Harris Lawyer Agonizes Over the Battle Lost to Executioner : Justice: An angry and frustrated Charles M. Sevilla reflects on his failed bid to spare the life of Robert Alton Harris.

Relegated to phone contact only, lawyer Charles M. Sevilla dialed the holding cell where Robert Alton Harris was waiting to walk to his death at San Quentin’s gas chamber.

Warden Daniel Vasquez answered. The warden and the defense attorney had quarreled over differences in the past, Vasquez acknowledged, but the time for that was over. “This man will be treated right,” Vasquez told the lawyer. “I promise you that.”

“The warden kept his promise,” Sevilla wrote in his journal afterward. “Robert was treated right by the staff. Until they killed him.”

In his first extensive interview since the execution last Tuesday, California’s first in 25 years, Sevilla vented his feelings of anger--and failure. And he revealed his notes on the all-night ordeal that led to Harris’ death at dawn.

How, to kill time, Harris played chess. When, after being marched to the gas chamber, then ushered out, Harris exclaimed, “What a bummer.” How Harris then numbly ate fried chicken. And how, at the end, Harris--drained, depressed and exhausted--walked to his death, leaving Sevilla to try to make sense of it all.

More than 10 years of work, a legal and ethical call to do the right thing as a defender, all the countless late nights over the years, and for what? For frustration, bitterness and depression, that was what. For public vilification. And, worst of all, an overriding, damning sense of failure.

“It’s like a death in the family,” Sevilla said. He added, “I can’t help but feel a sense of guilt at being unable to save this man’s life. So there’s this terrible failure in it all, too.”

Last week, after the execution, Sevilla and Michael J. McCabe, the pair of San Diego attorneys who had led the crusade to spare Harris, hid out at a rural retreat. For two days, they drank. They talked. They searched for solace, but came back home Thursday night with feelings still raw.

In an interview Friday at his downtown San Diego office, Sevilla struggled to control his emotions. Once, to keep from crying in front of a visitor, he turned his swivel chair to hide his face. “It’s very, very depressing,” he said.

The most depressing thing, he said, was that the U.S. Supreme Court turned Harris down four times in 12 hours.

In the early morning hours Tuesday, the court released an order saying that the lower federal courts were through with the case, adding that there was “no good reason” for the “abusive delay.” It was the final, most painful rebuke after years of complaints from the public, politicians and prosecutors about the appeals Sevilla waged.

But, in Sevilla’s eyes, he would have been failing to do his job had he not made all those appeals. It would have been unthinkable to give up while fighting for a man’s life, he said.

“It’s not in our job description to quit,” he said. “People can’t understand that, if it’s your job to defend someone, that’s something you pursue. You don’t just say at some point, ‘I’ll give in to the public clamor and not pursue this.’ As defense lawyers, we’ve been vilified for so long that I’m used to it.”

Sevilla said there was no reason to blame the defense for the gruesome scene that played out about 4 a.m. Tuesday, when Harris spent a dozen minutes strapped into the gas chamber before being led out because of a fourth, and last, stay of execution.

“Only in this Orwellian age could the killers of Robert Harris accuse the people trying to save his life of trying to torture him,” Sevilla said.

“Robert understood and supported everything we did to save his life,” Sevilla added.

“It’s an outrage that the killers have now taken this protectionist attitude that they were sensitive to Robert’s feelings at the end.”

Only a handful of people--Harris’ family, lawyers, and a few friends--knew that Harris came to care deeply about the lives he had stopped short, Sevilla said. Harris, who was once referred to in print as “human sewage,” had made a dramatic change for the better in prison, Sevilla said.

“After a life of unparalleled torture and abuse within the walls of the prison, he could begin to comprehend himself,” Sevilla wrote in his journal. “And earn forgiveness, and be a good person worthy of the compassion of others.”

To back up his words, Sevilla showed off a letter from a prison chaplain.

In 1985, the letter says, Harris wept openly in a prison Bible study group, crying aloud, “I wish I knew that God could forgive someone like me.”

This was no eleventh-hour sentiment, according to the chaplain, who said in his recent letter urging Gov. Pete Wilson to grant clemency that Harris was “deeply ashamed of what he did, indeed bewildered by his own behavior and unable, still, to fully comprehend what happened that day,” on July 5, 1978, when Harris killed two San Diego teen-agers.

Wilson rejected Harris’ plea for mercy, saying he had compassion for Robert Harris, the youth who had been badly abused, but could not excuse the killings committed by Harris the man.

Echoing Wilson’s wording, Sevilla said, “I have nothing but compassion for Gov. Pete Wilson as a man, but I have no compassion for him as a governor.”

In his journal, Sevilla wrote, “The angry people out there are afraid of the truth about Robert.” He added, “The angry know-nothings brand him as an ‘animal,’ a ‘predator’ or ‘slime,’ as if dehumanizing him makes it easier to kill him.”

At 6 p.m. last Monday, Harris hugged Sevilla and said goodby. A cousin who acted as spiritual adviser and a prison chaplain stayed with Harris through the night, but everyone else--other family and attorneys--had to leave.

Sevilla was the last one out. After the hug, Harris told Sevilla he was proud of him and the other attorneys who had joined in appeals.

“I couldn’t have had better,” Harris said, according to Sevilla’s journal. “You’ve been good friends. The best. I love you all.”

Sevilla was loaned an office at San Quentin to make his phone calls. Warden Vasquez answered the first call back to the room containing the holding cell, then put Harris on. Harris said he was alone in the cell. In the surrounding room, he said, were his two advisers, four guards and two state psychiatrists.

As the night wore on, the scene at San Quentin turned bizarre, even surreal.

“The ups and downs of the night, the roller coaster emotional ride, it was difficult,” he said. “There was the feeling that a stay of execution might stick. Then there was the feeling that, at any time, you might have the rug pulled out from under you.”

For something to do, Harris played chess with his cousin and the chaplain. Every half hour, Sevilla checked in by phone.

At 8:12 p.m., more than an hour late, Harris’ last meal arrived--fried chicken, pizza, jelly beans and Pepsi.

At 10:10 p.m., a mortuary called Sevilla by mistake and asked, “Should I still come pick up the body at midnight?” Sevilla told the caller to try another number.

At 3 a.m. Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the stays keeping Harris from the gas chamber. “This is it,” Sevilla wrote in the journal.

Except it wasn’t. At 4:08 a.m., Harris, who had just been strapped into the gas chamber, was back in the cell. “What a bummer,” Harris told his lawyer, talking very fast in a “hyper-excited” voice, Sevilla wrote in the journal.

“I thought when they came into the chamber it was just to put me into another chair,” Harris said. “I thought the one I was in was broken. Then they said, you got a stay.”

Sevilla warned Harris that the final stay was “fragile.” At 4:30 a.m., Harris ate some of the fried chicken. “The hyper-excitement is very much gone,” Sevilla wrote. “He’s drained.”

At 5:45 a.m., the Supreme Court vacated the fourth, final stay with orders for no more. Three minutes later, Sevilla talked with Harris for the final time. “We say our goodbys again,” the journal said. “He’s exhausted.”

Sevilla did not watch the execution. “I had no desire to watch it,” he said.

Instead, Sevilla watched the sun rise over San Francisco Bay.

He learned from Robert Harris’ cousin, Leon Harris, that the four prison guards in the holding room had treated Robert Harris right during the long night--just as the warden had promised.

And, when it was all over, Sevilla wrote in his journal, when those four guards learned that Harris was dead, they cried. “They wept,” he wrote, “at the death of the man who so many believed incapable of earning the compassion of others.”