COLUMN ONE : Striking at Society’s Moral Core : If Robert Alton Harris is executed, California would reach the crest of a struggle that has made political careers and split the populace. But the wrenching debate will not die in the gas chamber.

It has been 25 years since we Californians killed a man in the name of justice. Ronald Reagan was governor back then; Vietnam, civil rights and the Beatles were among our national preoccupations.

The condemned citizen was Aaron Mitchell, a lifelong thief whose fateful crime was the murder of a Sacramento policeman. Mitchell’s execution echoed enduringly through the state, perhaps because he slashed his forearms and wailed “I am Jesus Christ!” before succumbing to a cloud of cyanide vapors.

Now, San Quentin’s gas chamber is being readied for another killer. Robert Alton Harris, who gunned down two teen-agers in 1978, was set to be buckled into one of the chamber’s sturdy metal chairs on Tuesday. Unless the stay issued Saturday night holds up on appeal, he may still die as scheduled.

His death would close a legal saga of titanic proportions. But its meaning merely begins there.

With this execution, California would reach the crest of a generation-long struggle over capital punishment, one that has launched and crushed political careers, transformed the state’s judiciary and bitterly split the populace over what may be society’s most fundamental and wrenching moral question.

For advocates, the eventual gassing of Harris would symbolize a cathartic triumph over forces that have twisted the law and defied the public’s pronouncement that death is a just punishment for our most savage killers.

For opponents, the event is equally momentous, and represents California’s descent into a barbaric fraternity of states that are so blinded by vengeance that they resort to premeditated murder in a futile assault against crime.

These opinions, like those that mark the debates over abortion and gun control, are all but unshakable. They are rooted in fear and tragedy, in religious faith, in personal values and in careful contemplation.

They belong to people such as Franklin Zimring, a law professor who vividly recalls his boyish fright at seeing a photograph of Ethel Rosenberg strapped snugly into an electric chair.

They belong to people such as Patricia Henderson, whose son, a cheerful Peace Corps volunteer, was snatched from her by a remorseless killer who shot two other youths as well.

And they belong to people such as state Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk, a man whose daily work demands that he smother his abhorrence for a punishment he views as ineffective and immoral.

For three decades, the adversaries have traded the dominant spot on the seesaw, battling gamely in courtrooms, at the polls and in the California Legislature as the death penalty issue has flared and dimmed. Now they have reached a denouement.

“The public wants blood and now the public is going to get blood,” said state Sen. Ed Davis of Valencia, a Republican who has been a vigorous capital punishment champion since his days as Los Angeles police chief.

“But will the disagreement end? Will all the arguing end? Of course not.”

Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. cannot remember precisely when he concluded that state-sponsored killing is wrong. Oddly enough, it probably happened during his years as San Francisco district attorney, a time when he routinely sought death for criminals. Later, as state attorney general, Brown again was bound to enforce a law with which he disagreed.

But it was not until he became California’s governor, and was handed the role of final arbiter of the condemned, that the “grim reality” of capital punishment sunk in.

During his two terms, Brown commuted 23 death sentences--more than any governor in the state. He also tried twice to ban capital punishment. Yet what he remembers most today, at age 86, are the 36 men he sent to their deaths inside the walls of San Quentin.

“It was a brutal decision for one human being to have to make,” Brown recalled during a recent chat, surrounded by mementos in his Century City office. “Thumbs up, he lived, thumbs down, he died. It all came down to me.”

The decisions invariably drew a reaction. One--a thumbs down delivered 32 years ago--triggered a particularly vicious outcry: Brown was hung in effigy, booed at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, and deluged with hateful mail for years.

Brown wrote a book about those 59 life-or-death judgments. It reads rather like a confession, and he admits that he felt the need for a purging, a need to revisit those decisions that have stalked his conscience all these years:

“Looking back over their names and files now, despite the horrible crimes and the catalogue of human weaknesses they comprise, I realize that each decision took something out of me that nothing--not family or work or hope for the future--has ever been able to replace.”

If you lived in California in 1960, chances are you remember the man who occupied Death Row cell No. 2455. The abolitionists certainly do. Caryl Whittier Chessman--who never killed--is this state’s most famous condemned prisoner. His death helped spawn the movement that has idled San Quentin’s gas chamber for a quarter of a century.

In the early days, Californians paid with their lives for a wide assortment of crimes--even train wrecking got you the gallows. By 1960, the list had been trimmed, but death was still society’s antidote for kidnapers who robbed and harmed their victims.

That is what Chessman did. Dubbed the Red Light Bandit, he was convicted and sentenced to die for a rampage of sexual assaults on women in Los Angeles in 1948.

For 12 years, Chessman evaded the gas, waging a cunning legal fight to overturn his conviction. He wrote four best-selling books, and was made an international star by glossy treatments in Life and Time magazines.

As his execution approached, pleas for mercy came from the Vatican, Albert Einstein, even the Queen of Belgium. But on May 2, 1960, the Bandit’s time ran out.

For California’s small community of abolitionists, Chessman was the perfect poster child. This was not a villainous butcher, but an articulate, literate man--a man, remember, who had not killed anyone.

“The exceptional thing about Chessman was the profound effect he had on a group of Californians who became intensely involved in the capital punishment issue in a not unimportant way,” said Zimring, a Boalt Hall law professor regarded as one of the nation’s foremost capital punishment experts.

“Chessman became the personification of claims for and against the death penalty. And because his crime was not homicide, the death sentence began to look ludicrous and frightening as a government claim.”

In the execution’s aftermath, public support for capital punishment began to wither. Traditional opponents in the clergy and defense Bar suddenly had company, drawing strength from the social movements against racial injustice and the Vietnam War. A rebellion took shape.

By the mid-1960s, the legal strand of this uprising had a national strategy. Lawyers, trained and equipped by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, began to raise the entire gamut of constitutional challenges in cases where execution seemed imminent. California, the state with the nation’s largest population and biggest Death Row, was key to the plan.

The tactic worked. By 1967, federal judges had effectively banned executions until the U.S. Supreme Court could resolve the constitutional objections, notably the disproportionate use of death penalties against minorities and the poor.

Five years later came a landmark victory: The California Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional under the state’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment.

Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court took a step down the same path. Finding the imposition of death sentences to be unconstitutionally arbitrary, the high court struck down all remaining death penalty laws in the nation.

One abolitionist recalled the glow of the moment this way: “It seemed as though our struggle was over. It seemed as though our country had finally seen the light.”

It is funny the things you remember. The thing that Pat Henderson remembers is how the sheriff’s deputy got a flat tire that morning she drove to her house with the terrible news.

The news was that Henderson’s son was dead, by gunshot, at the hands of a man who was on the loose. But for a little while, Henderson could not focus on that. She just kept thinking of that deputy, and that unfortunate flat tire.

The Hendersons live in Murrieta, in the oldest house in town. On April 9, 1978, the couple’s ordinary lives were irrevocably scarred. Their middle child, Jim, was killed while making an amateur film in the Mojave Desert.

Jim was a month shy of graduation at La Verne College, a drama star with strawberry blond hair. He was engaged, and scheduled to join the Peace Corps that summer.

Robert Henderson does not harbor any hatred for his son’s killer, now waiting his turn on Death Row. “I can’t feel hate,” he said, “because I don’t even know the man.”

But there is one thing he does hate--the system that has allowed the murderer to elude punishment for 13 years: “The polls show that 80% of the people in this state favor capital punishment. So why have the 20% been getting their way for so long?”

Pat Henderson, a schoolteacher, and Robert, a maintenance supervisor, have heard all the arguments against the death penalty--that it is legalized murder, that God would not approve, that it is unfairly applied and does not deter.

They are not convinced. They await the day that their son’s murderer takes his last breath.

“There is a line, and those criminals who cross over have to pay the consequences,” said Robert Henderson. “It’s not about revenge. It’s about society taking a stand.”

An execution, his wife said, will not close the wound. But maybe “it will help a little bit. Maybe I’ll be able to stop thinking of that man, sitting up there, while my child is nowhere, buried in the ground.”

Shock was the principal sensation that swept over prosecutor Ronald M. George when he learned that the California Supreme Court had declared capital punishment unconstitutional.

For starters, the opinion came in a case that he had argued and believed he would win. Moreover, it had been written by Chief Justice Donald Wright--an appointee of conservative Gov. Ronald Reagan, an ardent death penalty supporter.

How, George wondered, could this have happened?

Today, George is a state Supreme Court justice. Many weighty matters have demanded this tall, lean man’s attention in the last two decades; few can eclipse those momentous events of 1972.

“It was a crushing disappointment,” George said of the court’s landmark opinion. “There are certain cases a lawyer loses for reasons you can understand. But this seemed, at the time, something outside the law. It was truly disturbing.”

One memory stands out more clearly than most--that of the 107 Death Row inmates whose sentences were reduced to life in prison by the justices’ decision. Among those spared were two of California’s most notorious killers.

George, in a petition requesting that the court reconsider its ruling, asked the justices this on behalf of the people: “Who can guarantee that defendants like Charles Manson . . . and Sirhan Sirhan will never escape or be paroled?”

Millions of other Californians were asking each other the same thing, and public support for the death penalty--on the wane in the ‘60s--abruptly began to rise. It was, one scholar speculates, as if Californians felt that their state had unilaterally disarmed and was suddenly vulnerable to attack.

Like a magnet, the 1972 decision pulled believers in capital punishment together. In the past, their will had been the law, their position secure and impenetrable. Suddenly, it had been tossed out by a stroke of the court’s pen.

George, for one, wasted little time putting his indignation to use. Teaming up with an aggressive, law-and-order legislator from Long Beach, he helped write a ballot initiative seeking to bring the death penalty back to California.

The politician was state Sen. George Deukmejian. And his initiative--pitched as a necessary rebuke to a court that had thwarted the people’s wishes--passed with a whopping 68% of the vote.

By 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court had made its own U-turn on capital punishment, permitting states to resume executions under new laws that required juries to follow clear guidelines in applying the death penalty. Soon after, four bullets from a firing squad tore through the chest of Gary Gilmore in Utah, and executions were once again a part of American life.

In just four short years, the abolitionists had watched their victory unravel.

For Californians who believed in capital punishment, it felt like salvation. But was it?

When Deukmejian first arrived in Sacramento, he had not given capital punishment much thought.

Then a bill aiming to abolish the death penalty came along, and Deukmejian studied up on the issue. His conclusion--that capital punishment deters criminals--laid the foundation for a career that may shape California for decades to come.

Some statesmen yearn to build roads or open universities. Punishing criminals was Deukmejian’s mission. Throughout his 27 years in public life, the death penalty reverberated loudly, an ever-present, sometimes thunderous refrain.

Today, Deukmejian watches California from the 35th floor of a Los Angeles office tower. With the Harris execution approaching, his long campaign to reopen the state’s gas chamber is much on his mind.

It started with an unsuccessful bill that sought to sentence some armed robbers to death--even if their victims escaped unharmed. It ended with a $4.3-billion expansion of the state’s penal system, an unprecedented investment that more than doubled California’s supply of prison beds.

In between, Deukmejian made 1,000 judicial appointments--including several that dramatically tilted the philosophical balance on the state’s highest court.

But the governor was denied one key prize--the chance to see executions resume during his watch.

“That was very, very frustrating,” Deukmejian said in an interview. “One of society’s major functions is providing protection and safety for people. . . . It was a very high priority for me.”

Despite all the dollars and energy he poured into criminal justice, Deukmejian concedes that California is not substantially safer--yet. The execution of Harris, he believes, will change this.

“If the law is carried out, it’s my belief that it will save the lives of some people. And if you save just one innocent person, then having this law is worthwhile.”

In one of those curious ironies of history, it was California’s most prominent abolitionist--Jerry Brown--who gave death penalty advocates their most lethal weapon. The weapon was a person, an appointee to the state Supreme Court named Rose Elizabeth Bird.

Nobody ever doubted where Edmund G. Brown Jr. stood on capital punishment. The first public signal flashed in 1967, when Brown, then an attorney, protested outside San Quentin as Aaron Mitchell was given the gas.

A decade later, Gov. Brown created the state public defender’s office, which quickly became a working think tank for the handling of death penalty appeals. Deukmejian crippled the office with budget cuts, but the State Bar responded with a new organization to provide Death Row indigents with lawyers--the California Appellate Project.

It is the diligence and innovation of the California Appellate Project that have blocked executions in California in this era. Capital punishment was declared constitutional long ago, but attorneys for the condemned have waged a case-by-case guerrilla war against the law--unearthing errors, oversights and other evidence that so far has kept all their clients alive.

The lawyers could not have done it without the help of the courts--specifically, the state Supreme Court and the former chief justice, Bird.

In the beginning, Bird proved a perfect ally for the abolitionists, finding reasons to reverse the sentence of death in case after case. But soon this behavior caught the eye of court opponents. Sensing an opportunity, they spent $10 million on a 1986 campaign charging that Bird was soft on crime and had to go.

And so she was bounced, in an ugly election that also toppled two other justices, Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. The defeats were unprecedented in modern history, and they proved to be an ominous development for those on Death Row. With its new conservative majority, California’s high court is affirming death sentences at a rate that is among the highest in the nation.

Grodin is a law professor in San Francisco, and he tries to hide his bitterness beneath a cool, scholarly veneer. But it bothers him that his judicial performance, his meticulous scrutiny of all those life-or-death appeals, was reduced to a batting average so cleverly pitched by politicians.

“I must assume that the public got what they wanted out of the 1986 election,” Grodin said recently in his Berkeley home. “But I do find it troubling that my record on death penalty cases was used as a score card by which I was judged. It all came down to that.”

The growling mob was milling outside the County Jail in San Jose when the knock came at Gerry Marcus’ door. The young man opened it, and there stood two high school chums, their eyes aglitter. Come to the lynching, they urged, down at St. James Park. Marcus paused, and then decided he would spend his afternoon another way.

At the old stone jailhouse, the police had run out of tear gas to keep back the crowd. A band of men grabbed a thick iron beam, using it to smash down the locked front door. The jailer wept, and then handed over his keys.

Moments later, two prisoners were dragged from their cells to the park. They had kidnaped and killed the son of a San Jose merchant, and the crowd--a lustful throng of 10,000--would not wait for their revenge.

“String ‘em up!” they yelled, as darkness fell.

The men were hanged from a pair of stately oaks, their bodies bloodied and stripped in the frenzy. Mothers lifted children to inspect the quivering corpses; some lighted matches under their dangling feet. The day was Nov. 26, 1933.

Marcus learned all the details later, including the praise that had come from California’s governor. Gov. James (Sunny Jim) Rolph suggested that he might parole all kidnapers “to those fine patriotic citizens of San Jose.”

Marcus was repulsed by the lynchings. They imprinted on his young consciousness a horror of executions that lingers to this day. A Bay Area attorney, he rekindled a dormant group, Californians Against Capital Punishment, in the 1960s and he is on the board of Death Penalty Focus, the leading abolitionist group in the state.

As Harris’ death draws near, the soft-spoken San Franciscan plans to protest outside San Quentin prison. He is also thinking of the future, of how he will feel when the killing resumes. One thing seems certain:

“It will be very demoralizing. I just can’t understand why, in a time when all other Western democracies have outlawed this brutal act, California wants so badly to embrace it.”

So where do we go from here?

Beginning Tuesday, executions in California could evolve from legal abstraction to flesh and blood. Will the public recoil? Or will cheers go up, encouraging efforts to extend the ultimate penalty to drug dealers and child molesters?

There are 331 inmates on Death Row--and the numbers keep growing. Can our system, our gas chamber, ever catch up?

Who can say. For now, the arguments over state-sponsored killing, pro and con, will rumble on.

The foes will tell us it is wrong to take a life to demonstrate the impermissibility of taking life. That mistakes are made and innocents are sometimes executed. That California will get no relief from crime until it treats the causes of crime.

The advocates will answer that some criminals are so vicious that they must lose their right to live, that--as former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once said--executions are a useful, necessary instrument to “guard the righteous against the predators.”

For now, these Californians will have their way.

“The people are fearful,” said Mosk of the state Supreme Court, “and what they want is retribution. They see a scoundrel who has killed somebody, and they say: ‘We must kill him.’

“It’s just that simple. And it’s not so difficult to understand.”