the federal courts.

Last Tuesday, however, Harris retracted his application for a clemency hearing before Deukmejian. In a letter to the governor, Harris said he had decided not to seek clemency because he did not believe he could get a fair hearing from Deukmejian, a longtime advocate of capital punishment.

In the legal papers filed Monday, Harris’ lawyers said it would be unjust to execute him because it was not clear that he had a fair chance to explain why he killed the two 16-year-olds.

Harris shot them after stealing their car for use in a bank robbery. He abducted them from the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in San Diego where they had just ordered lunch. Later, he ate their half-finished hamburgers.

What neither Harris nor his lawyers knew in 1979, when he was sentenced, was that he suffered from a variety of mental disorders, his attorneys claimed in the new appeal. Among them, they said, was post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition usually associated with combat.

No one knew about the disorders because the psychologists who tested Harris in 1979 did not do a good job, his lawyers claimed. And, in 1979, psychiatrists did not recognize a condition like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Because evidence of Harris’ mental disorders would provide powerful mitigating evidence concerning his crime, Harris deserves a hearing to prove his claims about the effect of the disorders, the lawyers said.

Even if Enright agrees to grant that request, he must also decide to put off the execution because the date has been set.

In 1982, in denying Harris’ first federal appeal, Enright called Harris’ death sentence an “appropriate and deserved penalty.”

If Enright denies the appeal again, Harris must turn to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the San Francisco-based federal appellate court that serves nine western states and Guam.

Shuit reported from Sacramento, Abrahamson from San Diego.