What a Son Should Know About This

Dear Son,

We killed a man this morning. He was a murderer named Robert Alton Harris, and they don’t come any worse. He gunned down a couple of teen-age boys to steal their car. He was caught, and a jury decided the state and its people should exterminate him. Fourteen years later, we finally did it.

Now, James, as I write this letter, you are just learning to crawl. All you know about newspapers is that they’re terrific for tearing into tiny scraps. I figure, though, that in time you’ll be ready to read this. And it is important that you do. Maybe you can decipher why, at the pale dawn of a fine California spring day, we strapped this man Harris into a chair and smothered him with poison gas.

While you slept, I spent the night with a strange mob. Several hundred people had converged on the prison gate here, wanting to stand as close as possible to the killing place. Some were hungry for the end of Harris, believing his death would provide justice and perhaps make the state a safer place to live. Others prayed for clemency.

Both sides quoted the Bible and carried placards. One loudmouthed man wore a straw cowboy hat, said he was a preacher named Bobby Bible. “We are for Christianity, the Bible and killing everyone on Death Row,” he shouted. James, the Bible is a wonderful book, but its teachings can be twisted to advance almost any argument: One man’s “eye for an eye” is another’s “turn the other cheek.”

The other side could be just as weird: One banner suggested that, instead of executing people like Harris, we should put them to work building bullet trains. There has not been a picket sign or bumper sticker made yet that tells the whole story. It’s never that simple.

Take Joe Iberri, for instance. He told me outside the gate how his daughter, Vanessa, had been murdered by a man now on Death Row here. She was 12 at the time. Iberri was pumped up about Harris’ poor prospects. He figured that if we executed Harris, we eventually would execute the man who deprived him of his daughter. “It makes me feel real happy,” he said of the festivities.

Iberri is a man consumed, but he made me wonder, James, about you and your sister, and how crazy I would become if someone killed either of you. I suspect I would scream for blood. This stems from parental love, and the instinct to protect. I also imagine it might have something to do with guilt, the gnawing sense that some lesson untaught, some protection unrendered, left a child vulnerable to violence.

Thankfully, I can only imagine. The survivors of Harris’ victims don’t imagine--they know. They have protested that opponents of the death penalty don’t understand their pain. Until 6:21 a.m. today, their last 14 years had been consumed by frustration with the case’s slow, serpentine course through the judicial system.

I got the sense they never understood just how much they were asking of us. There are some people who find in the Bible clear instruction not to kill, even the worst of enemies; who are convinced that the death penalty won’t deter crime and isn’t fairly applied; who believe that utter banishment for life is punishment enough. To demand the people of California sanction a killing to close out an individual family’s circle of pain is no small order.

All that, of course, is now moot.

There were only a couple dozen protesters left by the time they actually killed Harris. Most, like Dodger fans, had left in the middle innings. I noticed Iberri was there, grinning. Outside the gate, we got word of the end by whispers: They just dropped the cyanide; they just said he’s dead.

For the first time, the endless, repetitious debate between opposing demonstrators was silenced. The dominant sound was of birds greeting the sun. A ferryboat glided by just offshore in calm waters.

What surprised me was that I wasn’t more upset. Harris was an evil stranger and won’t be missed. His case never really held much promise of turning public opinion against capital punishment. That will come over time, as the 330 Death Row prisoners are fed to the chair at a faster pace.

Eventually, California will toss the death penalty. But it’s my hunch, James, that the task will fall to your generation. These things run in cycles. People even today might support life imprisonment without parole--if they were convinced the sentence would stick. But they don’t trust the system, and so the best we can do is what we did this morning. I hope you can do better.

Love, Dad

April 21, 1992