COLUMN ONE : A Precise Procedure for Killing : The schedule for Robert Alton Harris’ final days is designed to make brutal killers meek and malleable for their execution. Thirty-four pages spell out the ritual in chilling detail.

It’s called Procedure 769, a blandly bureaucratic and mundane title that belies its grim content. In precise detail, over 34 pages, the document describes how the people of California will carry out their first execution by lethal gas in a generation.

Honed by years of dry runs, Procedure 769 sets out the ritual of death and enumerates everything the execution team could conceivably need. Six spare light bulbs, two heart monitors, three sets of rubber gloves, eight square feet of cheesecloth. Even scissors, to cut the cloth in the shape of a sack to hold the sodium cyanide pellets.

In just over a week, barring a stay, Procedure 769 will be used to tick down the final hours in the life of Robert Alton Harris. His last meal--he requested Kentucky Fried Chicken, two pizzas without anchovies, Pepsi and jelly beans--must be served at 6 p.m. The spiritual adviser will arrive by 7. Sodas, a television, a radio, cigarettes all must be available for the inmate’s asking.

As the countdown to the 12:01 a.m. execution reaches 30 minutes, guards will call the phone company for the accurate time, and set the two clocks outside the death chamber. At 15 minutes, officers will take the prisoner’s clothes, and hand him his execution uniform: a pair of blue jeans, a blue shirt, a heart monitor, nothing more.

The ritual is all part of what criminal justice professor Robert Johnson of American University in Washington calls the “disturbingly, even chillingly, dispassionate” process of modern executions.

In his 1990 book, “Death Work,” Johnson writes that the overriding goal of officers who must carry out death sentences is that the execution “go off without any human feeling.” After a last meal, a last visit, a final cigarette, perhaps, finally, some tears, inmates usually become resigned to their fates. Brutal killers become meek and malleable for their final walks.

“The irony,” Johnson said in an interview, “is that the more professional you make this process the more coldblooded it becomes.”

Of course, it does not always go so smoothly. Electric chairs have misfired. In states that use lethal injections, technicians have had to grope for usable veins. A few inmates fight futilely. This week, Don Eugene Harding, who killed seven times, raised his middle finger as he sat in Arizona’s gas chamber, and became the first person that state had executed in 29 years.

But for the most part, the ritualized process works. In the annals of San Quentin, only a handful of the 194 people executed by lethal gas have put up struggles. A particularly skinny man, Leanderess Riley, managed to squirm free of the restraints in 1953. Guards strapped him back in, tighter. Another murderer tried to beat the executioner by slitting his throat just before his 1956 date with death. A physician hastily stopped the bleeding and the inmate was executed.

The Harris execution will be carried out by a team of San Quentin guards, all of them volunteers, all with only a small personal role to fill. With the jobs spread around there is no single executioner, no individual who must endure responsibility for carrying out the state’s ultimate sanction.

Warden Daniel Vasquez, a veteran of 30 years in the prison system, and the one execution team member who is publicly known, arrived at San Quentin in 1984 to find no written plan for carrying out executions. He brought in retired execution team members, toured other states that have carried out executions, and pieced together Procedure 769.

Without specific, step-by-step directions, an execution would “lack the somber (tone) that the ritual requires,” Vasquez said. The key to the plan is that the officers are shielded from the emotion of the event.

“There is one person who is not to survive the ritual of the execution, and that is the condemned inmate,” says Vasquez. “We have to survive. We have to go back to our families.”

The last state-sanctioned killing at this aging bastille on San Francisco Bay came on April 12, 1967, and it was one to remember. After Gov. Ronald Reagan refused a last plea for clemency, Aaron Mitchell seemed to crack. He slit his wrists and ranted through the night that he was Jesus Christ. As he died, the murderer of a Sacramento police officer again mouthed the words, “I am Jesus Christ.”

Through the middle 1960s, executions were common on Friday mornings at San Quentin. The ritual dictated 10 a.m., which gave courts a last hour to meet on any last-minute appeals. No one around San Quentin is sure why Friday was execution day, though it is noted that wardens often would leave for long weekends after their duties were done.

There was so little outside interest in most executions that the warden occasionally had to ask his underlings to serve among the 12 official witnesses required by state law. Officers did not covet the duty. But Black Fridays were part of the routine, says Louis (Red) Nelson, 82, a former warden who witnessed “countless” executions.

“It didn’t need rehearsal. It had been done so many times, it was all automatic,” said Nelson, a captain, associate warden and warden at San Quentin over a 25-year span ending in 1975.

On their last nights, prisoners would steel themselves by listening to music, nervously talking to death watch officers, smoking, playing cards. Two spent their final night watching the old show, “You Bet Your Life.”

Most had little to say. Few had any appetite.

Decades later, memories that Nelson does not relish stick with him. There was the prisoner he knew as “Soldier,” who had served under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in World War II. Executed shortly before President Eisenhower’s inauguration, Soldier carried a photo of his commander with him, and set it at the gas chamber door.

Back then, “inmates all knew who the executioner was,” Nelson said, and the prison was not locked down on Black Friday. This time, prisoners will be kept in their cells for the day leading up to the event.

Now, under Procedure 769, executions will be on Tuesdays, giving defense lawyers all day Monday to press appeals. The time will be a minute past midnight to ensure that protesters will not disrupt Marin County’s morning commute.

As a new era of executions draws close, details of Harris’ crimes are never far from Vasquez’s mind. Nor are the terrible effects on the victims’ families.

“He’s the executioner, not me,” Vasquez says, recalling Harris’ cold-hearted murders of two 16-year-old boys on July 5, 1978. “People fix on the ‘executioner.’ They feel bad for this person. How quickly they forget the victims.”

Last month, after a judge set Harris’ execution date, Vasquez carried out one of the first steps of Procedure 769 by summoning Harris and presenting him with the execution order. Harris had just stepped off the exercise yard and was fit and talkative.

“He understood that I had a job to do,” Vasquez said. “He said if it was his time, it was his time. “

Officers then moved Harris to a new cell, an elevator’s ride from the pale green gas chamber, and began logging his movements in hourly reports.

Starting on Thursday, the guards will keep logs at 15-minute intervals. On execution night, their watch will be constant, their control total.

Harris may by law invite five people to his death. He has not made his final selections, Vasquez said. Two years ago, when Harris won a stay days before his scheduled execution, he invited one of his lawyers; an older brother, Randy; a writer who befriended him; a prison officer, and the wife of a fellow prisoner.

Besides his final meal, Harris also must decide who gets his body. The prison will pay $200 toward costs. Under the ritualized tradition of execution, Harris will be granted last requests within reason. In 1990, he asked that prisoners on Death Row get ice cream as his treat. The prison was willing, so long as he could come up with the money. His writer friend, Michael Kroll, offered to pay.

On Thursday, officers will box up Harris’ pictures, letters, and other belongings, except legal material. He can ask for an item at a time.

On Monday, April 20, if no stay is issued Harris will be moved to the death watch cell. There, officers will take on the job of keeping him on schedule, moving him though a final set of steps that ends with his walk into the gas chamber.

Guards will cater to his needs partly for humanitarian reasons, but also because “contented inmates are easier to keep under control,” Johnson says. Prisoners often cry after their last meal. By the time he gets his final change of clothes, the prisoner knows he is marked as a man ready for execution, Johnson has found.

“They wait meekly to be escorted to their deaths,” he writes.

Half an hour before the appointed hour, Vasquez will take his place at the gas chamber, and signal that Harris be given a final change of clothes. Before he puts the shirt on, a cardiac monitor will be placed over his heart.

All the while, telephone lines to the governor’s office and the state Supreme Court will remain open.

Unless a call comes through, Vasquez will signal his officers to bring the inmate to the gas chamber and strap him down. A single light bulb will burn. Two of the eight windows will be covered by Venetian blinds, behind which the executioner stands. The guards will leave, close the heavy steel door, turn the spoked wheel that seals the capsule.

At a minute after midnight, Vasquez expects to issue his final command: Lower the immersion lever.

The gas is colorless, but a white vapor will rise when the cheesecloth bag disintegrates upon hitting the acid. The prisoner will take a breath or two. His lungs will become paralyzed. He will lose consciousness.

Death comes in 10 to 15 minutes.

Execution in California

California’s gas chamber was installed at San Quentin prison in 1937 to replace the gallows. There have been 190 men and four women executed by hydrogen cyanide gas, none since 1967.

The Gas Chamber: Background

During the 1930s, Warden James B. (Big Jim) Holohan complained that hangings he was forced to conduct were gruesome and inhumane. After he retired and was elected to the state Senate, Holohan sponsored the law that adopted killing by gas. Eaton Metal Products Co. of Colorado installed the chamber, which cost $5,000.

The Countdown to Execution

The prisoner is taken from Death Row to a ground-floor cell near the gas chamber seven and one-half hours before the execution. No visitors are allowed except the warden and prison chaplain. Guards keep a continuous watch.

About six hours before the scheduled execution, the prisoner is given a last meal. “Reasonable” last requests are accommodated. When about 15 minutes remain, the condemned is provided with a new pair of denim trousers and blue shirt to wear.

A) The green, eight-sided chamber is equipped with a pair of metal seats.

B) At the scheduled time, the prisoner is walked in by guards and strapped into one of two seats, marked A and B, facing toward the door. A heart monitor is attached.

C) The hatch-like door is closed and sealed.

D) Viewing windows for the witnesses look in from all sides except the door.

E) When the warden issues the execution order, a mixture of distilled water and sulfuric acid is piped into a reservoir under the gas chamber seat. Suspended above the reservoir is a cheesecloth packet filled with sodium cyanide granules. At the warden’s command, the granules are lowered into the reservoir, releasing the lethal gas. Soon after breathing the cyanide gas, the prisoner loses consciousness. Death by asphyxiation takes about 10 minutes.

F) Afterward, the chamber is purged of the poison gas, and a chamber containing a solution of caustic soda and water is used to flush out the reservoir under the seat. The body is removed.

The Numbers

Following are the numbers of executions in California over the years: 1893-1909*: 83 1910-1929: 124 1930-1949: 190 1950-1967**: 104

The Method

By hanging San Quentin Folsom Total Male 215 92 307 Female O O O By lethal gas Male 190 O 190 Female 4 O 4

* The first state-conducted execution was held in 1893.

** There have been no executions since 1967.

Lethal gas replaced hanging for those sentenced after Aug. 26, 1937. However, the state continued to execute by hanging those sentenced before that date. The last state hanging was held on May 1, 1942, at Folsom.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, California Department of Corrections, San Quentin Prison .

Compiled by Times editorial researcher Michael Meyers.