As April 21 Nears, the Executioner’s Song Grows Louder

If all proceeds as scheduled, convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris will be put to death by the state on April 21, California’s first execution in 25 years. Others are likely to follow. Currently, this state has 325 men on Death Row. More are added with each passing week.

Eventually, most--perhaps all--of them will be executed. In the dark watch between midnight and dawn, they will be led to a sealed chamber and strapped to a wooden chair. The hand of an unseen executioner will drop a packet of cyanide granules into a vat of acid. A killing cloud of gas will rise and, within a few bleak minutes, a man will die.

If you believe in the justice of capital punishment, then Robert Alton Harris is your man. His crime was terrifying in its implications, callous in its execution and devastating to its victims’ families.

In 1978, Harris and an accomplice, in search of a getaway vehicle for a bank robbery they planned to commit, kidnaped two San Diego teen-agers--John Mayeski and Michael Baker--from the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. They took the boys to a remote spot, and Harris murdered them.

Murder is the only crime our society seeks to punish with a sanction identical to the crime. We do not, for example, beat those convicted of assault nor do we subject a rapist--however repellent his act--to physical outrage.

If there were any possibility of restoring John Mayeski and Michael Baker to their friends and families--if their loved ones’ hearts, in fact, could be made whole--which of us would not move heaven and earth to do that thing?

But Robert Alton Harris’ death will do neither of those things.

Nor will it, as Gov. Pete Wilson argued this week, deter others from committing similar atrocities.

On this point there is ample evidence: In 1988, the United Nations conducted a global study of capital punishment’s impact. It concluded that “the evidence as a whole gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis.” That finding was identical to those from official government studies in the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan, as well as from controlled social science research in the United States.

Since 1977, more than 100 prisoners in 34 states have been executed. At this moment, more than 2,500 Americans are under sentence of death. None of this has diminished our homicide rate.

Death penalty advocates say this is because convicted murderers believe they can use the appellate process to escape the penalty for their crime. But they have yet to establish where the deterrent threshold may be. Would it be one execution a month, a week, a day? Must they occur in one state or many?

Those who are opposed to capital punishment point to evidence that the death penalty is not equitably applied: Here in California, as in all the United States, the poor are far more likely to be executed than the rich; people of color are more likely to die than Anglos; and men convicted of murder are sentenced to die far more frequently than women.

These facts take on a particularly stark quality when one considers just how frequently the innocent are sentenced to death. Since the turn of the century, 349 utterly innocent Americans have been unjustly convicted of capital crimes. Twenty-three of them, according to historians, went to their deaths.

Amnesty International, the international human rights organization, believes that, over the past five years, at least two innocent Americans--Willie Jasper Darden in Florida and Edward Earl Johnson in Mississippi--were executed.

In terms of legal procedure, California is far more scrupulous in its treatment of individuals accused of crimes than either of those states.

Yet, just last week, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office announced that it would join defense lawyers in seeking the release of Clarence Change and Benny Powell, who were convicted 17 years ago of murdering a deputy sheriff. According to documents filed by the pair’s lawyers, Change and Powell were framed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Had the death penalty been available when they were convicted, the only thing we could do for them now would be to arrange perpetual care for their graves.

And what of Robert Alton Harris? According to affidavits filed as part of his appeals, his premature birth occurred as the consequence of a beating his abusive father administered to his alcoholic mother. Like most children stricken with fetal alcohol syndrome, his intelligence and ability to calculate consequences are limited.

As a boy, he was frequently abused by his parents, and he was abandoned by his mother in a tomato field when he was just 14.

None of these things excuse his crimes. But, according to a recent poll, 57% of Californians favor life imprisonment without possibility of parole when “the murder was committed by a person under the influence of an extreme mental or emotional disturbance. Fully 75% of our state’s people favor such a penalty “if the convicted person had been seriously abused as a child.”

The best description of life without the possibility of parole I’ve ever heard came from a man who, at this moment, is serving such a sentence at Folsom Prison. Four years ago, Richard Ford, a former officer of the Los Angeles Police Department, was convicted of committing murder for hire.

During the penalty phase of his trial, the 12 men and women weighing Ford’s fate were told that he had been abused as a child, that he had suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome as a consequence of his service in the Vietnam War, that he had become unhinged after his wife, an RTD bus driver, was subjected to a savage sexual assault.

Taking those factors into account, the jury decided that Ford, who is white, ought to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole rather than to the gas chamber.

Today, Ford has no illusions about either his crimes or his future. “The gas chamber is a nice quick death,” he said in a recent interview. “Life without the possibility of parole is a slow death. That’s what it amounts to.

“This is no paradise. You know in every situation that confronts you here that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no light, period: You’re going to die in prison--alone, by yourself, and that’s the way it is. There is nothing you can do about that. So, to say you’re ‘getting off easy’ is an absurdity.”

If life in prison without parole were Robert Alton Harris’ fate, could he really be said to have escaped justice?