SAN QUENTIN DIARY : Group Sues to Allow Harris Private Visits

Condemned killer Robert Alton Harris, just a few days away from scheduled execution Tuesday in San Quentin’s gas chamber, was visited by a brother Thursday in the first of what may be final scenes with his family.

Four correctional officers were present in a small prison conference room as a handcuffed Harris talked for about four hours with his brother and close friend Michael Kroll, a San Francisco-based writer who has visited Harris regularly since 1982.

The brother, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his family’s privacy, said afterward that the visit was marred by the presence of the officers.

“We aren’t allowed to speak privately without being overheard,” said the brother, who had not seen Harris in two years. “It was better than no visit. I got to hug him when he first came up. . . . We could talk, but we couldn’t enjoy the comfort of a private talk.”

He added that although the officers were “professional,” he feared that Harris was holding back in his responses, perhaps out of concern that word might spread among other prisoners that he is “soft.”

The California Appellate Project, which provides defense services for Death Row inmates, filed suit in Marin County Superior Court late Thursday afternoon seeking to reinstate full visiting privileges for Harris. Death Row prisoners usually meet friends and relatives in an open visiting room where they can speak without being overheard and are not shackled.

Harris’ brother planned to return today, but said he hoped the visiting policy would change.

“I want to talk to my brother,” he said.

Harris has asked that, if he is executed, each of the 33 inmates on his section of Death Row be given a pint of ice cream of their choice. Kroll put money in Harris’ prison fund to pay for the gesture. The prison has agreed to the request.

Proclaiming himself an avid backer of the death penalty, state Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim) made a plea to Gov. George Deukmejian that he be allowed to attend Harris’ scheduled execution.

“I think if you are going to stand up on an issue and say, ‘I support the death penalty,’ then you ought to be willing to take a look at an execution,” said Seymour, who is seeking the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.

The governor refused Seymour’s request without comment.

“I think for anybody to attend that execution and make it into a political show, that would be a stupid political mistake because that would come off very ghoulish,” Seymour said.

But he maintained that his request was no political show.

“I was not interested in making points,” he said. “I’m not going there to hold a press conference or anything.”

Still, Seymour’s effort to view the execution drew a sharp rebuke from Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, a Democrat.

“Like most supporters of the death penalty, I know this execution is justified,” said McCarthy, who was an avid death-penalty opponent until the mid-1980s. “But by treating it as a campaign prop, Seymour is reaching a new and repulsive low.”

What with all the security at San Quentin these days--the prison went into lock-down Thursday in anticipation of next week’s execution--it is very nearly impossible for the average curious citizen to view a real gas chamber.

This troubles the Northern California Collective Consciousness, which Les Robert, the group’s vice president, described as a “philosophical symposium that deals with the separation of man from his essence.”

The group supposes that if real, ballot-casting Californians could only see a real gas chamber, they would be better prepared to wrestle with the question of whether to support capital punishment. So they set out to get a gas chamber of their own, which they could display in public.

Gas chambers being somewhat hard to come by, the NCCC acquired a chamber of its own from a death-penalty opponent who claimed he had built the steel-and-glass device using the blueprints for California’s original single-seat gas chamber.

The only problem: California has never used a single-seat chamber. Perhaps, said a man who answered the NCCC telephone but declined to identify himself, the chamber is based on a Colorado design, or something else. He was not sure.

Undeterred, Collective Consciousness nevertheless put its ersatz chamber on display Thursday at San Francisco’s Rose and Thistle Club--on a stage usually reserved for a performance-art group called the Institute of Absurdity.

Only reporters and clerics were invited Thursday, Robert explained, because earlier efforts to display the chamber attracted unnerving threats of violence from outraged passers-by.

“We’re not an anti-anything group,” said Robert. “We just explore issues. . . . We want people to come to know the execution process and make up their own minds about it.”

Times staff writer Dave Lesher contributed to this story.