SAN FRANCISCO : Justice Assails Rulings on Harris

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun said the court “messed up” the execution of Robert Alton Harris, the first man executed in California in 25 years.

Blackmun was one of two dissenters from the court’s unprecedented order April 21 forbidding the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to issue any further stays of execution for Harris, who killed two San Diego teen-agers in 1978.

The high court lifted four stays of Harris’ execution between midnight and 5:45 a.m. April 21. Harris was executed shortly after 6 a.m., the first to die in California’s gas chamber since 1967.

“We all messed it up,” Blackmun said of the Harris case in a speech Tuesday to legal-aid lawyers.

“My feeling, as the months go by, is that every time there’s an execution and we’re up half the night (wrestling with requests for stays) . . . we end up being lessened in dimension and are the poorer for it,” he said.

Blackmun, generally the most liberal member of a conservative-dominated court, noted that, unlike liberal former Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, he has voted to uphold some death sentences and has not considered the death penalty unconstitutional in all cases.

He asked his audience whether it was “concerned about the growing demand for the death penalty . . . (despite) statistical evidence that it embraces no deterrence factor whatsoever.”

The argument in favor of the death penalty “gets down to retribution,” he said. “Maybe that’s what it’s all about.”