EXECUTION JOURNAL : Media Frenzy Gives San Quentin an Unreal Theatrical Atmosphere

The big brown dog climbed up on the roof just after dawn, sniffed the salty air above San Quentin Village and growled.

There were strangers everywhere, strangers with walkie-talkies and microphones, strangers with notebooks, strangers preparing to go on camera live. And all of a sudden, the strangers were looking straight at him.

“Get that picture!” a TV producer yelled, pointing up at the dog, which stood on the roof of a bungalow like an oversize weather vane, his nose pointed toward the prison.

“Don’t move him!” screamed a camera operator as the dog, apparently uninterested, turned his back on the eager crowd.

On execution eve near the prison nicknamed “The Q,” even the local pets were not safe from scrutiny.

The state was preparing to kill a man. Monday was, by any measure, a big news day. But as Robert Alton Harris said his goodbys inside the prison, the journalists outside found it difficult to find anything new to say.

Part of the problem was mathematical: For most of the day, as countless deadlines came and went, news gatherers outnumbered newsmakers by a noticeable margin.

Until almost nightfall, the protesters on both sides totaled only a few dozen. There were gawkers, but even they focused their comments on the media.

“I came to see if it’s an event or a non-event,” said a spandex-clad man named Mike, explaining why he rode his bicycle to the prison from San Francisco. His conclusion: “There’s a whole lot of press here, but no people.”

It was easy to see what he meant. On Main Street, television reporters stood three deep, vying for a spot in front of the prison gate. In the rustic cottages that face the San Francisco Bay, kitchens were transformed into news bureaus, bedrooms into sound booths.

When Steve Baker, the father of one of Harris’ teen-age victims, arrived at one of those cottages for a live interview with a San Francisco radio station, two TV crews rolled film of the event.

More than once, the media stumbled over themselves, prompting cries of panic: “You’re in my shot!”

Tristan Mermin, a 21-year-old village resident who was chronicling the scene with his home video camera, said the frenzy made the scheduled execution seem oddly unreal.

“Countless media are out here reporting on a death they cannot see. We’re all experiencing a hanging, but there’s no (body) we can observe,” he said.

Mike Rustigan, a San Jose State University criminology professor, agreed. Standing on a sunny porch, waiting to be interviewed on radio, he said he felt “like I’m on a Hollywood set.”

There was no shortage of theatrics. The folks at San Francisco’s KRON-TV, desperate to illustrate a story that for the most part was happening out of sight, went shopping for props. They found a 21-piece bucket of extra-crispy chicken--the same kind that Harris had requested for his last meal--at a Kentucky Fried Chicken store in San Rafael.

Back in the village, weary reporters resorted to grim humor. At midday, one producer began answering his telephone with a cheerful “Q Pizza! Hold the anchovies!”--another reference to Harris’ meal request.

Rick Polito, a reporter for San Quentin’s hometown paper, the Marin Independent Journal, was not so glib. Polito, one of 17 reporters chosen to witness Harris’ death, sped into the village on his bicycle and made himself available for interviews.

Polito said his goal was to “communicate a little slice of horror” from the gas chamber. He said journalists who claimed to be objective about capital punishment are liars.

“I don’t believe anybody on this planet doesn’t have an opinion about the death penalty,” he said. “I go in there as one person to watch another person die. To fake objectivity would be dishonest.”

It raised an interesting question, one that few of the journalists who ate baloney sandwiches and doughnuts to pass the hours seemed eager to address.

How detached were they, really? How soundly had they been sleeping lately? Did covering an execution represent merely “an unpleasant hard day’s work,” as Gale Cook, a former San Francisco Examiner reporter, had described it?

In an essay published on Easter Sunday, Cook said that was how he had first approached the execution of murderer Barbara Graham at San Quentin in 1955.

But when he sat down to write after witnessing her death, he realized how undetached he had become.

“Barbara Graham was tortured to death by the sovereign state of California yesterday”--that was the lead of the story Cook recalls writing.

“That sentence lasted only through the first edition of the paper,” he wrote. “Then a properly detached editor changed tortured to put .”