2 Religious Groups Protest Harris’ Scheduled Execution at Prison

Staging back-to-back demonstrations outside the main gate of San Quentin prison Tuesday, Protestant and Roman Catholic groups opposed to the death penalty joined the chorus of religious leaders protesting the scheduled execution of Robert Alton Harris next Tuesday.

The two protests attracted about 30 people. Spokesmen blamed the small turnout on Gov. George Deukmejian’s cancellation of a clemency hearing for Harris that was to have been held Tuesday. The hearing was aborted when Harris withdrew his request for executive clemency, saying he believed that Deukmejian, a staunch death penalty supporter, would be biased against him.

The protest leaders predicted that as Harris’ scheduled execution nears, their ranks will swell. “The vigil will grow,” said the Rev. Paul Sawyer, a Unitarian minister, referring to a series of planned services and protests. They include a march across Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday; a Catholic service led by San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn at Mission San Rafael on Monday morning and an ecumenical vigil and rally Monday evening in Grace Episcopal Cathedral in downtown San Francisco.

Harris’ execution would be the first in California in 23 years.

“All the great religious leaders of history have spoken out with one voice against killing,” Sawyer said at Tuesday’s protest. “But we, too, are the murderers as we stand behind the state, and our hands are on the lever.” He was referring to the gas chamber mechanism that drops cyanide pellets into a mixture of water and sulfuric acid that results in a lethal dose of gas.

Sawyer was one of four people arrested for blocking the main entrance to the prison after a series of readings, statements, prayers and a role-playing skit in which Sawyer and others took turns being strapped into a black wooden chair and having a black hood and hangman’s noose draped over their heads.

That protest was followed by one led by a statewide delegation of Catholic priests and leaders of Catholic social justice groups.

Last week, 17 leaders of major California religious groups issued a statement asking Deukmejian to commute Harris’ sentence to life in prison without parole “based on the established policy statements of our respective denominations opposing the death penalty.”

In a letter to Deukmejian, who is an Episcopalian, Episcopal Bishop Frederick H. Borsch of Los Angeles urged him to stop the execution.

And Monday, Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize-winning nun based in Calcutta, India, appealed to the governor in a telephone call to “do what Jesus would do” and spare Harris. But Deukmejian stressed that he had a responsibility to carry out the law under which Harris was sentenced to die.