NEWS ANALYSIS : Wilson View on Clemency Forged Out of a Conflict in Beliefs

As Gov. Pete Wilson weighed the fate of condemned murderer Robert Alton Harris, he faced a conflict between a pair of beliefs that have marked his long career in politics and his short tenure as California’s chief executive.

Wilson has made his support for the death penalty a central feature of his political persona--from his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1982 to his role in helping to oust California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird in 1986 to his race for governor in 1990.

But from the day he took office as governor 16 months ago, Wilson has relentlessly argued that drug and alcohol abuse by pregnant women, as well as child abuse, can have lasting, negative effects on the behavior of children and the adults they become.

Wilson has created programs to expand medical care for poor pregnant women, provide substance abuse counseling to teen-age girls, and offer mental health treatment in the schools to youngsters whose troubles are spotted by teachers or counselors.

Now, Wilson’s commitment to capital punishment came smack up against the real live case of a man whose brutal tendencies could be traced, apparently, to his mother’s use of alcohol while pregnant and the mental and physical abuse heaped upon him almost from the day he was born. According to the testimony, Harris’ father beat him unconscious several times and once tried to strangle him with a baby blanket.

Is such a man the victim of the kind of childhood trauma Wilson is seeking to prevent or the willful perpetrator of the kind of crime Wilson has always said should be punished by death?

In the end, the governor decided he was both.

After days of deliberation and two hours of discussion with experts for Harris and relatives of his victims, Wilson expressed compassion for what Harris went through as a child but denied the killer’s petition for clemency.

Unlike governors before him, Wilson did not simply issue a brief written statement announcing his decision. He disclosed his action live on statewide television Thursday, reading a detailed, three-page explanation of why he concluded that Harris should die for the 1978 murders of Michael Baker and John Mayeski in San Diego.

“The governor believed that all the parties involved as well as the people of California deserved to know the rationale that led to his decision,” said Dan Schnur, the governor’s communications director.

Wilson’s rationale was that the trauma Harris suffered as a child did not warrant a reduction in his sentence from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

From all accounts, Wilson took seriously the evidence supporting the diagnosis that Harris suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. During the clemency review hearing, the governor asked one expert who appeared for Harris about the circumference of Harris’ head, which can be an indicator of prenatal problems. He queried another about tests given Harris to measure possible damage to the frontal lobe of his brain.

“He took copious notes,” said Howard I. Friedman, the lead lawyer for Harris during the clemency proceeding. “He listened very intently. There wasn’t a moment of what appeared to me to be any wandering on his part of interest. It was a focused, concentrated interest.”

Although Wilson on Thursday was careful not to say that he believed Harris suffered from the disorder, the governor repeated his description of fetal alcohol syndrome as “child abuse through the umbilical cord” and noted that “far more vigorous measures” are needed to prevent it. He also acknowledged that Harris’ childhood was a “living nightmare.”

“He suffered monstrous child abuse that would have a brutalizing effect upon anyone,” Wilson said.

But in deciding to let the execution go forward, Wilson focused not on the broad question of whether Harris’ life should be spared because his brutal demeanor could be traced to his awful upbringing. Instead, he determined that Harris should not only be punished, but be put to death, because he had the capacity at the time of the murders to restrain himself, if he had wanted to.

In Harris’ conduct, Wilson found what he called “clear and chilling evidence” offsetting the materials on fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse offered by the Harris defense team.

“Harris planned a bank robbery for two months, practiced live-fire exercises, stole a car to avoid identification as a bank robber, and--most tragically--murdered two 16-year-old boys . . . to eliminate the witnesses who could connect him to the car theft and the bank robbery,” Wilson said. “And then he burned the robbery equipment and other evidence of the bank robbery.

“We must insist on the exercise of personal responsibility and restraint by those capable of exercising it,” Wilson said. “If we excuse those whose traumatic life experiences have injured them--but not deprived them of the capacity to exercise responsibility and restraint--we leave society dangerously at risk.

“The evidence of Robert Harris’ own victimization does not alter his responsibility for his acts.”