Day of Reckoning : Execution: Death penalty foes say they sense a new urgency as Harris’ date in the gas chamber approaches.

Thirty-two years ago, Lyle Grosjean was a college student yelling at Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. outside the Sacramento governor’s mansion, pleading in vain with him to spare Caryl Chessman from the San Quentin gas chamber.

Today Grosjean is an Episcopal priest in San Bruno trying to organize a daylong, 21-mile protest march from San Francisco to San Quentin on the eve of Robert Alton Harris’ scheduled execution.

“The lawyers have just about run out of their appeals, and it’s time for the church and the ethicists and the non-lawyers to really make a public witness,” Grosjean said.

As Harris’ April 21 execution date nears, people like Grosjean are mobilizing more urgently than they did in 1990, when Harris, the convicted killer of two San Diego teen-agers, came within hours of becoming the first person to be executed in California since 1967.

In Palo Alto, Claudia King, executive director of a human rights group founded by singer Joan Baez, has commissioned 501 cardboard tombstones--one for each person executed by the state of California--for a mock cemetery demonstration.

In Richmond, David Magris, an ex-Death Row inmate, is girding himself for the final-hours vigil at the gates of San Quentin--an experience he says is so emotionally stressful that he simply could not bring himself to go there in 1990.

In San Francisco, George Wesolek, the head of the San Francisco Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s Peace and Justice Commission, is trying to organize a mass anti-death-penalty statement by 100 Northern California clergymen.

And in Castro Valley, Tom and Rita Freres, a middle-aged couple whose opposition to the death penalty has led them to visit a number of men on Death Row, are altering their vacations.

“We’re coming back from Missouri two days earlier than we planned, so that if there is an execution we’ll be at that vigil at the gate,” Rita Freres said.

On the night that Harris is scheduled to die, people like these--some veterans of the 1990 struggle, others strangers to one another--will meld into a morose crowd that activists expect to number 500 to 1,000. Their numbers will probably overwhelm the main street of tiny San Quentin Village, a few dozen old, rustic homes with a breathtaking view of San Pablo Bay.

So far, the vigil outside the prison is being maintained by a 79-year-old former Social Security office worker who calls himself Eldred. He sleeps in an old Volvo and has painted a sign on an old blue plastic tarp: “Don’t Kill Them. Put Them to Work on the Infrastructure.”

Pat Orr, the president of the village homeowners association, is more worried about the expected crush of demonstrators than Harris’ fate.

“I have a nightmare that at the time of the execution all hell will break lose,” said Orr, who lives a few houses from the prison gate. “People will start rioting. There is an emotional frenzy that’s going to develop around that.”

In a house just beyond Orr’s lives Richard Merman, who like a number of residents is making a quick buck by renting out space in his driveway to television networks that want to park their equipment trucks near the main gate. Merman is sending the money to a group working against the execution.

“I have been dreading this (execution) as long as I’ve been living here,” said Merman, the owner of a truck repair business who moved to the village in 1974.

The 1990 vigil at San Quentin turned into something of a celebration when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal judge’s stay of execution order 12 hours before Harris was to die.

This time, death penalty opponents have almost nothing to cling to beyond an April 15 clemency hearing before Gov. Pete Wilson, who has refused to consider new evidence of Harris’ abuse-filled childhood.

“We’re still hopeful Robert Harris’ life will be saved, but I think people are going to realize as it comes down to the wire that (a reprieve) is not something we can pull out every two years,” said Pat Clark, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, a 4-year-old, Oakland-based organization that has become the clearinghouse for a variety of rallies, leafletting and marches throughout the state.

On Wednesday, two dozen pickets, most of them members of Clark’s and King’s groups, marched through San Francisco’s Civic Center, stopping first at the state and federal court buildings where Harris lost a string of legal appeals, and then at the governor’s San Francisco office to plead for clemency.

Rita Freres, marching with her husband and holding a sign reading “Let One Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone,” said she senses less support for Harris now than in 1990. One measure, she said, is that she has been less successful at persuading acquaintances to sign a petition asking for clemency.

“I went to a square dance and barbecue the other night, and someone I know came up and said, ‘Was that you on TV . . . I don’t believe it!’ and walked away,” Freres said. “Someone else came up and said, ‘How would you feel if your daughter was raped and murdered?’ . . . But we believe nobody is beyond being redeemed. We feel that only God has the right to judge.”

Former Death Row inmate Magris, a murderer who was paroled in 1985 and is chairman of the Northern California Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said he is seeing more citizen activity than in 1990.

“Now that the appeals are gone, you sense the urgency. But it’s a shame. You get down to the last few pages of the book and you know how it’s going to end,” said Magris, who spent three years on San Quentin’s Death Row in the early 1970s before the state’s death penalty law was overturned.

As in 1990, sympathetic clergymen are trying to arrange a telephone call to Wilson from Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize-winning missionary, who phoned former Gov. George Deukmejian two years ago to urge clemency.

Some anti-death-penalty clergymen also are encouraging discussion of the issue in weekly religious services. But the Rev. Ben Fraticelli, director of the Northern California Ecumenical Council, said many will not raise the issue.

“Average clergymen don’t take stands. The ones who take stands are the ones who have the strongest views or are willing to risk the conflict. That’s not average,” he said.