Outside, a Time of Waiting and Anxiety

Days had melted down to hours Monday, and next to the symbolic mock coffin burned one last candle--marking the last day before California might get back into the business of capital punishment.

A few dozen death penalty foes, some of whom had helped keep a vigil at San Quentin prison for several weeks, paced anxiously under an unseasonably warm sun, waiting as the day crept by and wondering: Why had the U.S. Supreme Court not yet issued the ruling that would determine Robert Alton Harris’ immediate fate? When would it decide? What hope could be divined from delay?

At 3:30 p.m. PDT, the phone call came, and demonstrators erupted in cheers and hugs at the gates of the prison when it became clear that Harris would not die, as the state wanted, at 3 a.m. today.

“I’m a very happy man, and so is Bobby Harris,” Michael Kroll, a close friend of the convicted double-murderer, told a rally of about 150 death penalty opponents.

Some spent little time savoring victory. Several speakers quickly urged their fellow activists to ratchet up the fight against capital punishment and make Marin County, site of the state’s only gas chamber, a “death penalty-free zone.”

Joe Morris Doss, pastor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, said he saw the Supreme Court’s action as only a narrow victory for death penalty foes.

“Any time someone doesn’t die when he is scheduled to die is a victory,” he said. “But there is no real victory until we stop treating violence with violence.”

Catholic Bishop Francis A. Quinn of Sacramento was more optimistic.

“I think this is moving us toward a permanent solution,” he said. “The more people are educated on this, the more they tend to prefer life (in prison) without parole.