Harris Clemency Plea Based on History of Mental Illness : Execution: Reports on condemned killer as a teen-ager detail bizarre acts, schizophrenia and suicide attempts.

Years before Robert Alton Harris killed, psychiatrists and counselors in federal reformatories wrote a mountain of reports warning that the teen-ager was a hostile and suicidal schizophrenic who probably would always be a danger to himself and society.

Those mental evaluations, more dramatic than any taken into account by the jurors and judges who condemned Harris to die, help form the crux of the last-ditch campaign to spare the San Diego murderer from execution in the San Quentin gas chamber at a minute past midnight on April 21.

His defense team hopes that the chilling raw details of Harris’ mental illness while incarcerated as a youth will persuade Gov. Pete Wilson that Harris was insane and should not be sentenced to die--or at least will prove persuasive as a plea for mercy in the court of public opinion.

The chances of halting the execution seem slim. Wilson has scheduled a clemency hearing for April 15, but said he will refuse to consider new evidence about Harris’ case. Courts appear to have drawn the line on appeals after 13 years, and prosecutors say the new reports only further document what is known--that Harris endured a troubled childhood and was not well adjusted to life.

Richard Huffman, who prosecuted Harris for murder and is now an appeals judge, said the original defense lawyer was given “every scrap” of the old Bureau of Prisons files before the trial and had Harris analyzed by a psychiatrist and psychologist. If they could have diagnosed Harris as schizophrenic, “they would have come into court with bells on,” Huffman said.

In the starkly objective federal reports, totaling 950 pages, doctors and counselors who observed Harris over four years describe bizarre self-mutilations, delusions and repeated suicide attempts. Accompanying one such attempt was a letter in which Harris vowed to meet his parents in hell.

Harris was beaten by his parents as a baby and abandoned by them as a child. At 16, near the start of his confinement in a series of five federal reformatories and prisons, Harris seemed consumed with contacting his mother, an alcoholic whom he could not find.

“Robert speaks continuously of finding his mother but has been unable to locate her address,” said a report written at the time.

When Harris was 17, a prison psychiatrist at the federal institution at Springfield, Mo., concluded that he suffered from “chronic non-specific schizophrenia”--a diagnosis based on his hallucinations and other evidence of severe mental instability.

“The consulting psychiatrist and the chief of psychiatric service both felt that the patient’s overall prognosis is quite poor,” said the Dec. 17, 1970, report in a refrain that recurs through the documents.

As Harris, then 19, neared the end of his incarceration, another report bleakly summarized his chances for making it in the world.

“This young man’s future is indeed gloomy,” the report said. “In all probability, he will spend most of his life in institutions.

Exasperated caseworkers came up with no plan to salvage the troubled youth, and when his sentence ended and they could no longer hold him, authorities released Harris to his parents: a mother whom he described as promiscuous and a father who was jailed for committing incest with his daughters.

Six years after his release, while on parole for a manslaughter conviction, Harris committed the killings that led to his death sentence. He shot two 16-year-old San Diego boys, John Mayeski and Michael Baker, so he could use their car in a bank robbery.

At the time of the murders, Harris had normal intelligence and although troubled by a traumatic upbringing and perhaps some brain damage, he suffered from no major mental maladies other than an antisocial personality disorder, prosecution and defense psychiatrists agreed during the trial.

But Harris’ lawyers say those psychiatrists must have been unaware of most of the early federal evaluations or else they would have at least cited schizophrenia as being among Harris’ problems. Defense lawyers also contend that medical advances in the understanding of brain damage add weight to an early electroencephalogram that showed abnormalities in Harris’ brain wave activity.

Lawyers for Harris obtained the documents from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the two years since a federal appeals court blocked his April, 1990, date with the gas chamber. Some documents arrived as recently as last month.

Defense lawyers have failed to persuade any appellate court to review the documents. Judges have ruled that the documents were filed too late to be considered in an appeals process that has gone on for more than a decade.

Their avenues of appeal in the courts may have reached a dead end, but the defense attorneys intend to use the reports in what may be Harris’ last hope--that Wilson will be moved to grant him clemency after a closed hearing April 15.

During four years in federal custody for driving a stolen car across state lines, virtually every aspect of Harris’ life found its way into reports. They begin in 1968, when a probation officer, detailing Harris’ first 15 years of life, labeled him a “homeless waif.” Even if his parents could be found, his situation would not be any brighter, “since they appear to be the cause of his delinquency,” the report said.

The first reports describe Harris as a polite and quiet youth. But after five months of incarceration, a psychiatrist was warning of a “complete psychotic break with reality.” The report describes Harris, then 16, as a “highly disturbed individual who presents an increasing threat to himself, the institution and his peers.”

“With this type of person,” the report concluded, “the staff can only do their best and hope for the rest.”

Psychologists reported that he told of visual hallucinations and voices that only he could hear. He believed he was one of the few who knew the truth about flying saucers, and had nightmares in which skulls bit his neck, according to the reports.

The reports also tell of a time when he broke a hand, then shattered the cast and pounded a punching bag with his broken hand. On another occasion, he inserted pieces of plastic so deeply into his penis that they had to be removed surgically.

In October, 1969, Harris for the first time was found to be suffering from “schizophrenia, chronic undifferentiated.” The diagnosis of schizophrenia was repeated several times in later evaluations. Over the years, he was placed on a variety of powerful antipsychotic drugs, including thorazine, mellaril and prolixin.

On Christmas Eve, 1969, Harris cut himself in an apparent suicide attempt. A search of his cell revealed scraps of letters with the salutation: Dear Mom. But the letters degenerated into scribblings. All that can be made out on one letter is the sentence “I will do it,” repeated at least five times.

He was hospitalized for two weeks. But his mental state only deteriorated, the reports said.

“This kid is going to continue cutting himself and one of these days will either slip or do the job right and we are not going to be able to prevent the inevitable results,” a report warned in July, 1970, after Harris had cut a wrist and tried to conceal it by covering himself with his bedsheets. An officer noticed the blood oozing through the sheet.

A search of his cell turned up a note scrawled in angry letters:

“I WILL . . . DIE . . . good-by . . . HELL . . . LOVE by MOM & Kids & Dad . . . SEE YOU ALL . . . IN HELL.”

In October, 1970, Harris was at the federal institution at Englewood, Colo., when he learned that his mother was in jail and four younger siblings were in foster homes. He pulled a knife on a guard in a failed escape. In an isolation cell, he cut himself again.

For treatment, he was sent to a medical prison at Springfield, Mo. There, with his wounds still bandaged, he stabbed himself with a pencil.

At the start of 1971, a prison psychiatrist at Springfield took an interest in Harris, gave him a battery of tests and three months of analysis. The psychiatrist who administered the tests described him as extremely bitter and hostile, highly unstable and in danger of deteriorating “into psychosis under stress.”

“As a result, he is always primed to explode and it takes very little to set him off,” the report said.

Attorneys seeking to save Harris, now 39, say the reports describe a mental cripple who received little or no treatment, and who did not become more stable as he aged. Without the ability to think clearly, the defense says, he could not have premeditated the crimes.

As a teen-ager, Harris was a “profoundly mentally ill young man who was at core schizophrenic,” said Dr. W. Douglas Skelton, a psychiatrist who examined Harris during his years of federal incarceration, in a statement for the defense.

Skelton, now dean of the medical school at Mercer University in Georgia, said that without long-term therapy, Harris’ condition would have worsened and left him “unable to understand and reflect upon the nature and gravity of his actions.”

Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor who studied Harris and perused the file for the defense, describes the mental deficiencies laid out in the reports as among the worst he has ever seen.

“It is about as dismal and serious a diagnosis as he could have,” said Haney, who has evaluated 100 people facing or convicted of murder. “These kinds of problems don’t go away. They get worse.”

Other experts in psychiatry, not involved with the Harris case, offered differing interpretations of the evidence about the mental state of the teen-age Harris. In part, their opinions reflect disagreements within the field of psychiatry over the nature and causes of schizophrenia.

The psychiatrists agreed that a person found to be schizophrenic might not necessarily be insane, as the term is defined by the courts. That is, a schizophrenic could know that what he was doing was wrong and be capable of controlling his actions.

“Most psychotics would be legally sane,” said Dr. Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Dr. Harry Kormos, a Berkeley psychiatrist with an interest in forensic psychiatry, argued that severe schizophrenia can on occasion rob a person of volition--causing him to believe that he was “punishing someone on a fantasy level” rather than committing murder.

Chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia--the federal psychiatrists’ diagnosis of the teen-age Harris--need not involve blatant symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions, Kormos said. Instead, it may signify only long-term difficulties in life--in getting along with oneself and others and in understanding the world.

Dr. Alfred Coodley, psychiatric consultant to the criminal division of the California Superior Court and to the California parole outpatient clinic, said such a person may simply have emotional responses that are inappropriate to the situations at hand.

Although experts said schizophrenia is officially “a lifetime diagnosis” that will not go away with time, Coodley said he believes it can come and go and others said it can slip into a chronic, inactive phase.

“The variability of the illness is big enough to allow for the patient to act in different ways at different points in his life,” said Kormos, who said he “would take it very seriously if a person at some point in their lives had been characterized as schizophrenic.”

Experts said the early diagnosis of schizophrenia is not inconsistent with Harris’ later diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. A person traumatized repeatedly during childhood could develop an antisocial personality before becoming schizophrenic.

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren shrugs off assertions about the murderer’s abusive rearing, brain damage and mental illness. Courts have decided the claims and jurors long ago heard about his hellish childhood, Lungren said.

“This case has been more than thoroughly reviewed,” said Lungren, whose deputies are in charge of arguing that Harris should be executed. Courts have “given a strong signal that they have reviewed this in its entirety, and it’s time to go forward.”

Times medical writer Janny Scott contributed to this story in Los Angeles.