Wilson Rejects Plea of Mercy for Harris : Capital punishment: Murderer’s lawyers are seeking a court to stay his execution, scheduled in four days.

Gov. Pete Wilson rejected condemned murderer Robert Alton Harris’ plea for mercy Thursday, sending Harris’ lawyers looking for a court that would stay the execution scheduled to take place in less than four days.

Speaking live to a statewide television audience, Wilson said that despite Harris’ childhood suffering at the hands of alcoholic and abusive parents, he should suffer the ultimate penalty for murdering two San Diego teen-agers in 1978.

“As great as is my compassion for Robert Harris the child, I cannot excuse or forgive the choice made by Robert Harris the man,” the governor said in denying clemency.

Wilson cited “clear and chilling evidence of his (Harris’) capacity to think, to conceive a plan, to understand the consequence of his actions, to dissemble and deceive and destroy evidence.”

He cited testimony from the trial 13 years ago that Harris stole a car belonging to John Mayeski for use in a bank robbery, then killed Mayeski and his best friend, Michael Baker, “to eliminate the witnesses (who could) connect him to the car theft and bank robbery.”

“Robert Harris the child had no choice--he was a victim of serious and inexcusable abuse,” Wilson said. “Robert Harris the man did have a choice. He chose to take a life, two lives.”

After reading his statement, the governor left without answering questions. He had spent the day cloistered with his legal affairs secretary working on the carefully worded statement, in part to ensure that there could be no successful suit challenging his action.

With Harris scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, a lawsuit was expected to be filed today in federal court, probably focusing on a contention that death by lethal gas is a cruel and inhumane form of punishment.

Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeal court with jurisdiction over California, has ever decided the question, attorneys say. In 1983, another federal appeals court, deciding a Mississippi case, cited detailed evidence about the effects of cyanide gas but did not find that use of gas was unconstitutional.

In a statement issued moments after Wilson spoke, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren called the governor’s decision “courageous,” and said state prosecutors are prepared for “last-minute attempts to delay further the imposition of Robert Alton Harris’ sentence.”

In San Diego, Sharron Mankins, 48, the mother of Michael Baker, cried as she listened to the governor on her car radio while riding home from a shopping trip.

“Today is a joyous day,” she said. “I’m very pleased with the governor’s decision. With all his compassion, he did make the right decision.”

Anton Mayeski, 39, a brother of the slain teen-ager, watched the governor on television at his Ramona business. “It’s a huge relief,” he said.

Relatives of Harris and his defense team could not be reached for comment after the governor’s announcement.

At San Quentin on Thursday, Harris received several visitors and was moved to a new cell on Death Row, an elevator’s ride from the gas chamber, prison spokesman Lt. Vernel Crittendon said. Most of Harris’ personal belongings were taken from him as part of the ritual designed to prepare the inmate to accept his death without a struggle.

Correctional officers also began a round-the-clock watch to ensure that Harris does not attempt suicide and maintains emotional composure in what may be his final days.

Harris’ lawyers are expected today to urge a Marin County Superior Court judge to force San Quentin to allow the Rev. Leon Harris, a Southern Baptist minister from Alabama and a second cousin of the condemned, to be present with him in his final hours.

The suit also seeks to permit Harris’ sister, Brenda, defense lawyer Michael Laurence, a psychiatrist, and others to be with him in his final moments--over the warden’s objections.

“He sounds real sad,” Brenda Harris said Wednesday, noting that she has been speaking regularly by phone to him. He wishes he could change what happened, she said, and “hates having to put everyone through this.”

Wilson reached his decision a day after meeting separately with Harris’ advocates and relatives the teen-age victims, who were killed July 5, 1978.

Barring a last-minute court stay, four relatives will attend Tuesday’s execution, the first in California since 1967. Baker’s father, Stephen Baker, a San Diego police officer who took part in Harris’ arrest in 1978, said he would pull the lever releasing the cyanide pellets into the gas chamber if that’s what it would take.

He and Mankins, his former wife, were among five surviving relatives who addressed the governor Wednesday. In all, 11 members of the Baker and Mayeski families traveled to the Capitol to ask that Wilson not stop the execution.

Mayeski’s mother died 11 months ago. His father also is dead. Mayeski and Baker would have turned 30 this year.

In the clemency hearing, Harris, 39, was represented by three lawyers plus experts on child abuse, brain damage and fetal alcohol syndrome--including Kenneth L. Jones, a UC San Diego researcher who first identified the syndrome. The experts say people such as Harris who suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome act impulsively without consideration of consequences.

Harris’ brothers and sisters say he also endured terrible beatings as a child from a father who knocked him unconscious and tried to strangle him with a baby blanket. Psychiatrists analyzing him while he was incarcerated in federal juvenile facilities for stealing a car said he was schizophrenic.

Long familiar with the research on fetal alcohol syndrome, Wilson began reviewing the material submitted by the defense at the end of last week, and also reread books and other material he had gathered on the topic.

Wilson acknowledged Thursday that the defense presented him with evidence that “adequately demonstrates Harris’ childhood was a living nightmare,” and said the state needs to take stronger measures to prevent child abuse, and drug abuse by pregnant women.

But in the end, Wilson, who was mayor of San Diego at the time of the killings, turned to the evidence presented by prosecutors from his hometown. He concluded that the “monstrous abuse” heaped upon Harris did not rob him of the “the capacity to premeditate, plan or to understand the consequences of his actions.”

Prosecutors note that many, and perhaps most, of California’s other 330 condemned prisoners could seek commutations based on similar claims of mental impairment or child abuse.

A condemned inmate among the next group likely to be executed, Melvin Wade, says it was not he who killed his stepdaughter but his alternate personality, Othello.

According to the California Constitution, Wilson could have used whatever criteria he deemed appropriate to grant clemency. But he would have needed state Supreme Court approval to commute Harris’ sentence, and might have faced a backlash from the public.

A Los Angeles Times Poll this week found that seven in 10 residents of Southern California favor the death penalty for murderers. Only 19% said they oppose executions. Other polls in recent years have found a similar level of support throughout California.

Harris’ plea for mercy came at a time when governors nationwide rarely invoke their powers of clemency. From 1987 to 1990, years in which 75 inmates were executed, the nation’s governors commuted only three death sentences.

In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when juries regularly called for the death penalty, judicial review was swift, and executions were more common, governors granted clemency in as many as 30% of all death sentences.

A 1989 Yale Law Review article, citing the declining number of grants of clemency in capital cases, said it “has become unavailable in practice, largely as a result of the popularity of the death penalty.”

Times staff writer Alan Abrahamson in San Diego contributed to this story.