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Arizona Executes Killer; State Gripped by Grisly Accounts

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

A prolonged death penalty battle with strong legal and historical resemblance to California’s pending execution of Robert Alton Harris ended early Monday when a 43-year-old man was put to death in Arizona’s gas chamber for killing three businessmen in 1980.

Don Eugene Harding became the first person executed in Arizona since 1963 and the 10th person executed in the West since the U.S. Supreme Court authorized states to resume executions in 1976. Nationwide, 168 people in 19 states have been executed in that period.

Reaction in Arizona to Harding’s execution may be a preview of what Californians will experience this month when the debate over capital punishment gives way to the state’s first execution in 25 years.

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People in Arizona were gripped by detailed accounts from several Arizona reporters--witnesses to the execution--who described a 10-minute, 31-second ordeal in which Harding gasped, made an obscene hand gesture, strained and convulsed before he was pronounced dead.

The amount of time it took for Harding to die was considered routine for an execution by gas or other method, such as lethal injection. But in a news conference after the midnight execution, Cameron Harper, a television anchorman for the local ABC affiliate, said Harding’s death was a surprisingly gruesome process that underscored the need for Arizona to shift to another form of execution, such as lethal injection, in which the prisoner is more quickly rendered unconscious.

Of the 36 states with death penalty statutes, only five--Arizona, California, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio--permit the gas chamber.

“It was an ugly event,” a shaken Harper said a few minutes after Harding died. “We put animals to death more humanely than this guy.”

Later, on his 5 p.m. newscast Monday, Harper said he had crossed the line from journalist to personal opinion but felt compelled to “offer more than a clinical description.”

Some of the other eight news media witnesses disagreed, saying they had expected worse than they saw.

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After sunrise, talk-radio shows were filled with arguments made more vivid by the execution, although seldom changed by it.

One listener, a man named Bill, having heard Harper’s criticism, telephoned his response.

The reason horses are killed more quickly than Harding is that “horses don’t kill anybody,” Bill said.

An Arizona poll last week showed support for capital punishment slipping, to 67% from 77% last year. Atty. Gen. Grant Woods, who witnessed Harding’s execution, said the shift was to be expected as people reconsidered their opinions about the death penalty as the first execution in many citizens’ lifetime approached.

In Phoenix on Monday, a random sampling of residents found continued support for the death penalty but widespread agreement that the gas chamber should be abandoned in favor of lethal injection.

Karen Bays, a 34-year-old mother, said she had supported the death penalty but that details of Harding’s death left her with mixed feelings.

“I was pretty disgusted by it,” she said.

Greg Tomas, 29, a park maintenance worker, said reports of Harding’s suffering did not move him.

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“What if it was your wife or child he had killed?” he said. “I don’t think I’d want him killed painlessly. I’d want him to suffer a little bit.”

Steve Twist, Arizona’s former assistant attorney general who supports the death penalty, said he believes the Harding execution, which he called “an awful, solemn way” of punishment, would increase support for executions by injection.

Arizona began using the gas chamber in 1933 after an obese murderess was accidentally decapitated at the gallows.

California is scheduled to execute Harris, the killer of two San Diego teen-agers, in the San Quentin Prison gas chamber April 21. It would be the first California execution since 1967.

Similarities in the cases of Harris and the Arizona killer include a lengthy course of appeals through federal courts. Harding’s death marked the first contested execution allowed within the jurisdiction of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals since the Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling.

In California, Harris’ lawyers are seeking clemency by contending that he is a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome and was severely abused as a child. Harding’s Arizona lawyers blamed his crimes on mental illness from a difficult childbirth.

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They said Harding was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, a brain-damaging, choking effect that lasted 90 minutes because the doctor who was supposed to deliver Harding arrived late because of a car breakdown.

In a series of appeals by Harding to state and federal courts, which continued until minutes before cyanide pellets were dropped into a bowl of sulfuric acid to release the gas that killed him, attorneys argued that he was subject to uncontrollable impulses of rage.

Hours after the execution, the state Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill to eliminate the death penalty for the mentally ill or prisoners under 18.

The Arizona crimes for which Harding was sentenced to die--crimes prosecutors said were well-planned, rather than impulsive--were the murders of businessmen Robert Wise of Mesa and Martin Concannon of Tucson. They were robbed, hogtied, beaten and shot in a Tucson hotel in 1980.

Harding also was sentenced for the death of another man who was killed in the same fashion in a Phoenix motel the day before. Harding had been linked to at least three other slayings, one in Arkansas and two in California.

As the scheduled 12:05 a.m. execution approached, about 100 death penalty opponents held a quiet candlelight vigil on a field at the edge of the prison grounds, half a mile from the main gate. In the final half-hour, they formed a circle, sang hymns and prayed silently.

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One participant, Faith McMahon, a 31-year-old nurse who drove from Phoenix, said sympathy for Harding had nothing to do with it.

“Those were heinous crimes,” McMahon said. “He’s a vicious killer who should be put in prison for the rest of his life. I don’t have sympathy for him. It’s not this particular man, it’s the whole idea that we as a society can remain so barbaric.”

A block away, on a street corner outside a motel, a small group of Florence residents shrieked and cheered in celebration of the coming execution.

“They try to justify what he did because he had mental problems. Hey, everybody has mental problems just trying to live in this crazy world,” said 18-year-old Marybelle Urias, who recently moved from Los Angeles to Florence, a small town 60 miles southeast of Phoenix. “You kill, you deserve to die.”

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