San Quentin closure: From The Sacramento Bee archives, Sam It never has. At the political level, teaching peace means opposing the death penalty and promoting the sort of resocialization programs that David Magris suggests for our prisons: these would decrease human suffering, save money, and provide a truly sensible route to the lessening of crime and violence in our society. Then youre ripe for anyone who comes along and says, Well, lets kill the guy who did it! But that doesnt solve anything. Execution Nears for First Man To Die in Calif. Gas Chamber in 23 A Course in Miracles suggests a reason that capital punishment is morbidly alluring to so many: The death penalty is the egos ultimate goal, for it fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God knows you are deserving of life.. The Course is a one-year, self-study curriculum that guides its students toward an instinctive, utilitarian spirituality by restoring their contact with what it calls the Internal Teacher. Published in 1976, the Course was written down over a period of seven years by Columbia University research psychologist Helen Schucman, who claimed to hear a soundless voice giving her a compelling inner dictation. Schucman, who died in 1981, never claimed authorship of the Course. Think of Jesus. If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to you to give attack to anyone at all. Ive seen guys with so many holes in them you couldnt count them. 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 Further, seeing vengeance as the primary motivation for the death penalty grossly oversimplifies. When murderers torture and slay the vulnerable bodies of their victims, we are reminded of our own tenuous physicality, and we react with a fearful rage. . The innocent release in gratitude for their release. At Miramar Lake, the Harris brothers ordered the boys to kneel, whereupon the boys began to pray. If we presume that God brings all natural deaths to us, why not exact a death penalty from our Creator? On July 5, Robert and Daniel Harris kidnapped John Mayeski and Michael Baker, both sixteen, in order to use their car for the getaway. Harris' death sentence was affirmed by the Supreme Court of California in 1981. With time now their most fearsome enemy, lawyers for condemned killer Robert Alton Harris pressed last-ditch appeals in several courthouses Friday, searching for a judge who will delay Californias first execution in 25 years. Such questioning will not immediately yield a deathless world of spirit, for we have gone too deep into our illusions for that. "Well, how about praying and giving the victims inner strength? We already live in a culture committed to denying the reality of death. I was a nurse for several years and spent hours with people as they died. Magris was arrested several hours later and charged with murder, kidnapping, robbery, and attempted murder. In denying mercy, Wilson said he sympathized with Harris for having been the victim of alcoholic and abusive parents but said he could not excuse or forgive the choice made by Robert Harris the man.. One of the arresting officers, Steve Baker, was the father of one of the murdered boys, but did not realize the victim was his son until later. After sixty days in jail, Magris was free briefly before being brought up on burglary charges, for which he received a suspended sentence. "It was a terrible loss. [15] That night, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam decision vacating the Ninth Circuit's stays and allowing the execution to proceed, by a vote of 72. Since the body is always vulnerable to damage and destruction, our lives are constricted by our perpetual service to fear, self-defense, and vengeance. D. Patrick Millers essay A Brutal Sadness [August 1993], for all its insight and tender heart, disturbs and angers me in exactly the same way. After thinking about his creation, the old man demanded to know: How could that bastard do that?, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Our primal human nature will always scream out to fight or flee in response to attack, but we have the conscience to choose thoughtfully how well respond, whether with exquisitely planned, torturous vengeance, or with prayer and forgiveness, or with something else altogether. I invite responses at 103 N. Hwy 101, #1022, Encinitas, CA 92024. Give them lobotomies? While I agree with D. Patrick Miller wholeheartedly that prisons should exist solely for the positive transformation of their inmates into contributing members of society, I believe he totally misses the point of the death penalty. Id say you have a right as a victim or loved one of a victim to get resolution, he says. The judge denied other requests by Harris sister, his lawyer, and a psychiatrist that they be allowed to remain with Harris on Monday night. Shall we keep people with such damaged consciences alive and try to reform them? Baker said he finds it "totally ridiculous that it would take 14 years to punish someone like Harris. But our actions must be open to some evaluation in the here and now. So I tried to reach out in a . We know what justice is, unless we are philosophers or lawyers. The nod, however, was not one of forgiveness but only acknowledgment, said Baker, who wore a small gold pin shaped like a hangmans noose on the lapel of his gray suit. After all, everyone knows its a dangerous world. On his twenty-first birthday, his credentials as a petty criminal well established, Magris and his pals decided to do a robbery. 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. 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. It was a solemn act. His date with the gas chamber is set for Tuesday morning at one minute past midnight Pacific time. in such a helpless, depressed state," Sam Mankins said of Michael's death. I think lethal injection is much cleaner, more surgical, quicker, Leary said. Harris appeals of his conviction went up and down the legal system, including seven trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. In these cases we think it just that we suffer reasonable consequences and then be allowed to earn another chance. For the simple fact that we cannot: God seems unreachable, unpunishable, the ultimate, invulnerable Boss in an unassailable Heaven. There is no glee here, Lungren said at a press conference following Harris execution. We do not have the political will to cease serving as the number-one arms merchant to the world. The cycle of vengeance will never resolve itself; to end it we must question its foundation the belief that the body and its death are real. We will try our best to teach you peace, and by learning it, you will teach us as well.. Herein lies the peace of God.. He had been scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. today. 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. The lawsuit raised the issue of whether California should switch to lethal injection as a form of execution. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. He replied, I have a hard time seeing how twenty-five years in prison equals getting away with it. Shall we study them like lab rats? Im also for abortion rights, while acknowledging that abortion is murder. On Thursday, Gov. Counselors reported that he slashed his wrists in suicide attempts. The execution order was given at 6:07a.m. and Harris died at 6:21a.m. His body was removed from the chamber at 7:00a.m. and was taken to a funeral home at 8:15a.m.[citation needed], Harris's execution is specifically remembered for his choice of final words (recorded by Warden Daniel Vasquez): "You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the grim reaper. And it just opens up all the wounds, and we hope maybe, just maybe, the judicial system is going to prevail. Even then I knew her advice was bad. Any concept of punishment involves the projection of blame, and reinforces the idea that blame is justified. 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. Robert Harris spent the next four years as a ward of federal reformatories. . 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. He wanted to rob a bank. SAN QUENTIN -- After an exhausting night of uncertainty and three last-minute legal delays, condemned San Diego murderer Robert Alton Harris was put to death at dawn today in Californias gas chamber. Staff writers David Hasemyer, Jim OConnell, Dana Wilkie and Dori Meinert of Copley News Service contributed to this story. Deep within us seethes a venomous logic that says someone must pay for death. 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. [2][3] Kenneth was a sergeant in the United States Army who was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for his service in World War II. 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. Movies. Nothing about this identity should be forgiven; it should die. When Robbie was 1 1/2 years old, Harris pummeled him with a bamboo cane. Education and responsibility are what I pursue as a writer and a human being. At 6:22 p.m. yesterday, he was moved to a death-watch cell about 15 feet from the gas chamber. Forgiveness is often mistaken for the passive acceptance of wrongdoing and the denial of anger. I am not so arrogant as to presume that I understand the ancient hard wiring of human nature. Rarely, if ever, is the public made aware of the reasoning behind the District Attorneys Offices decision not to file charges in a case. The execution was videotaped by order of U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. ), How Palm Springs ran out Black and Latino families to build a fantasy for rich, white people, At Willie Nelson 90, country, rock and rap stars pay tribute, but Willie and Trigger steal the show, Plaschke: Lakers live up to their legacy with a close-out win for the ages, Concertgoer lets out a loud full body orgasm while L.A. Phil plays Tchaikovskys 5th, L.A. Affairs: I had my reasons for not dating white men. We love getting letters to the editor for our Correspondence section. We have only begun questioning our fascination with car chases, gun battles, and violent crime on television and in the movies. Baker bolted, trying to find cover in the bushes, but Robert Harris chased him. . In sum, God and nature get off the hook for apparently committing murders because we have no way of punishing either of them. I was leading an exemplary life in the daytime as a dancer, he recalls. Robert was 39 years old. In their most surprising legal bid, defense lawyers presented what they called new proof that Daniel Harris, a younger brother of the condemned man, may also have shot one of the two San Diego teen-agers whom Robert Harris was convicted of murdering. Any violent or sudden death, whether through murder or not, is quite different. Robert Alton Harris was born at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the fifth of nine children of Kenneth and Evelyn Harris. Through the windows of the soundproof chamber, many of the forty-eight witnesses to the execution saw Harris mouth the words, Im sorry. Baker nodded his head sharply in acceptance of the apology. Schizophrenia was diagnosed. WebRobert Alton Harris was an American murderer who was executed at San Quentin State Prison in 1992 for the 1978 murders of two teenage boys. WebRobert Alton Harris is perhaps the most famous bad-history wrongdoer in the philosophical * I thank Saba Bazargan-Forward, Amy Berg, Matthew Braich, and his brother planned a bank robbery. I doubt we have the collective imagination to implement anything so radical. The Harris He would not have defended it with such exasperation had he not been moved to question it. [3] Robert was especially targeted for abuse by his father, who believed that Robert was conceived in an affair. And I dont want to forgive robbers. Nor does the birth of an unwanted, soon-to-be-abused baby. 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. I looked at him and I saw just another human being, Clark told Times reporter Alan Abrahamson. If we must go down as the victims of senseless violence, we intend to go down with guns blazing. The visitors were not allowed to bring anything to Harris, but they shared sodas and sandwiches supplied by the prison. He seemed to be making a great effort to die well, said Wade Douglas, a media witness from KSDO radio in San Diego. "We were just traumatized . Atheists may substitute the forces of nature for the idea of God, but the basic logic is unchanged. Later divorced, Magris ended up in a crash pad where drugs were sold to subsidize the rent. It helps us to understand what forgiveness really is: not the self-sacrificing acceptance of wrongs that have been done to us, but rather the willingness to recover a long-abandoned world of peace by questioning both the sanity and reality of the world we have built on vengeance. But Magris lived a double life. It is completely savage and completely insane. Part of the answer is certainly that his upbringing, however chaotic and confused, was nowhere near as cruel as Harriss. The older Harris brother, Randall, confirmed Daniels latest account of the facts in a sworn affidavit, noting that Daniel had confessed a few years after leaving prison that his rifle went off first and that Robert then just went crazy and opened fire. Five minutes before the cyanide gas was released, Harris twisted against the straps confining him and looked back over his shoulder to catch the eye of Steve Baker, the father of one of the two teenage boys Harris had killed in 1979. At San Quentin prison, where Harris is under a deathwatch, a spokesman said Wilsons rejection of clemency had turned Harris more somber. With his father again in prison, Robert and his family took up the migrants life, following the crops up and down the valley. In recent years, we have decided, by at least a three-fourths majority according to most polls, that we do want capital punishment administered in due course to convicted murderers. Attorney General Dan Lungren said attorneys for the state had worked until 3 a.m. each night since Friday to fight the legal challenges to Harris execution. I agree with Miller that the sanity/insanity argument is absurd. If we listen to the voice in the Miracle Ladys head, we will understand that the body is an illusion and, therefore, we need not execute guilty murderers because wed only be depriving them of their illusory bodies. [15] Two hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay, explicitly ordering "No further stays of Robert Alton Harris' execution shall be entered by the federal courts except upon order of this Court. But in a time when youngsters are murdering each other over athletic shoes, we can presume that many peoples love of life is so weak that the theory of deterrence hardly applies to them. "I wish things could have been different. 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. His death cant bring those boys back, he said. Robert stole a car and was arrested in Florida, winding up as a ward of federal reformatories for the next four years. WebRobert Alton Harris was born on 15 January 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, USA. In 1978, at age 25, Harris was released again, despite warnings from the Imperial County Sheriffs Department to parole authorities that Harris was in need of psychiatric attention.. He made his way to Oklahoma to live with his sister Barbara and brother Randy and was expelled from the eighth grade after his first day at school. Actually surrendering his belief in vengeance is a miracle he will have to induce himself. FOR VICTIM'S MOTHER, KILLER HAS LIVED TOO LONG Harris pleaded guilty to a federal charge of bank robbery and received a 25-year sentence.[9]. Why is Frank McCourt really pushing this? What would I do if I lost another child?". Id see guys lives change over an exchange of bad words, Magris remembers. I do not mean abortion lifts up humanity. Robert Harris told the boys that they would be using the vehicle to rob a bank, but that no one would be hurt. This story was originally published in The San Diego Union-Tribune on April 21, 1992. In each issue of The Sun youll find some of the most radically intimate and socially conscious writing being published today. We seem studiously to avoid many other choices: to forgive without condoning or committing further violence ourselves; to lay down our arms; to turn the other cheek or even to try to love our perceived enemies. All it does is alienate us further from our own humanity. Kenneth Harris had won a Silver Star and Purple Heart in World War II. Robert Alton 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. He said he decided he would be more useful by a phone outside the chamber after the first execution attempt was abruptly stopped. If we presume that this surrender is impossible, we ensure that killers like Harris will always be with us as the most extreme perpetrators of our collective belief in vengeance. This is the fourth in a series of essays inspired by the principles of A Course in Miracles. I dont know what the answer is, but its not forgiveness, and its not letting prisoners out. The fifth of nine children, he was born two months premature in a Fort Bragg, North Carolina, army hospital after his drunken father kicked his alcoholic mother in the stomach. It was then that Mr. Baker learned that the robbery Most of us love life enough not to wreak death indiscriminately upon others every time we are ourselves faced with our mortality (or deprivation or suffering, which are often experienced as equally threatening). He became inhuman. He was arrested less than an hour after the robbery and charged with murder, auto theft, kidnapping, burglary, and bank robbery. In the simplest terms, we collectively want to kill those who kill. Later, the father would load his gun and tell Robbie to run. But as long as society is unwilling to liberate itself from that same belief, it will continue to have a chaotic correctional system that does little more than warehouse and further degrade societys most dangerous members. When I was ten, my parents took in a delinquent boy of fifteen. Miller does not want to acknowledge that civilization is founded on armed force. Native American societies handled murderers this way. This formula is so confusing that it may seem simpler to forget about defining sanity and rely instead on the fundamental logic of vengeance: if you kill, for any reason, you deserve to be killed. Robert Harris did not stop with his fists. Robert's first But around age ten Magris learned that the man in the photographs around his house was his biological father a bad man, he was told, who was in prison for murder, a Mafioso whose brothers and sisters were pimps and whores. Magris claims, The irony is that I was the trigger man on the attempted murder I was acquitted of, and not the trigger man on the murder I was found guilty of. Sent to San Quentins death row for the murder, Magris was also given a life-without-parole sentence for the kidnapping. Before I couldnt do it. But the way the state now practices capital punishment is as inept and insane as the rest of our criminal justice system: its impersonal, inefficient, and expensive. In an order signed by Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas, the court said it had carefully read and considered legal arguments from both sides. I owe this to Michael.". Barbara enrolled him in the eighth grade but, after a day, the school kicked him out. One gets off ones idealistic cloud of spirituality and finds a way to make common-sense choices that will benefit the people who are truly innocent. [15][17], On April 21, 1992, at 3:49a.m., Harris was strapped into the gas chamber. [15] That evening, a group of Ninth Circuit judges ordered the execution stayed while the circuit considered granting en banc consideration of his lawsuit. 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. . People who idealistically face violence with nonviolence have often been mowed down. I, too, hope the time will come when humanity attains a state of spiritual realization in which capital punishment is unnecessary, but that is an end to be achieved through education and the great assumption of responsibility by individual citizens. But you do yourself an injustice when you feel that your victimization justifies somebodys execution or degradation in prison. I thought he was either going to kill mom or Kenneth.. "The process has been too long and too cumbersome.". Robert Harris outlived his parents. Randy Harris said he once spoke to his father about the life and crimes that led little Robbie to the gas chamber. [15] On April 22, the Ninth Circuit issued an emergency writ of mandate vacating the restraining order, in which Judge Arthur Alarcn was joined by Judge Melvin T. Brunetti, over the dissent of Judge Noonan. 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. Our sense of civilization requires that this someone be guilty of murder. (To its credit, the state goes to some trouble to determine whether a punishment fits the crime, but the freelance agents of personal justice generally dont worry about such niceties.) Thats all the effect I can have. Kolender, who was appointed director of the California Youth Authority last year, said he hoped Harris death would bring peace to the families of his victims. He knew vaguely that his biological father was a bad person--his mother had told him so. People like Miller can teach and write only so long as the state has the power to crush thugs. He deliberately smashed my bicycle; I screamed I would tell my mother. Mankins said the two looked to each other for strength, waiting on the night of the murders at the Mayeski house for news of their sons and waiting these years for Harris's execution. Rather than interpret this irony as another example of the fallibility of human justice, I interpret it as another example of the perfection of divine justice. . These are the people we must worry about most, of course those who have decided that they can kill to avenge murder, end their suffering, or solve a particular problem, whether their victim is guilty of anything or not.

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