Can There Be Real Justice in Ending Such a Hateful Life? : Executing a vile murderer such as Harris is not the answer

Robert Alton Harris is a pathetic misfit who committed two murders of almost unthinkable cruelty. For those killings, he is scheduled to die in California’s gas chamber just after midnight Tuesday morning. There will be widespread, and perfectly understandable, satisfaction at that harsh denouement of a 13-year legal process. But will there be real justice? As with other cases where capital punishment is imposed, we have doubts and concerns.

Snuffing out Harris’ life will not restore the lives of the two San Diego teen-agers, John Mayeski and Michael Baker, whom he robbed and shot to death in 1978. Nor can his death make whole again the lives of their bereaved families and friends.

Studies in this country and abroad have repeatedly demonstrated over the years that the death penalty does not have any appreciable effect in deterring other criminals from murdering.

Once Harris is dead, there is no guarantee that the death penalty will be imposed any more consistently or fairly than it ever has been. It will most likely still be imposed more often on the poor than on the well-to-do, more on racial and ethnic minorities than on whites, more on men than on women. There is certainly no justice there.

All of those sad, but undeniable, realities are why this newspaper has opposed the death penalty over many years. They can most succinctly be summed up in the words of former Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, who held “that the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment.”

But we are acutely aware that reasonable and well-meaning people can differ with this view. There is a sense of fierce frustration that pushes a crime-weary public to feel avenged by putting violent criminals like Harris to death. Clearly Gov. Pete Wilson, who held a clemency hearing for Harris this week and decided to go forward with the execution, made a decision reflecting a broad public consensus. And, that decision could not have been made easily by the governor, who, somber-faced, announced his decision Thursday evening.

But, all that said, there is yet one more reason to be concerned that there will be no final justice in Harris’ execution. For, in imposing the ultimate penalty on a convicted murderer for the first time in 25 years, the State of California will be doing so in a case whose outcome is tainted by lingering medical and legal questions.

Despite the fact the Harris case has been in the courts for 13 years, those questions were finally and fully aired only this week--when Wilson, much to his credit, given the fact he is a long-time supporter of the death penalty, held the Harris clemency hearing.

There, attorneys argued that Harris, the abused and abandoned son of an alcoholic mother and an almost pathologically cruel father, suffers from organic brain damage and other mental problems as a result of severe fetal alcohol syndrome. Medical experts testified that this syndrome was not discovered until the late 1970s and not widely introduced in litigation prior to 1989, well after Harris was convicted of murder.

They argued that if this new medical evidence had been available to the jury that condemned Harris, the outcome might have been different. Instead of being sent to the gas chamber, Harris would likely have been ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole--a sentence that public opinion polls have indicated a majority of Americans consider an acceptable alternative to capital punishment, and a sentence that is particularly appropriate in Harris’ case.

Anyone who has studied the life history that led Harris toward the gas chamber cannot help but be struck that this wretch of a man has attempted suicide, or otherwise mutilated himself, on more than 30 occasions. As far back as his teen-age years, prison psychiatrists saw him as a potentially dangerous schizophrenic. If nothing else, his case must be studied to better understand how we can better keep his ilk away from society at large. Even those who may simply want vengeance on Harris might realize that life imprisonment for such a murderous and self-hating man, with his many personal demons, is as harsh a punishment as anyone could imagine.