Death Row Inmate Drops Appeal, Seeks to Hasten Execution

The first time he was sent to death row, a Supreme Court ruling freed convicted murderer Bob Massie. This time, he aims to free himself, dropping the appeal that stands between him and execution.

Massie is speeding his path to California’s death chamber next month to protest a capital punishment system he says is in shambles. He’s also tired of a career behind bars that has won him the nickname “The Dean of Death Row.”

“I think it’s time to move on, don’t you?” he said.

Charles Harris, who survived a bullet from Massie and saw his friend Boris Naumoff die at Massie’s hands, agrees it’s time.

“I want an end of this and that’s that,” said Harris.

Robert Lee Massie was born on Christmas Eve 1941 to a 15-year-old Virginia girl and the man who married her to avoid a charge of statutory rape.

Between the ages of 4 and 6, he lived with his mother. She took him bar-hopping; his stepfather physically abused him, according to court records. By the time he turned 11, Massie had lived with five different foster families.

At 11, Massie was in a school for runaway boys. When he was 17, Massie stole a car and was sentenced to adult prison. There he was gang-raped.

In January 1965, Massie went on a crime spree, robbing and assaulting five people in the Los Angeles area. The crime that got him his first death sentence happened Jan. 7 when he fatally shot Mildred Weiss outside her San Gabriel home.

At one point, Massie came so close to execution that he had ordered his last meal.

But, in 1972, Massie’s sentence was commuted to life by a Supreme Court ruling that knocked down the death penalty. He was paroled in 1978. That was also the year California voters overwhelmingly endorsed reinstating the death penalty.

On Jan. 3, 1979, Massie fatally shot San Francisco liquor store owner Boris Naumoff.

At trial, Massie didn’t deny shooting Naumoff, pleading guilty over his lawyer’s objections. Massie said he had been shortchanged, returned to get the extra cash, then felt someone grab him from behind as he left the store. Massie said he pulled out a gun and shot wildly, fearing that members of the prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood had caught up with him.

Massie’s conviction automatically was appealed, as are all capital convictions in California, and his sentence was overturned when the California Supreme Court concluded it was illegal for him to have pleaded guilty against his lawyer’s advice.

Massie fought both the appeal and the overturned judgment. But when he was convicted a second time of Naumoff’s murder, he filed an appeal based on double jeopardy, the legal principle that you can’t be tried twice for the same offense.

Double jeopardy applies to acquittals and convictions, although appealing a conviction waives the protection. Massie says that because he wasn’t part of the automatic appeal, and in fact actively opposed it, double jeopardy applied.

The California Supreme Court disagreed.

Massie could take his claim to the federal courts, but he says he won’t. “The choice comes down to this: Either next week or next year, and in that case I don’t see any use in continuing this charade,” he said.

Massie’s execution date of March 27 was set over the objections of San Francisco Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan, who opposes the death penalty.

Massie, a self-taught jailhouse lawyer, points out that Hallinan “has no jurisdiction to interfere.”

He reserves his harshest criticism for a system that leaves California death penalty appeals in limbo for years.

“I’m trying to make them do the right thing. A man is not obligated to help the state validate capital punishment and thus sanitize his own execution 20 years down the line,” Massie said.

Massie has instructed his lawyer to tell the governor he won’t be asking for clemency.

“There comes a time when it is better to depart this world for the right reasons than to continue living in it for the wrong one,” he said.