Death Row Inmates File Suit to Father Children : Courts: They claim violation of rights. Both prosecutors and advocates of death penalty abolition react unfavorably.

Fourteen prisoners on San Quentin’s Death Row filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco Monday demanding the right to impregnate their wives or girlfriends through conjugal visits or artificial insemination.

The lawsuit, which quickly drew a chilly reaction from both advocates of death penalty reform and prosecutors, claims the prisoners’ constitutional rights are being violated because they are denied the right to have children.

“Inmates who are to be executed by the state are subjected to cruel and unusual punishment when not only are their lives taken, but the possibility of any future generations of their family are also executed,” states the lawsuit, filed by a Reno, Nev., attorney.

Among the named plaintiffs are Darren Charles Williams, a Los Angeles gang member convicted as the mastermind in the 1984 mistaken-identity slayings of four relatives of former pro football star Kermit Alexander; Daniel Steven Jenkins, condemned to death for the 1985 ambush killing of an off-duty Los Angeles police detective who was picking up his son from a church day-care center, and Randy Haskett, a former security guard convicted in the 1979 stabbing deaths of two Lynwood youngsters.

The suit also was filed on behalf of the inmates’ spouses and their parents.

“Some parents are desperate for a grandchild,” explained attorney Carter R. King, who filed the suit. “I would hope some young children would be born with the kinds of mothers or grandparents who would perhaps provide the kind of environment where maybe one of the kids would grow up to be a surgeon and save hundreds of lives to help make up for the lives their father took.”

Conjugal visits currently are granted to a wide range of inmates in California prisons--but not those on Death Row.

In 1989, the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that such prohibitions do not violate prisoners’ freedom of religion. The case was filed by William Adolf Noguera, a condemned inmate from Orange County who claimed the prohibition violated his rights as a Catholic.

As for artificial insemination, state Department of Corrections spokesman Tip Kindel said Monday that California has no “specific policy that deals with the preservation of sperm or anything like that.

“But if a guy has to leave prison,” Kindel said, “we’d probably say no. And if our staff has to collect it, we probably wouldn’t have the expertise.”

Last year, King filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of a Nevada Death Row inmate--Tracy Petrocelli. But the case was dropped before trial by Petrocelli and his wife. Earlier this year, a procreation rights lawsuit filed by a pair of Virginia Death Row prisoners was rejected as “frivolous” by the Virginia Supreme Court.

Similar comments were made Monday by a number of California lawyers apprised of the lawsuit.

“It’s sort of funny,” said Rosalie L. Morton, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who tried one of the plaintiffs, Shawn Hill, in a 1986 Reseda stabbing. “We wouldn’t want to perpetuate these people.”

Even defense lawyer Daye Shinn, who represented plaintiff Kenneth Gay in his trial for the 1983 killing of a Los Angeles motorcycle officer, appeared amused.

“Doesn’t he have anything else to do?” Shinn asked with a chuckle.

The suit was greeted icily by several advocates of death penalty reform, who expressed concern that it would prove ideal fodder for the likes of comedians Johnny Carson or Jay Leno.

“Conjugal visits, I think, certainly wouldn’t threaten security,” said San Francisco attorney Robert R. Bryan, a board member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “But what concerns me about this litigation is it might be distracting from the bigger and more important issues of whether we as a society should be in the business of killing people in the name of the law.”

The state’s most prominent condemned killer--Robert Alton Harris--was listed as a plaintiff in a press release announcing the filing of the suit. But King said Monday that Harris’ name was dropped from the litigation before it was filed at the request of his lawyers.