If all goes as scheduled, shortly after midnight April 21, behind the Death Row walls of San Quentin, tiny pellets of cyanide will drop into a bowl of acid and water under Robert Alton Harris.
A small puff of mist will rise, paralyze his nervous system and then escape-meeting California`s strict environmental impact standards-through a copper stack above Death Row.
Harris, 39, who was convicted in the 1978 murders of two San Diego 16-year-old boys, would be the first person executed in California in 25 years.
”It will bring to an end an epic struggle in which Robert Alton Harris became the personification of the capital punishment mire,” said Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ”For four years, it has been Harris or rust.”
But just when Harris` case-which has been bouncing back and forth in the courts for a decade-seemed to be finally winding down to its end, startling evidence has given opponents last-minute hope that California`s Depression-era gas chamber will remain empty, at least for now.
Harris` last chance to save his life probably will come Wednesday, when Gov. Pete Wilson, a vocal advocate of the death penalty, is scheduled to hold a clemency hearing.
In what law experts consider a highly unusual move, the governor will not only be Harris` last judge, he will be the first to consider evidence that casts deep doubts on the celebrated case.
Harris` attorneys will introduce hundreds of pages of documents that argue that the murderer is borderline mentally retarded and suffers from organic brain damage and schizophrenia, as well as fetal alcohol syndrome.
The evidence was never heard by the judge and jury who sentenced Harris or by the state Supreme Court that reviewed his trial. Efforts to present it in state and federal courts were rejected on procedural grounds.
The evidence has shocked even some of the most adamant proponents of capital punishment, including the former head of the state`s prison system and a former state prison warden. Both joined Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa on Wednesday in urging Wilson to grant clemency.
The evidence also has breathed new life into the cause of death penalty abolitionists, who plan to hold vigils, marches, forums and demonstrations across the state in the next few days.
”There are no more legal avenues to pursue,” said Pat Clark, executive director of the Death Penalty Focus of California, which opposes capital punishment. ”The clemency petition is our last resort. It is where we`re putting all our eggs in at this time.
If Harris is put to death he would join 168 other inmates nationwide who have been executed since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
Harris` execution would make California the latest in a recent string of states whose execution chambers have been put to use after decades of sitting idle.
Last Monday, Arizona executed its first inmate since 1963.
Three weeks earlier, Delaware held its first execution in 46 years; and nearly three months ago Wyoming held its first execution in 28 years.
Opponents of the death penalty hope Wilson, who was San Diego`s mayor when the killings occurred, will find himself in a difficult moral dilemma.
Wilson is not only a death penalty proponent, he also has expressed a special interest in abused children.
During his campaign last year, an emotional television ad showed a visibly shaken Wilson visiting a hospital ward filled with cocaine babies.
”The death penalty has long been a political football,” Clark said.
”But the governor has been very adamant that he has an open mind.”
Nevertheless, there will be increased pressure from capital punishment proponents who say they are fed up with the seemingly endless string of appeals and frustrated by a last-minute stay ordered by a federal court judge two years ago. The new evidence, they argue, does not excuse the murder.
”There are many abused people with fetal alcohol syndrome who have not murdered two children,” said Marcella Leach, treasurer of Justice for Homicide Victims, which claims 6,000 members in Southern California.
”If they`d re-create the crime, everyone would stand up and cheer when they execute Harris.”
Both sides are appalled by the gruesomely calculated murders of Michael Baker and his best friend, John Mayeski, on a hot San Diego day 14 years ago. Harris, who was looking for a getaway car for a bank robbery, ran into the two boys at a Jack-In-The-Box restaurant, kidnapped them at gunpoint, took them to a nearby reservoir, shot them to death-to see what it felt like- then munched on their lukewarm hamburgers.
In a recent interview, Baker`s mother, Sharon Mankins, said she would have ”to live with that, all the rest of my life. . . . When he is executed, I will feel more at peace with myself. There will be finality to this case.” The defense argues that Harris, too, was a brutalized victim, who was abandoned in a tomato field when he was 14 and spent most of his life in reformatories and jails. They have detailed the inmate`s life in a videotape sent to Wilson and the state`s media.
Harris, the tape relates, literally was beaten out of the womb of his heavily alcoholic mother by his abusive father. The infant was born with an abnormally small head and later would speak with an impediment and look with a wandering eye.
In his infancy and early childhood, Harris was assaulted repeatedly and brutally. Once, his father struck him in the face with his own face and almost broke his neck. Another time, he tried to choke him with a bedspread in the crib.
The tape recounts how Harris and his eight siblings often were called into the living room by their father, who gave them 30 seconds to hide, before hunting them with a loaded gun.
”This sort of thing should never have been found 12 years after the penalty trial,” professor Zimring said. ”But far from being an isolated instance, that kind of lack of amplified investigation of the defendant is almost typical in the Death Rows of the U.S.”
Opponents fear that if Harris is killed as scheduled in the quaint hilltop town of San Quentin overlooking San Francisco Bay, it could open a floodgate of executions.
Many of the nation`s more than 2,500 Death Row inmates finally are exhausting their appeals. In addition, the Supreme Court is rejecting last-minute requests for stays, and the nation`s politicians are coming under increasing pressure to take a hard stance against crime.
California, which long has been viewed as a progressive state, has 325 inmates awaiting execution. It is second only to Texas, which heads the list with 345 and has eight executions scheduled for the next 10 weeks.
Said death penalty abolitionist Pat Clark: ”We`re talking about a bloodbath like you`ve never seen before in this realm.”
