Arizona Prepares Gas Chamber as Final Appeals Seem Doomed

The room has been cleaned and checked, equipment has been tested and the invitations have gone out, but the occasion that Arizona officials are preparing for is a grim one--the state’s first execution in nearly 30 years.

Don E. Harding, 43, who has confessed to seven slayings in four states, is scheduled to be led into Arizona’s gas chamber at five minutes after midnight Sunday.

Although other Death Row inmates have had false alarms in recent years and there is a chance for a surprise stay of execution, many officials believe that Harding has reached the end of his appeals. “There’s no reason why he should not be executed,” said Crane McClennen, an assistant state attorney general who is an expert on Arizona’s death penalty laws.

If the execution takes place, it will come 15 days before killer Robert Alton Harris is to be put to death in California’s gas chamber.

Harding’s name has traversed an 18-foot chart the attorney general’s office uses to map the appellate routes a condemned prisoner can use. Because the case has been through the state court system twice and is on its second round through the federal system, Arizona prosecutors believe last-minute appeals will fail.

“We are in the countdown mode and all systems are go,” said state Department of Corrections spokesman Michael Arra.

The department has even obtained the necessary environmental permit--something unheard of in 1963, the last time the gas chamber in the prison at Florence was used.

Harding’s case has been on appeal since 1982, when he was sentenced to die for the slayings of two Tucson men. A death sentence for the killing of a Phoenix businessman is in earlier appellate stages.

Court records show that Harding, an Arkansas native, spent most of his life institutionalized or behind bars. After escaping from an Arkansas jail while awaiting trial on a murder charge, Harding allegedly went on a cross-country crime rampage robbing, kidnaping and murdering. He has admitted slaying seven people in Arizona, Arkansas, Texas and California, but authorities suspect him of nine slayings in all.

In the Arizona cases, Harding went to motels in Phoenix and Tucson in January, 1980, gaining entrance to two rooms by posing as a security guard. He was convicted of killing and robbing Allan Gage in Phoenix and Robert Wise and Mark Concannon in Tucson. In Phoenix, Harding bound and gagged his victim, who died from slow asphyxiation. The Tucson men were hogtied, beaten and shot at close range.

Defense attorneys want the execution postponed so they can present evidence that Harding--who represented himself in court--is brain-damaged and not capable of controlling his aggressions. Prosecutors say that Harding is a cold, calculating killer whose mental capacities have been adequately examined over the years.

After a Tucson federal judge refused to grant a stay Wednesday, defense counsel approached the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which is expected to hear the case today.

Paul McMurdie, chief counsel for the criminal appeals section of the attorney general’s office, said that if the three-member panel rejects Harding’s appeal, defense attorneys can ask any of the other 24 judges to grant a stay so that a hearing can be held. Both sides are prepared to take Harding’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court this weekend.

Meanwhile, the Arizona parole board was to consider Harding’s case this morning and is planning to stand by for the final three hours Sunday night in the event of a last-minute request for a rehearing.

Harding is scheduled to be moved from his Death Row cell to a guarded room in the prison’s death house at 4 p.m. Saturday. On Sunday, he will be allowed to eat his last meal and visit with family or clergy members. If his appeals fail, he will be led into the gas chamber clad only in boxer shorts at 12:05 a.m. Monday. After he is strapped into place, cyanide pellets will be dropped into a bowl of distilled water and sulfuric acid beneath his chair.

Harding, who made his only public comments so far to the Los Angeles Times, said via a cassette tape that his attorneys have advised him not to discuss his case. But he did answer one question--what he might order as a last meal.

“I’m thinking about ordering a cyanide antidote with a side order of Rolaids,” he said.