Another Harris Please for a Reprieve Fails : Execution: Lawyers still scramble to try to win a stay. Victims’ family members prepare to see the killer die.

Condemned killer Robert Alton Harris, who showed no mercy to the two boys he murdered 14 years ago, lost one plea Saturday for a reprieve as his attorneys continued to look for a federal judge who will extend his life.

Harris, who has two days to live before his scheduled execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber, lost one plea before a federal judge in San Diego who observed that the murderer “has had his day in court many days over.”

The killer’s lawyers, however, held out hope he might win a last-minute stay on Easter eve from another federal judge in San Francisco. Moving on two legal fronts in their bid to save his life, they also prepared to appeal both cases to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

At the same time, protests against the death penalty began to gather momentum in the Bay Area. On San Francisco’s Marina Green, nearly 500 people lay down on the grass with mock tombstones to symbolize the 501 people executed in California’s history.

“I have not given up hope yet,” insisted Pat Clark, executive director of Death Penalty Focus of California, the state’s leading anti-death-penalty group. “There’s still time for a miracle.”

If no judge grants a last-minute stay, Harris will be executed at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, becoming the first person executed in California in 25 years. Harris, 39, was convicted of murdering two 16-year-old San Diego boys, John Mayeski and Michael Baker, in 1978 so he could use their car in a bank robbery.

While Harris’ attorneys and opponents of capital punishment hoped for an 11th-hour reprieve, the families of the two victims prepared to see Harris die.

Four relatives have been selected by prison officials to watch the execution. Marilyn Clark, Mayeski’s sister, will be there. So will Baker’s father, Steve Baker, his mother, Sharron Mankins, and a sister, Linda Herring.

“I’ve been suffering for 13 1/2 years,” said Herring. “Harris has been sentenced. He ought to pay. It’s time. He should suffer.”

For years, Steve Baker has been the most outspoken of the survivors. Now, as Harris nears execution once again, a number of relatives from both families have taken a higher-profile stance in urging that the execution go forward.

“It’s very simple,” Mankins said. “We are eager to get our word out because we are frustrated, frustrated enough to talk about it. Enough is enough.”

With a clear recollection of their disappointment two years ago when Harris was spared by a federal judge only days before his scheduled execution, the families are ready for anything, Herring said.

“This is the furthest we’ve ever gotten in the process,” Herring said. “Still, they could put (Harris) in that chair and strap him in and stop it right there. How’d you like to be in that position if you were us? How would you like to deal with that?”

In their last-ditch bid to save Harris’ life, his attorneys are pursuing two separate legal avenues to halt the execution.

In San Francisco, a hearing was scheduled for Saturday night on a civil rights class action suit filed on behalf of all the inmates of Death Row contending that death in the gas chamber is a “cruel and unusual” punishment, and as such is outlawed by the U.S. Constitution.

In the San Diego case, his attorneys argued Saturday morning that Harris suffered from serious mental illness at the time of the murders, an even stronger claim about his mental deterioration than in earlier appeals.

Senior U.S. District Judge Howard B. Turrentine in San Diego, however, was unmoved by Harris’ contention that he was mentally ill when he killed the two boys and rejected the appeal.

Defense lawyers promised to take the case as soon as possible to the federal appeals court, perhaps as early as Saturday night.

“I’m too numb to be discouraged,” said defense lawyer Charles M. Sevilla of San Diego. “We’re disappointed but we’re going to go forward. We’ve been here before. A number of things could happen.”

Earlier court challenges had contended Harris was a victim of emotional and physical abuse as a child that left him sane but unable to control his murderous impulses.

The new appeal centers on more than 800 pages of recently unearthed records that show doctors--in jailhouse examinations from 1969 to 1972--had diagnosed Harris’ condition as serious brain damage, including schizophrenia, Sevilla said.

San Diego prosecutors, Harris’s trial attorney and the medical experts who examined Harris before the 1978 trial never saw any of the documents, Sevilla said. If they had, his attorney almost certainly would have argued that Harris was legally insane at the time of the killings.

However, Turrentine ruled that Harris’ defense team “could have and should have” found that sort of evidence years ago.

On a separate issue, the judge also ruled there was no merit to the claim--rejected by the California Supreme Court--that Harris’ brother Daniel shot one of the two San Diego teen-agers. If that was true, Turrentine said, it “would have been discovered a long time ago.”

At San Quentin, Harris conferred Saturday morning for more than an hour with his lawyers and met with family and friends until his allotted visiting hours ended at 2:30 p.m. “He was ready for (visiting time) to end. He was tired,” said his friend, Michael Kroll, adding that Harris seemed a “little more depressed” and “a little bit more disconnected.”

With grim determination, the crowd of death-penalty opponents staged their protest by San Francisco Bay, by far the largest mass gathering by opponents in recent months.

Underneath an incongruously crystal sky, surrounded by joggers, Frisbee players and sightseers, the participants formed what organizers called a mock cemetery. In rows, they laid on their backs in the large grassy park near the Golden Gate Bridge, holding the cardboard tombstones on their chests. A singer and guitarist performed “Taps.”

The protest was punctuated by shouted curses from passing motorists who favored the death penalty. “Gas him!” screamed one. “Kill the son of a bitch!” shouted another.

Organizers urged the crowd to attend a vigil outside San Quentin Monday evening. But in a bow to the near-inevitable, they also said that if Harris is executed, another demonstration will be held Tuesday afternoon at the state office building in San Francisco.

“Everyone’s depressed,” said Claudia King, executive director of Humanitas International, a Palo Alto group formed by singer Joan Baez, which sponsored the mock cemetery. “Ever since (Gov. Pete Wilson denied clemency) we’ve had this feeling of impending doom.”

Times staff writers Philip Hager, Bob Baker and Paul Feldman in San Francisco and Dan Morain at San Quentin contributed to this story.