It Almost Happened at 3 a.m. : Supreme Court Agrees Harris Case Needs a Further Look

Late last week, Robert Alton Harris was moved to a special cell in San Quentin state prison and three guards took up a “death watch” over him. Theirs was not a vigil of compassion, nor even of simple solidarity with a man deep in the shadow of his own mortality. Rather, their purpose was to see that Harris did not by his own hand take the life the state had decreed must end, thereby cheating the people of their justice. In its name, Harris was to have died early this morning, when the hand of an unseen executioner released a packet of cyanide granules to fall into a vat of acid, forming a lethal cloud of gas. A few minutes after 3 a.m., in the darkest watch of the night, the penalty imposed long years ago for Harris’ callous murder of two teen-age boys finally would have been carried out. But Monday’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a stay granted on Friday by the Court of Appeals stopped the clock--at least for now--at 1 minute to 3.

For more than 20 years, California has kept a kind of death watch of its own. Those who favor capital punishment--as 78% of Californians do--and those who oppose it--as The Times does--have waged a wrenching, often bitter struggle over this divisive issue. Its consequences have marked our state’s politics at every level and continue to do so to this very day.

But had this morning’s scheduled execution gone forward, what would have been accomplished beyond Robert Harris’ death? The two young men he murdered will not be returned to life, nor will the hearts of their families and friends be made whole. Nothing can accomplish those things, and that is what is most terrible about the crime Harris committed.

Would others have been deterred from murder by this killer’s execution? According to a global survey of capital punishment conducted in 1988 by the United Nations, “the evidence as a whole gives no positive support to the deterrence hypothesis.” That is one reason, among many, why no other Western democracy maintains an active death penalty.

Could we have said with confidence that this ultimate penalty had been fairly imposed in this case and will be fairly dispensed in others to come? Since the turn of the century, 349 innocent Americans have been sentenced to die. Two of them have been executed during the past two years. Both were black. In fact, a recent report by the U.S. General Accounting Office found what it called “a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and imposition of the death penalty.” And, as Monday’s ruling shows, even in the case of white defendants like Harris, the wheels of justice can grind out a coarse mixture of care and indifference.

Finally, all that can be said is that life dealt cruelly with Robert Alton Harris, that he dealt cruelly with others and that the state may yet deal cruelly with him. Reasonable people will differ on whether there is any justice in that, but none can say there is either goodness or mercy.