Dead Again, Maybe

We, the people, of California have decided to kill Robert Alton Harris. Again. On Friday a judge in San Diego set the execution date for mid-April. This constitutes the fifth time we have scheduled the killing of Harris in the gas chamber.

On this, our fifth try, Harris may truly die. Or maybe he won’t. We, the people, don’t really know, and we know we don’t know.

This drama has proceeded for 14 years, spanning the careers of lawyers and judges. The Harris case, perhaps more than any other, testifies to the cruelties of the death penalty as practiced in the United States and particularly in California.

We like to think of our system as civilized. It is not. It is a system that teases and tortures both avenger and avenged, offering false hopes to all concerned before it teases and tortures some more. The cycle of die/don’t die continues year after year. In this system, the cruelty flows from the process, not the resolution, from everything that precedes the final walk to the chamber, the strapping in, the dying itself.

If ever a crime deserved the death penalty, it is the murders committed by Harris. On a sunny day in San Diego he kidnaped Michael Baker and John Mayeski, two teen-age boys who had stopped at a Jack-in-the- Box for some lunchtime burgers.

Harris forced them to drive their car to a secluded spot and then told the boys they were free to go. As soon as they turned their backs, he shot them. Harris wanted their car for a bank heist.

Harris was accompanied by his brother. At the trial, the brother said Harris joked about the killings and then drove to a friend’s house where he retrieved the boys’ burgers from the front seat of the car. He was hungry.

Initially, justice came swiftly. The San Diego police nailed Harris the day of the murders, and within eight months he had been convicted and sentenced to die.

All very smooth. But in our system, apprehension and conviction only signal the beginning of the torture. In 1981, the courts stayed Harris’ execution three weeks before he was due to take his walk. Later that year, a second stay came six days before execution. In 1982, a third stay came four days before execution.

Each time, Harris prepared himself to die. Each time, the parents of John Mayeski and Michael Baker prepared themselves to watch him die, if only in their mind’s eye, and finally put an end to the cycle of misery.

And each time the system recycled. The most recent stay, which took place in 1990, deserves some attention. Harris was set to die on April 3. He had been moved from his Death Row cell to a special holding room near the execution chamber.

Then his attorneys produced a new argument. They went to court with a claim that Harris’ psychiatric experts had failed to explore his abused childhood at the original trial. If the jurors had only understood the beatings and alcoholism that attended Harris’ upbringing, they would never have recommended the death penalty, the lawyers said.

The lawyers were not claiming insanity, but something more subtle and in tune with our age. They were arguing that Harris’ inner child had been so trashed by drunken, violent parents that murder became inevitable. The fault lay with the parents, they said. Or enough of it, at least, that a fully informed jury might have spared Harris’ life.

And a U.S. District judge bought this argument. Harris was taken from the holding room. The system recycled. The courts then chewed on the inner child defense for two years.

Ultimately, it was rejected, as expected. On Friday, the new death date was set for April 21. Harris now will prepare to die for the fifth time. And the teen-agers’ families will prepare to witness his death for the fifth time.

The judges and lawyers who work within this system know well the cruelty they produce. Time after time they have promised reform and proposed this remedy or that.

They have failed, most likely because a true solution does not exist. The barbarism of official execution, and its utter finality, fits very badly in a legal system finely tuned to the nuances of human rights. Death puts an end to all rights, and our system seeks to preserve them. An irreconcilable difference.

So we torture instead. We promise to kill, and then don’t. We practice mortis interruptus and in the days preceding April 21, we will do it again with Robert Harris.

Or maybe we won’t. You never know.