CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : Wilson Assails Brown’s Ties to Father on Death Penalty

Gov. Pete Wilson chided Democrat Kathleen Brown on Thursday for basing her opposition to the death penalty in part on her father’s experience applying capital punishment when he was the state’s chief executive nearly 30 years ago.

Wilson, escalating what has become an increasingly personal debate between the two candidates on the sensitive issue, questioned his opponent’s explanation and three times quoted her father, former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who wrote a book about his personal turmoil over the state’s ultimate criminal sentence.

“She says that her opposition to the death penalty is a result of what she learned from her father,” Wilson told reporters at a Capitol news conference. “But I think her explanation to date indicates that if she may be a dutiful daughter, she would not be a good governor.”

Wilson added: “With all respect to Pat Brown, however people may remember him fondly for other reasons, I don’t think he was greatly admired as governor because of his performance on the death penalty.”

Kathleen Brown, at the White House for a meeting with President Clinton, was informed of Wilson’s remarks and lashed back at the governor.

“That is typical Pete Wilson,” she said. “If Pete Wilson wants to ridicule me and my father and my family values, I would say Pete Wilson has a problem with his values.”

Brown, who is seeking to follow her father and her brother, former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, into the state’s highest office, returned to the old Governor’s Mansion on Tuesday to explain how she came to oppose the death penalty.

There, in the same room in which her father had pondered the fate of 59 condemned criminals--and had decided to send 36 to the gas chamber--the younger Brown said her position was not based on logic or philosophy, nor on arguments over the death penalty’s effectiveness as a deterrent. She described her reasoning as a “gut thing,” based on her family and religious values.

Brown added that even though she personally opposes the death penalty she would carry it out if called upon to do so, appoint judges who supported it, and not stand in the way if lawmakers wanted to put a measure on the ballot to expand it.

“I oppose it because my father taught me it was wrong and the religious experiences I had reinforced that,” she said.

Wilson said he did not think Brown’s statement was “much of an explanation” and in clear terms spelled out his own position.

“In my case,” Wilson said, “I believe the death penalty is a deterrent, I think it is an entirely legitimate form of punishment, I think it answers the requirements of justice.”

Wilson quoted extensively from Pat Brown’s book, “Public Justice, Private Mercy, a Governor’s Education on Death Row.”

In weighing one case, Brown wrote: “I was trying to move beyond legal limits as I looked for reasons to commute” an inmate’s death sentence.

In another case, the elder Brown commuted the sentence of a killer who had not yet formally requested clemency.

“I couldn’t see,” Brown wrote, “how sending him to the gas chamber would deter some future frightened would-be robber from panicking and striking out at his victim.”

Wilson’s point: If Kathleen Brown says she is following the example of her father, then her father’s reasoning and actions are fair game for criticism. And the record, Wilson said, shows that Pat Brown, as time wore on, leaned more toward granting clemency than denying it.

“We know clearly what Pat Brown brought to these deliberations,” Wilson said. “He was, I think, a good man but he agonized and was ambivalent and through life his attitude changed. More and more he was able to find excuses for granting clemency. I would not have found those excuses.”

Wilson also criticized an Assembly committee for bottling up two bills to expand the death penalty to cover killings committed in connection with carjackings or drive-by shootings. Wilson aides have suggested that Democrats blocked the measures so that Brown would not have to defend her opposition to them during the fall campaign.

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Times staff writer Glenn Bunting in Washington contributed to this story.