Court Asked to Uphold Stay of Execution

Lawyers for convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris on Sunday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to allow more time for a federal appeals court in San Francisco to reconsider Harris’ case and reject a bid by California officials to proceed with his execution on Tuesday.

In a 30-page motion filed with the court late Sunday afternoon, Harris’ lawyers said the justices should give “great deference” to the move by Judge John T. Noonan on Friday to indefinitely stay the execution.

“Judge Noonan has been thoroughly familiar with the facts and history and record of this case,” the lawyers said.

On Saturday, lawyers for the state filed a 40-page motion with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor urging that Noonan’s stay be lifted so the execution could proceed as planned at 3 a.m. Tuesday at San Quentin prison. O’Connor is likely to refer the Harris matter to the entire court for a decision.

In their recent efforts to spare Harris from the gas chamber, his lawyers have been contending that Harris had incompetent psychiatric help at his 1979 trial. On Friday, Noonan agreed that this claim raised a reasonable issue that should be considered further by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Therefore, he issued a stay of execution pending that hearing.

In their filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, the lawyers said: “The stay ensures some semblance of order in a situation unnecessarily filled with haste and confusion. It . . . allows orderly review of the substantial federal constitutional claims raised by Mr. Harris.”

The justices will issue orders in pending cases at 10 a.m. today, but no further public meetings are scheduled during the day. After leaving the bench at 10 a.m., the justices could go behind closed doors to consider the motions on the Harris case and issue an order later in the day.

While the high court could lift the stay and let Harris go to the gas chamber as scheduled, doing so would amount to a rebuke of a prominent appeals court judge. Noonan is a 1985 appointee of President Ronald Reagan.

But state attorneys argued in their motion Saturday that Noonan fundamentally misstated a 1985 Supreme Court ruling on psychiatrists. In issuing his stay order, Noonan read the 1985 case as creating a “federal constitutional right . . . (to) competent psychiatric assistance.”

He also compounded the error by applying the ruling retroactively, the state lawyers contended. Just in the last month, the high court said Death Row inmates should not get the benefit of high court rulings issued after their convictions were upheld in the state courts. Harris’ conviction and death sentence were upheld in 1981, four years before the 1985 ruling on psychiatric help.