Experts See Faster Pace for Appeals : Courts: The 14-year struggle in the Harris case is expected to lead to severe limits on the time spent on such cases.

While there will be no stampede to the gas chamber, the execution of Robert Alton Harris after a 14-year legal struggle will sharply curb the time federal courts are spending on appeals by condemned killers, experts say.

No more executions are expected this year. Of the 330 inmates on Death Row, the three closest to being executed are awaiting hearings before a federal appellate court.

But in the wake of the Harris case, the overall pace of such appeals undoubtedly will quicken. Major issues have been resolved, psychological barriers by judges to executions in California have been removed and sweeping restrictions on appeals have been imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court. And Tuesday’s pointed high court condemnation of Harris’ repeated appeals adds strong new impetus for accelerating the process.

“Now that this case is over, it’s going to make it a lot easier to carry out executions,” said USC law professor Charles D. Weisselberg, a specialist on the appellate system. “This is a very strong statement by the Supreme Court. . . . It certainly communicates the message that counsel better plan on including all possible claims in their first (constitutional challenge).”

Prosecutors have long complained about how long it takes to resolve the challenges prisoners bring after their sentences are upheld on direct appeal. In some instances, inmates have been able to win a stay of execution for as long as four years before they actually file the appeal in federal court.

“That’s the kind of delay we are trying to cut back on,” said state Deputy Atty. Gen. Pat Zaharopoulos. “Obviously, a prisoner should have a fair hearing on constitutional claims, but we shouldn’t have to wait four years for him to tell us what those claims are.”

Defense lawyers agree that appeals now will move faster. But they say the federal courts still may prove more receptive to at least some of those appeals than has the California Supreme Court. The state high court, under Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas, has upheld 119 death sentences and reversed only 29 in the past five years.

“In many instances, the federal courts are likely to take a very different view of a case,” said William M. Goodman of San Francisco, a defense attorney in capital punishment cases. “They are going to take a look at those decisions with a great deal of skepticism because of the superficial analysis the state court made in some cases on federal issues.”

In California, death-penalty cases essentially follow a two-round appeal process. First, all death verdicts are automatically appealed directly to the state Supreme Court, and if affirmed, may be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. If that fails, a condemned prisoner may begin a second round by filing a constitutional challenge--called a writ of habeas corpus--in federal court or state court.

Harris’ sentence was one of the first affirmed by the state high court after California reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Even as appeals stretched on for years, it remained the most procedurally advanced such case in California.

Now, with the state court affirming far more death sentences, more and more cases have gone through the first, direct stage of appeal and are under second-round review in the federal courts in California.

Currently, 73 cases are before federal district courts in habeas corpus proceedings. Three more--the cases of convicted slayers Edgar M. Hendricks, Melvin M. Wade and Bernard Lee Hamilton--are before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and thus are nearest execution.

In the years Harris was in the courts, many far-reaching issues surrounding the death penalty were resolved--some in Harris’ case itself. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in the Harris case in 1984, held that defendants may be put to death for murder even if others who commit comparable killings escape execution.

Meanwhile, the federal high court has issued several decisions sharply restricting the ability of condemned prisoners to bring challenges after their first-round appeals are exhausted.

The justices have held that prisoners can bring more than one such challenge only in limited circumstances--such as to show they were actually innocent, and not just deprived of a fair trial. The high court also has said that new constitutional rulings generally will not apply retroactively in such proceedings to death verdicts already upheld on direct review.

The justices last January took the unusual step of issuing an order in a Washington state case warning the 9th Circuit Court--the court that covers California--about unwarranted delay in deciding capital appeals.

If that were not clear enough, a legal exclamation point was provided in Tuesday’s unprecedented action in which the high court bluntly ordered federal appellate judges to stop trying to block Harris’ execution.

Harris’ latest claim that death by gas was cruel and unusual could have been brought more than a decade ago--and was an obvious attempt to avoid past rulings limiting constitutional challenges, the high court said.

“There is no good reason for this abusive delay, which has been compounded by last-minute attempts to manipulate the judicial process,” the court said.

Defense attorneys, already reeling from high court actions, are even more uneasy about a case now before the justices that could greatly restrict the ability of prisoners to challenge their sentences or convictions.

At issue is whether federal courts must defer to constitutional determinations made by state courts. A ruling limiting federal authority could have a dramatic impact on condemned inmates seeking federal relief in California and elsewhere.

In the three cases that now stand closest to execution--those of Hendricks, Wade and Hamilton--lawyers for the prisoners will be arguing that the state Supreme Court misapplied federal constitutional requirements in affirming death sentences. In addition, a wide range of separate claims is being raised--including inadequate assistance of counsel at trial, a frequent issue in habeas corpus proceedings.

Among other things, Hendricks is contending that his trial attorney failed to properly investigate psychiatric defenses that could have been used in the inmate’s 1981 trial for the robbery murders of two San Francisco men.

His lawyer on appeal, Goodman, notes that such evidence was presented for Hendricks later in a separate trial for the murders of two other men in Los Angeles in 1980. In the Los Angeles case, Goodman notes, jurors who heard the defense decided against the death penalty and gave Hendricks life in prison.