SAN QUENTIN DIARY : News Agencies Jockey for Space at Prison Gate

As Tuesday’s scheduled execution of Robert Alton Harris draws near, news organizations have begun quietly renting rooms, balconies and even lawns from residents living near San Quentin prison.

The grim business--and it indeed has become an enterprise, with one well-located balcony renting for $2,000--developed because of the difficult access to the prison’s main entrance, where a large anti-death penalty demonstration is planned for the night of the 3 a.m. execution.

Getting in and out of this tiny San Pablo Bay village near San Rafael is expected to be extremely difficult when the only road into town, a two-lane street, is jammed with what authorities expect will be a crowd of 3,000 demonstrators and several hundred sheriff’s deputies, police and California Highway Patrol officers.

To make sure they have the room needed to do their jobs--and, in the case of one Bay Area television station, to broadcast a live one-hour special--news agencies turned to people living in former prison staff housing just outside the gate.

Residents and journalists, fearing such deals may seem to be in bad taste, are reluctant to discuss specifics. But many concede that significant money is being discussed: One man is asking $2,500 for his front lawn, while a woman at the low end of the scale has rented spaces in her home for $400 apiece.

“It’s been a bidding war out there,” said Al Corral, assistant news director at KTVU, an independent Oakland television station.

John Motroni, managing editor at KGO, the local ABC television affiliate, said the renting of space is unavoidable because location will largely decide how well a significant aspect of the story--the protest demonstrations--can be covered.

“It’s sort of like a game of Monopoly,” Motroni said. “Everyone wants to land on Boardwalk and Park Place instead of Baltic Avenue.”

(The Los Angeles Times also is negotiating with local residents for the installation of telephone lines for use by its reporters.)

In a departure from what it had originally said was standard procedure, the state Department of Corrections said Wednesday that Harris will continue to be allowed direct contact with visitors through Sunday.

The decision will let the condemned man meet for one last time with members of his family on that day, about a day and a half before he is scheduled to die in the gas chamber.

Earlier, prison spokesman Cal White said that “security concerns” in the death penalty protocol required that Harris be separated from visitors by a pane of glass. Conversations would have been conducted over telephones.

The Prison Law Office, a legal aid group for prisoners and their families, had threatened to sue over the loss of contact visits, said spokeswoman Laura Prado.

Rejecting the complaints of a small band of residents who live next to the prison, the Marin County Board of Supervisors said there is little the county can do to ban anti-death penalty protests outside San Quentin prison’s gate.

The residents, who live along the two-lane road to the prison’s main gate, had asked the county to try to block the execution by suing the state because it cannot guarantee that residents will be safe from demonstrators.

Opponents and supporters of the death penalty have said they will assemble outside the prison gate the night before Harris is scheduled to be executed. Residents fear that their lawns will be littered and their homes damaged.

Supervisor Gary Giacomini, who represents the village of San Quentin, suggested the residents lobby Sacramento to find a new location for the gas chamber if it is used again. He said it is too late to relocate Harris’ execution, which according to the death warrant must be carried out at San Quentin.

Gov. George Deukmejian’s office Wednesday released the list of 16 news agencies that will be allowed to send representatives to witness Harris’s execution.

Among the organizations selected to attend are The Times and the two major wire services, the Associated Press and United Press International.

In addition, the list includes four media representatives--two from daily newspapers, one each from radio and television--from San Diego, where Harris committed the two 1978 murders that put him on Death Row.

The list also includes one television and one radio station each from Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as a Sacramento television station. Also on the list are two newspapers from San Francisco, the largest city close to the prison; a newspaper from Sacramento and the local newspaper in Marin County.

Absent from the list is the Sacramento Bee, the largest, most influential newspaper in the state capital. Deukmejian spokesman Tom Beermann said the exclusion of the Bee was not related to its editorial opposition to the death penalty or other Deukmejian Administration programs.

He said the number of news agencies seeking to witness the execution was far more than could be accommodated. The witness list was drawn up by the governor’s staff with help from the Department of Corrections, Beermann said.

As many as 36 other execution witnesses will be drawn from among state officials, prison staff, people designated by Harris and the family of his victims. The names of those witnesses will not be made public by the prison.