The Politics of Life and Death

By Richard Lacayo

They are getting the gas chamber at San Quentin ready again. It has been 23 years since an inmate was put to death in the prison that overlooks San Francisco Bay. Now eight volunteers from among the guards are rehearsing mock executions. Inspectors are checking the plumbing to ensure that the systems are working smoothly. If all goes as planned, the airtight steel door of the green chamber will open on April 3 to admit Robert Alton Harris, 37, then close behind him.

Harris is the kind of killer who can seem like a walking argument for capital punishment. On July 5, 1978, just six months after he completed a 2 1/ 2-year prison term for beating a man to death, Harris and his brother Danny decided to rob a bank in San Diego. Looking first for a getaway car, they spotted two teenage boys parked at a fast-food restaurant. Harris forced the youths to drive to a nearby reservoir, where he shot and killed them. Later, he calmly ate their unfinished hamburgers. Danny testified against his brother and served three years in federal prison.

The brutality alone of Harris' crime would make him notorious. A conjunction of place and time has made him something more: a symbol of the future for the nation's more than 2,200 death-row inmates. If Harris goes to the gas chamber, California will join the relatively short list of states that have carried out executions since the Supreme Court declared the death penalty constitutional in 1976. And it will do so at the very moment that the death penalty has become a hot campaign issue around the U.S. "There is almost a mob attitude in California, a frenzy being fed by politicians," frets Robert Bryan, chairman of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It's sure to increase public pressure throughout the country for the death penalty."

In the past 13 years, 121 executions have been carried out in the U.S., most of them in Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia. The prospect that the Southern "death belt" will be joined by California has opponents of capital punishment worried. "California is the key state in the death-penalty debate," says American University law professor Ira Robbins. "If a fairly moderate-to-liberal state can execute someone, then states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania might be next."

With polls showing most Americans strongly in favor of capital punishment, politicians have been feeling the heat -- and in some cases fanning the flames -- to prove how tough they are. Especially in California, Florida and Texas, three large states where the Governor's office is up for grabs this November, the new look in campaign commercials is to feature the candidate doing everything short of throwing a giant electrical switch:

-- During the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Texas early in March, former Governor Mark White and state Attorney General James Mattox boasted of the number of successful executions they had furthered. Though state Treasurer Ann Richards also supports the death penalty, she had to labor under the disadvantage of having been endorsed by editors of a newspaper produced by death-row inmates at the state prison in Huntsville. With Mattox and Richards set to face each other again in a runoff election in April, the issue is sure to loom large. "Maybe the next step will be scratch-and-sniff ads, so voters can sample the smell of the death chamber," complains Richards' campaign spokesman Mark McKinnon.

-- In Florida embattled Republican Governor Bob Martinez has been appearing in campaign commercials that show the face of serial killer Ted Bundy while Martinez takes credit for signing 90 death warrants in his first term.

-- Even former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, the nonviolent disciple of Martin Luther King Jr., has repudiated his longtime opposition to capital punishment in his campaign to become Georgia's first black Governor. Says Young: "The state has to have the right to put mad dogs to death."

-- Nowhere is death-penalty politics more powerful than in California, where former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein faces state Attorney General John Van de Kamp in a race for the Democratic nomination for Governor. Feinstein's campaign was considered all but hopeless until recently, when she began to run a television ad proclaiming her approval of both abortion rights and capital punishment. Almost overnight, she rocketed up 19 points in the polls, grabbing the lead from Van de Kamp, an opponent of capital punishment. Now Van de Kamp has unveiled his own TV spot, complete with footage of the gas chamber, in which he boasts of how many prisoners he has dispatched to death row as attorney general.

Although Republican Governor George Deukmejian is not running for re- election, he has adroitly played the death issue to maximize the discomfort of the Democrats. After Harris petitioned for clemency, Deukmejian decided to conduct the hearing himself, denying Van de Kamp a high-profile role that ordinarily would have been his. That led Harris to withdraw his request for a hearing, complaining he would never get a fair one from Deukmejian, who as a state legislator helped draft California's death-penalty law. The Governor has now agreed to hear a telephoned plea for clemency from Mother Teresa.

Because of the lengthy, complicated appeals process, the average delay between conviction for a capital crime and execution is more than seven years. That drawn-out process may soon be shortened. In a pair of decisions last month, the U.S. Supreme Court, which has been increasingly inclined to uphold death sentences, created nearly insurmountable procedural obstacles for death- ! row inmates seeking to have their appeals moved from state to federal courts. Congress is also considering several proposals to streamline the appeals process, including one issued by a commission headed by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell that would give each state prisoner a single chance to litigate all claims in federal court.

Later this year the Senate will also take up legislation to guide the use of the death penalty as a punishment for about a dozen federal crimes, espionage, and bank robbery or kidnaping resulting in death. But Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy has tacked on an amendment that would require federal prosecutors to produce "clear and convincing evidence" that race is not a factor in any death sentence. Since 1976, not a single white killer has been sentenced to death for the murder of any black victim, while 33 blacks have been executed for killing whites. Opponents of Kennedy's amendment, led by South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, say it would outlaw the death penalty altogether, since it would force prosecutors to develop race-based evidence to prove they were not discriminating. "This would allow vicious killers to get off by talking about race," says Thurmond.

For Harris, such controversies may soon be moot. Unless some unexpected hitch develops, at about 2:45 a.m. on April 3, the execution squad will escort Harris, wearing a new pair of jeans and a denim work shirt, into the gas chamber and strap him into one of the two seats. Fifteen minutes later, the chamber will fill with cyanide gas. Harris will inhale, slump over and, within minutes, die.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund}]CAPTION: WHO'S ON DEATH ROW

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Los Angeles and Jay Carney/Miami