VENTURA : Courthouse Vigil to Protest Executions

The Ventura-Oxnard chapter of Amnesty International plans to hold a silent vigil at the Ventura County Courthouse to protest the death penalty today, five days before the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris.

The human rights organization held a similar vigil two years ago when Harris was to be executed in the gas chamber for the 1978 murders of two San Diego teen-agers. After a series of appeals further delayed the execution until April 2l, Amnesty International renewed its objections, calling the death penalty a violation of human rights.

“People’s human rights are not lost when they commit a crime,” said Bob Gips, local group coordinator for Amnesty International. “Killing the killer will not bring back the victim, nor will it deter others from committing similar crimes.”

Group spokesman Mark Zutkoff said Harris should not be executed because he was left without the capacity to judge right from wrong by a mother who drank while pregnant and a father who beat him when he was young.

However, the Ventura County district attorney’s office supports the death penalty as an appropriate punishment for certain crimes, said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr.

“Take a look at the cases where it’s been imposed in this county, and I believe that fair-minded people would conclude it’s been done judiciously, selectively and appropriately in each of those cases,” he said.

One such case resulted in the death penalty imposed two weeks ago on Gregory Scott Smith, 23, who pleaded guilty to charges that he kidnaped, raped and strangled an 8-year-old Northridge boy, then set fire to his body in Simi Valley in 1990.

“We who work with the survivors of homicide victims understand why so many people in California do support it as a punishment for taking another life,” O’Neill said. He declined to discuss the Harris sentence, saying that he is not familiar enough with all the issues being argued.