"This is going to be a very hard thing to face and a very emotional thing, but it can't be any worse than what I think about all the time, Michael running and screaming and pleading for his life as he's shot down. One of the officers who apprehended the Harris brothers was Steven Baker, father of victim Michael Baker, who at the time was unaware that his son had been killed, let alone by one of the men he was arresting. At 52, she recalled that when her mother hit the whiskey, she would get wild and vicious. In adolescence, he emulated criminal role models and became involved in narcotics and petty crimes, which eventually led to involvement with drug syndicates. [15] Later that evening, the Ninth Circuit entered a third stay blocking the execution while it reconsidered reimposing the lower court's temporary restraining order. We are given the task on this earth of making choices between greater and lesser evils. For instance, why dont we use taxpayer money for programs to prevent children from being tormented by their parents, just as the young Robert Alton Harris was, rather than putting the money into extended stays of execution and the board and care of multiple murderers? A total of 49 people were present to watch. And then we take two steps back.". He then proceeded to persecute them before burying a bullet in both their brains. Miller also suggests that since violence begets violence, nonviolence must beget nonviolence. R. PULLEY, Warden, Petitioner v. Robert Alton HARRIS. Women who face the choice of whether to have one hold contradictory feelings of love, hope, and utter despair within them until one feeling rises up and they know what to do. 82-5246. Robert Alton Harris SAN FRANCISCO -- Friends and family eulogized executed killer Robert Alton Harris Friday as a man who had found peace of mind while awaiting his fate on I saw enough bloodshed, sadness, pain, and degrading and demeaning things to last several hundred people a lifetime. In December, 1964, the elder Harris got drunk and became unusually abusive. What were our means of creating this vast illusory world? At the spiritual level, teaching peace means cultivating the willingness to relinquish the world as we know it, in favor of a peaceful world that is presently beyond both our perception and our imagination. Before I couldnt do it. Maybe now they can sleep knowing justice is done.. The old man clubbed his son in the head with a wrench. Think of how Native Americans prayed to the spirit of the buffalo and thanked it for its sacrifice before and after the kill, and compare that to our meatpacking slaughterhouses, where prayers are absent. If we can't execute Harris, we won't be able to execute anyone.". When an innocent child is slowly destroyed by leukemia, we struggle to understand Gods incomprehensible mercy; but we surely do not attempt the same expansive attitude with mortal killers in our midst. But in an affidavit filed Friday, Daniel Harris said he at first told prosecutors that he may have fired the first shot from a rifle he carried to the scene. To those who favor capital punishment, his case came to symbolize their frustrations with a legal system that allows lengthy appeals by a killer condemned to die. It got worse and worse. Wanting to get even is only natural, we tell ourselves. For that is what Miller finally offers us, asking us to relinquish the world as we know it, in favor of a peaceful world that is presently beyond both our perception and our imagination.. Theyd fight and then go in the hole [solitary confinement], meaning their entire prison experience was altered. All rights reserved. Could things be different? He wanted to rob a bank. Other members of the victims families clutched one another, Hearn said, as they watched Harris die. His date with the gas chamber is set for Tuesday morning at one minute past midnight Pacific time. At 6:22 p.m. yesterday, he was moved to a death-watch cell about 15 feet from the gas chamber. Ive seen guys with so many holes in them you couldnt count them. SAN DIEGO -- The last time Sharron Mankins saw her son, Michael Baker, she was piling him and her five other children into the family car for the drive to the local high school where they watched the neighborhood's Fourth of July fireworks in 1978. Reentry programs would enable prisoners to return to society more smoothly, says Magris, instead of creating the current mind-set that the only way I can make it is in prison, because thats the only place where they get three meals, a cot, and a monthly pittance to buy cigarettes, potato chips, and drugs. It was like the miracle of forgiveness. He died on 21 April 1992 in San Quentin State Prison, California, USA. Later divorced, Magris ended up in a crash pad where drugs were sold to subsidize the rent. Even then I knew her advice was bad. Eats, shoots and leaves And so to the murder; Harris abducted two 16-year-old boys who worked at a fast-food outlet, along with his brother Daniel. The brothers then used the car as their getaway car when they robbed a bank in San Diego. We invented death as our answer to Gods invention of eternal life, for our creative powers are God-like, though we have used them to make a chaotic world of beauty and death mixed together. Arguing against the death penalty and in favor of forgiveness and compassion are sensible, humane positions. The relationship between my son and me would have probably been different later. Then, on July 5, 1978, five months and 26 days after his release from prison, Robert kidnaped John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both 16. Deputies in San Diego lead Robert Alton Harris from courtroom in 1979 after he was convicted of kidnap murders of two teenage boys. During this period he attempted suicide and was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Cases of murder and rape are so serious that it may be entirely appropriate to kill the perpetrators, not to get revenge on them or to deter anyone else, but simply to eliminate them. I do not mean abortion lifts up humanity. It isnt always so clear. In these cases we think it just that we suffer reasonable consequences and then be allowed to earn another chance. The last person to die in the gas chamber was Aaron Mitchell, who was executed April 12, 1967, for the murder of a Sacramento policeman. Justice in there is swift and sure and very clear. WebRobert Alton Harris - San Diego Murders San Diego Murders Sometime in May or June 1978, Robert, then aged 25, asked his brother Daniel, 18, for help in planning a bank She must have known it too; that kid was out of our home the next morning, and I never saw him again. Human murderers dont get off the hook because we can punish them. Baker bolted, trying to find cover in the bushes, but Robert Harris chased him. The metal-walled 8-by-10-foot cell contains only a mattress, toilet and recessed lights, with bars on one side, Crittendon said. He slapped my face several times, banged my head against a tree, and laughed, Go ahead, pussy. My mother said I should be understanding because his father used to tie him up and punch the daylights out of him and that was the only kind of life he knew. Actually killing someone to get even, however, is crazy. It's an awful, terrible feeling.". WebRobert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. What would I do if I lost another child?". In 1968, after his brother tried to stop him from sniffing glue, Robert ran off, stole a car, and was arrested in Florida. Millers account of David Magris, the reformed felon, gave me profound satisfaction. It is not a choice an entire society can make. Robert Alton Harris After Harris was discharged in October, 1962, the family arrived in the San Joaquin Valley $2,500 in debt, with eight kids to feed and a ninth on the way. Think of the students in Tiananmen Square. , State Deputy Atty. He seemed to be making a great effort to die well, said Wade Douglas, a media witness from KSDO radio in San Diego. When I was ten, my parents took in a delinquent boy of fifteen. It would, however, be a powerful symbol that violence will not be met with death. He also serves as a board member of Centerforce, an organization that manages hospitality houses at state prisons, where the visiting families of inmates are greeted and assisted with child care. WebALARCON, Circuit Judge: Robert Alton Harris (hereinafter Harris) appeals from the denial of his petitions for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the constitutionality of his WebRobert A Harris Collection: U.S. Social Security Death Index (SSDI) Birth: May 18 1909 Death: June 1 1990 Last residence: Haskell, Texas 79521, USA View the Record view all Immediate Family Holland Harris mother Fletcher Harris father J. Lester Harris brother Loyd B. Harris brother Julia L. Harris sister Jerold L. Harris brother Think of Gandhi. Think of Anwar Sadat. But unlike him I am actually interested in humanity getting there not endlessly delaying that attainment in order to land one more punch on anybodys nose. If the best they can do in this life is wage perpetual war on the rest of us, then maybe they dont belong here. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality to it, beginning with the eerie illumination of the chamber itself, literally with life or death hanging by a thread.. Daniel Harris claims that when he told authorities this, they threatened him with the death penalty if he made such statements at his brothers trial. Millers example of the child who died of leukemia certainly is a different kind of death from the one that Robert Alton Harris dealt his victims. Alton Harris, 79 of Strawn, passed away Sunday August 7, 2016 in Ft. Worth. For the simple fact that we cannot: God seems unreachable, unpunishable, the ultimate, invulnerable Boss in an unassailable Heaven. We punish murderers because they are the only beings on whom we can act out our anger about death itself, while still regarding ourselves as civilized. In the last few years I have taken up a discipline of forgiveness, which means I have decided against vengeance as a guide. ", "Mother Teresa is telling the governor to pray for these men {on Death Row} and make the right decision by granting clemency," Mankins said. The cold logic of economic analysis produces this intriguing option. THE EXECUTION THAT WAS FILM - Robert Alton HARRIS - YouTube His lack of comprehension that deaths are different must come from a lack of exposure to actual death. On July 2, Daniel stole two guns from a neighbor's house in Visalia, California, and the two drove to San Diego that night. As a spiritual training, it insists on a complete reversal of ordinary perception, urging acceptance of spirit as reality and the physical world as illusion. I never thought in my life that this would come over me. A person with mature faith can live a full life under any circumstances, as David Magriss transformation shows. Capital Punishment by Poisoning On Thursday, Gov. By denying blacks justice, we live with an uneasy armed peace in our inner cities. She writes down what the voices say, and a guy named D. Patrick Miller reads it and concludes that we all should forgive murderers and eliminate capital punishment and then the world would be a better place [A Brutal Sadness, August 1993]. Fear will run rampant in your mind if you allow it, and when it does, it becomes bigger than life. After crossing the chasm that forever separated them from the social contract, they found some kind of freedom outside the realm of conscience, outside the realm of society. In the safety of Juvenile Hall, she began revealing the sexual things her father would do to the girls. [2] The Harris family moved to Visalia, California in 1962 following Kenneth Harris' discharge from the Army. Robert Alton Harris San Quentin, California On July 5, 1978, Robert and his brother Daniel found John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both 16, eating hamburgers in Mayeski's car celebrating his new driver's license. According to the Los Angeles Times, Clark had had a vivid dream a few weeks before the execution, in which Harriss death unleashed a cloud of black gremlins that shrieked and flew in circles around his head before descending, tornado like, into hell. Atheists may substitute the forces of nature for the idea of God, but the basic logic is unchanged. Attempting to punish nature for causing death would seem equally ludicrous to anyone, while punishing people for causing death is considered a rational form of justice. We know what justice is, unless we are philosophers or lawyers. [8], About an hour later, the Harris brothers robbed the Mira Mesa branch of the San Diego Trust and Savings Bank located across the street from where they had abducted Mayeski and Baker, and fled with about $2,000. "The process has been too long and too cumbersome.". It was a serious act. Not until an hour later, when uniformed officer Baker was off duty, did a police sergeant go to Baker's home with news that one of the men he had helped to arrest was suspected of killing two youths, one of them Baker's son Michael. Education and responsibility are what I pursue as a writer and a human being. He has spoken publicly against capital punishment alongside his surviving victim, Dennis Tapp. We know we must still work for such a life and that we may not obtain it owing to our own failures, misfortunes, and sins. Just two hours before the Supreme Courts last order, Harris spent 12 minutes strapped into the gas-chamber chair before prison officials learned of the stay by Pregerson. The more clearly we understand that these levels are interrelated and inseparable, the more effective we will be in whatever mode of activism we choose. I looked at him and I saw just another human being, Clark told Times reporter Alan Abrahamson. WebRobert Alton Harris. They were having slap fights and were still fighting at 9 p.m. There is always someone willing to terrorize his neighbors for personal gain, regardless of what effort we make to understand him. Letting the victim sentence the criminal, within guidelines of course, would personalize the concept of justice, empower the victim, and (if he werent executed) allow the offender to make amends by producing wealth instead of draining it. Maybe to God no one is a hopeless case. Shortly after 8 a.m., a white van escorted by a California Highway Patrol car entered the prison grounds, leaving 15 minutes later with Harris body. 1993. Arrested on a drug charge, he managed to avoid additional prosecution for running a burglary ring only because there was insufficient evidence to convict him. Patel had issued a temporary restraining order late Saturday in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by Harris attorneys claiming that death in the gas chamber is cruel and unusual punishment. In an age of media conglomerates, were something of an oddity: an ad-free, independent, reader-supported magazine. Miller concluded in A Brutal Sadness that to demonstrate or legislate with full force against the death penalty is to acknowledge that we are actually campaigning to change human nature. I have scarcely read a more arrogant sentence in print. This is the fourth in a series of essays inspired by the principles of A Course in Miracles. Society is lucky in that this individual does not seem likely to kill again, but I do not want the safety of my family to depend on luck. Robert Alton Harris (January 15, 1953 April 21, 1992) was an American car thief, burglar, kidnapper and murderer who was executed at San Quentin State Prison in 1992 for the 1978 murders of two teenage boys in San Diego. She soon found a solution to her problems with Robert. He would not have defended it with such exasperation had he not been moved to question it. Pete Wilson (R) denied Harris's petition for clemency. Former San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender, who watched Harris die, said the execution sent a message that killers will face justice. "It's frustrating," Sharron Mankins said. The month that Robert turned 10, his father was deemed a sex offender and sent to Atascadero State Hospital for a year and a half. 21 April 1992 Robert Alton Harris Roberts mother called for police. They spent the next two days purchasing ammunition and practicing the robbery in a rural area near Miramar Lake. Even the most pacifist among us may be disquieted to realize how deeply the belief in vengeance is rooted. People who idealistically face violence with nonviolence have often been mowed down. Nothing about this identity should be forgiven; it should die. He might as well have been a brute force of nature, like a tornado. He had orgasms while doing so. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ To prosecutors and the families of his victims, Robert Alton Harris is a vicious murderer who laughed about killing two teen-agers and told one to ''quit crying and die like a man.'' "We're frustrated with the justice system," Mankins said. The witnesses said water that is part of the mixture that forms the lethal cyanide gas already had been pumped into the chamber, when a phone rang to announce that Pregerson had granted a one-day stay. Harris was convicted and sentenced to death on March 6, 1979. Im also for abortion rights, while acknowledging that abortion is murder. Last night in Sacramento from his Capitol office, Gov. "There were all these things he was just starting to enjoy. By denying criminals justice, we live with a growing underclass of violent, hopeless people. Crittendon said San Quentin Warden Daniel Vasquez visited Harris for about five minutes about 7:45 p.m. Crittendon said he didnt know what the two discussed. To have forgiven him would have been to say, We will no longer teach vengeance to you or your victims. Robert Harris spent the next four years as a ward of federal reformatories. In 1978, Robert Alton Harris and his brother, Daniel Marcus Harris, went to a fast food restaurant and abducted two teenage boys. It was then that Mr. Baker learned that the robbery A few minutes later, Harris second cousin, Rev. Magris was arrested several hours later and charged with murder, kidnapping, robbery, and attempted murder. Why? In 1975 he was imprisoned for manslaughter and paroled in January 1978. His mother had recently been put on parole for bank robbery. [2] During his time at the juvenile detention centre, Harris was repeatedly raped. Pleading guilty to manslaughter, Robert served two and a half years in the state prison at San Luis Obispo. Respondent Harris was convicted of a capital crime in a California court and was sentenced to death. "In hindsight, you look back and really kick yourself in the tail," Baker said. The lawsuit raised the issue of whether California should switch to lethal injection as a form of execution. His execution was the first in the state of California since 1967.[1]. Like a number of other prison reform advocates, Magris would like to see the prisons become more self-supporting by giving inmates marketable skills, and requiring them to pay room and board and help support their families on the outside. The equation is simple and so blatantly clear in human history and in the daily news that one has to wonder why our modern society has not yet grasped it. But Magris lived a double life. Enough is enough, Daniel Harris said in urging the execution. That policy would surely stop all the killing, wouldnt it? In sum, God and nature get off the hook for apparently committing murders because we have no way of punishing either of them. He found work as a welder, married and fathered a son. Yet what is poignantly missing and systematically suppressed in our society is the voice of our conscience when we face the choice of killing or not killing. As the old saying goes, life itself is a fatal disease. Magris emphatically believes so, arguing that society could be spending money and energy in more positive approaches to rehabilitation, which in the long run would be far more economical. Harris was bound in handcuffs and a waist chain. Unable to start the car, Robert Harris decided to steal another car in which two youthsJohn Mayeski and Michael Bakerwere eating lunch. Harris nodded, winking at one officer who stood outside waiting to witness his death. Steve Baker said in an interview that he has to contend with loss and regret. Criminal. Staff writers David Hasemyer, Jim OConnell, Dana Wilkie and Dori Meinert of Copley News Service contributed to this story. We already live in a culture committed to denying the reality of death. They dropped by their fathers home. We do not have the political will to cease serving as the number-one arms merchant to the world. God and nature get off the hook for apparently committing murders because we have no way of punishing either of them. His wife Evelyn, one of 11 children from a poor Cherokee family in Oklahoma, took her first drink by age 8. If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to you to give attack to anyone at all. Elsewhere in Marin County, Superior Court Judge William H. Stephens ordered that Warden Daniel B. Vasquez allow Harris second cousin, Leon Harris, to act as the condemned mans spiritual adviser in the waning moments of his life. He later gloated about their deaths and ate the rest of their hamburgers. Sometime in May or June 1978, Robert, then aged 25, asked his brother Daniel, 18, for help in planning a bank robbery. Kroll said Harris was not surprised by Wilsons denial of clemency, but continued to talk about the future, as if he held out hope that a court would grant an Easter weekend reprieve. [15] Seconds before execution, Ninth Circuit Judge Harry Pregerson stayed the execution for the fourth time, explaining that Harris should be allowed to begin a new lawsuit in state court. Over Independence Day weekend, he drove from San Diego to Visalia for a Harris family picnic. . Havent we all been seized at least once by a murderous rage and wondered later what kept us from acting on it? Times staff writers Jenifer Warren and Bob Baker in San Francisco, Paul Feldman in Los Angeles and Alan Abrahamson in San Diego contributed to this story. Ive never experienced anything like it in my 10 years here, said Toni House, the high courts public-information officer. WebRobert Alton Harris: Birthdate: May 18, 1909: Death: June 01, 1990 (81) Haskell County, Texas, United States Immediate Family: Son of Fletcher Harris and Holland Harris We have become convinced, largely through our politicians, that everyones fear of crime can best be cured by locking people up. You might as well invite mass murderers in for lunch and serve yourself on the menu. For instance, nearly everyone harbors self-hatred of a complex nature, including the petty and the profound. A $300-million (minimum) gondola to Dodger Stadium? Chikatilo, the Russian criminal who is estimated to have tortured, killed, and eaten more than fifty people, loved to mutilate their genitals. Robert was the fifth of their nine children, and the slowest. Dr. Howard Kornfeld, a San Francisco physician, said Harris will experience the terror of air hunger, a sense of strangulation, and desperate gasping for breath for a period extending up to several minutes.. We could, however, create more community service programs, so that criminals at least have a civilized alternative. WebRobert Alton Harris was born at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the fifth of nine children of Kenneth and Evelyn Harris. What made David Magris different from Robert Alton Harris and other career criminals? She never had anything good to say for Robbie, sister Brenda Harris said. Wheeler died. Defense lawyers said such evidence--that Robert began shooting only after his brother opened fire--would have supported the claim that Robert had not planned the killings but had gone into an uncontrollable mental state, thus making him legally insane at the time of the crime. Merely crushing them is no answer either; a state that has only force is just as precarious as one that lacks the will to use it. Harris' Final Appeals Stress Brother's Role - Los Angeles Times Nothing much had changed. From this mistaken belief arose an entire illusory world of time and matter, a world in which God is hidden from us because God lives in timeless, indestructible reality. All lives are not equal; neither are all deaths. Millers essay is an example of what I would call idiot compassion: the well-meaning inability to set limits on predators, disguised as spirituality. The wackos who commit torturous murders are not equal to other human lives. Native American societies handled murderers this way. The innocent release in gratitude for their release. I asked Magris what he would say to crime victims who assert that they have a right to see the criminals who hurt them punished. A similar challenge to the constitutionality of the use of gas, raised in a case from Mississippi, was turned down by a federal appeals court in 1983. There is a chasm of difference between the murderer who is full of remorse for killing someone while driving drunk and the murderer who, having tortured and killed someone, feels no remorse whatsoever. Robert Harris outlived his parents. On July 5, 1978, Harris and his younger brother commandeered a car occupied by two 16-year-old boys, John Mayeski and Michael Baker, ordered them to drive to a remote area, then killed them. They stole guns from a neighbor and returned to San Diego to shoot at targets for practice. Deep within us seethes a venomous logic that says someone must pay for death. Steps taken to delay or annul his execution illustrate some of the arguments against the death penalty. I hope it will, he said. Then youre ripe for anyone who comes along and says, Well, lets kill the guy who did it! But that doesnt solve anything. To get past that, you have to confront your fear., Without a death penalty, I asked Magris, wont many people conclude that murderers can get away with it? If it costs fifty thousand dollars a year to secure a prisoner, thats one million dollars over twenty years. Human murderers dont get off the hook because we can punish them. To forgive and try to save a killer like Robert Alton Harris does not mean excusing his crimes, but recognizing them more clearly as evidence of the ceaseless cycle of vengeance by which we all live. He had been scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. today. Absolutely not. Apparently it required being sent to the gas chamber for him to experience sincere remorse for his crime. We cannot even raise these questions as long as we feel vengeful. Part of the answer is certainly that his upbringing, however chaotic and confused, was nowhere near as cruel as Harriss. For his last meal, he requested and was given a 21-piece bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, two large Domino's pizzas, a bag of jelly beans, a six-pack of Pepsi, and a pack of Camel cigarettes. WebRobert Alton Harris was born on 15 January 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, USA. One drunken night in an Imperial County trailer court, he and his oldest brother, Kenneth, decided to give a neighbor, James Wheeler, a lesson in how to fight. This process usually feels like ego death, which is precisely what our so-called correctional system should be about suppressing criminal behavior and changing ways of thinking until criminals, whose egos are often saturated with the belief in vengeance, are liberated from that belief. Marilyn Clark, the sister of Harriss other victim, attended the execution to honor her deceased mother, who had wanted to be there but died of cancer the year before. Most people have judged themselves harshly for their mistakes, their desires, and their dark secrets. Killing has gone on and will always go on. One makes choices. It created a very positive effect on day-to-day living in a place where racial and territorial tensions were still prevalent.. A lot of misery would have been averted if the Nazi war criminals had been shot before they ever got power. From this perspective, the answer to the paradox of Gods incomprehensible mercy in wreaking natural death is that God has nothing to do with it. Pete Wilsons televised rejection Thursday of a clemency petition by Harris. WebHarris was paroled in January 1978. And what they see upholds their freedom from imprisonment and death. He is the son of Kenneth and Evelyn Harris. The revelation hit him like a bullet. Under terms of a plea bargain--in which he received three years for kidnaping for his role in the crime--Daniel Harris testified during his brothers trial that Robert had shot both victims. Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. Robert Alton Harris (1953-1992) - Find a Grave Memorial Miller draws from a set of doctrinal preconceptions (A Course in Miracles) to lay a massive guilt trip, not on criminals, who elicit his forgiveness and understanding, but on the innocent people they rape, rob, and mutilate.
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