Post-Furman US execution #168
California execution #1 since reinstatement
On the morning of Tuesday, the 21st of April, 1992, the State of California carried out its first execution in twenty-five years when 39-year-old Robert Alton Harris was put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison, Marin County. Harris had spent thirteen years on death row following his conviction for the July 1978 murders of two 16-year-old schoolboys during a bank robbery in San Diego.
His execution was the first in California since Aaron Mitchell was gassed on the 12th of April, 1967. The proceedings became an unprecedented legal spectacle, involving four separate stays of execution granted by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals within twenty-four hours—including one that halted the execution after Harris was already strapped inside the sealed chamber—before the United States Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of forbidding any lower federal court from issuing further stays.
Early Life and the Murders
Robert Alton Harris was born on the 15th of January, 1953, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the sixth of nine children. His domestic background was marked by severe disruption, malnutrition, and violence; both parents were chronic alcoholics, and his father, a decorated soldier, routinely subjected the children to physical abuse. Harris was born prematurely with developmental injuries consistent with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. By adolescence, he had begun drifting across the American West, accumulating convictions for car theft, burglary, and weapons violations. In 1975, he beat an associate to death during an argument in Imperial County, California, for which he served two and a half years for voluntary manslaughter before being paroled in January 1978.
Six months after his release, on Wednesday, the 5th of July, 1978, Harris and his 18-year-old brother, Daniel, decided to rob the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank in Mira Mesa. Intending to obtain a getaway car that could not be traced to them, they drove to a local Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant where they spotted two 16-year-old boys, John Mayeski and Michael Baker, sitting inside a green Ford sedan eating hamburgers.
Armed with a 9mm pistol and a 7.62mm Luger carbine, Robert Harris forced his way into the vehicle and ordered Mayeski to drive to an isolated fire road near the Miramar Reservoir. Once there, Harris ordered the terrified youths out of the vehicle and assured them they would not be harmed. However, as the boys walked away into a clearing, Harris raised the carbine and shot John Mayeski twice in the back, then turned and shot Michael Baker as he ran. Harris approached the fallen boys and fired point-blank shots into their heads to ensure they were dead.
Harris and his brother returned to the victims’ car, ate the cold hamburgers left by the murdered teenagers, and proceeded to rob the bank, obtaining approximately $3,000. Less than an hour later, San Diego police officers tracked the green Ford to the home of Harris’s sister. One of the responding officers, Detective Steve Baker, was unaware until arriving at the morgue that one of the victims discovered at the reservoir was his own 16-year-old son, Michael.
Both brothers were arrested without resistance. Daniel Harris entered into a plea agreement, testifying against his brother in exchange for a six-year sentence for armed robbery.
Trial and Sentence
Harris was indicted in the San Diego County Superior Court on two counts of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and armed robbery, with special circumstances under the newly reinstated 1977 California capital statute.
His trial took place in San Diego in January and February 1979 before Judge Eli H. Levenson. Forensic ballistics definitively matched bullet casings found at the reservoir to the carbine recovered from the Harris home. Witnesses testified that Harris had mocked the boys after killing them and had flicked brain tissue from his firearm. Harris took the stand, claiming he had blacked out and that his brother had fired some of the shots.
On the 23rd of February, 1979, the jury convicted Harris on all counts with special circumstances. During the penalty phase, his defence introduced evidence of severe childhood abuse, head trauma, and mental illness. On the 6th of March, 1979, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty. Formal sentence of death was imposed by Judge Levenson on the 10th of April, 1979.
Appeals and the Lethal Gas Controversy
Harris spent thirteen years on death row at San Quentin. His appeals were protracted, involving constitutional challenges to California’s death penalty procedures, claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, and neuro-psychological assessments documenting organic brain damage.
By 1990, his direct appeals were exhausted. A death warrant was issued, but stayed while federal judges considered broader constitutional challenges to California’s method of execution: lethal cyanide gas.
Opponents argued that execution by cyanide gas was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, causing asphyxiation, extreme pain, muscle spasms, and visceral terror that took up to twelve minutes to produce brain death. The courts, however, declined to categorically prohibit the gas chamber prior to Harris’s scheduled date.
In April 1992, Governor Pete Wilson denied executive clemency following an extensive public hearing, declaring:
“The crimes were cold-blooded, calculated, and executed with chilling brutality. Mercy is a quality reserved for those who show it.”
The Extraordinary Procedural Chaos
Harris’s execution was set for 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, the 21st of April, 1992. What followed was one of the most remarkable procedural confrontations between federal courts in modern legal history:
- Stay 1: On Monday night, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay to hear claims regarding brain damage. The US Supreme Court vacated it shortly before midnight.
- Stay 2: Minutes later, Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit issued a second stay. The Supreme Court vacated it at 3:00 a.m.
- Stay 3: At 3:30 a.m., a ten-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit issued a third stay. The Supreme Court vacated this stay at 5:45 a.m.
With the third stay vacated, Warden Daniel Vasquez ordered the execution to proceed immediately.
At 5:55 a.m., Harris was led into San Quentin’s two-seat, apple-green octagonal gas chamber. He was secured to Chair “B” with heavy harness straps. Technicians attached a stethoscope to his chest and connected a tube beneath the chair leading to a metal crock filled with dilute sulphuric acid, above which hung a cloth bag containing approximately one pound of sodium cyanide pellets. The massive two-bolt hatch was sealed shut at 6:01 a.m.
Inside the viewing room, official witnesses, journalists, and Detective Steve Baker watched as the countdown began. At 6:07 a.m., the chamber’s interior telephone rang.
Judge Procter Hug Jr. of the Ninth Circuit had issued a fourth stay of execution, this time based on a civil rights suit challenging the constitutionality of cyanide gas.
Warden Vasquez knocked on the chamber glass, telling Harris: “Stay, Bob.” Harris smiled, nodded, and looked towards the ceiling.
At 6:11 a.m., the heavy door was unbolted. Officers entered with gas masks as a precaution, unbuckled the leather straps, and led Harris out of the chamber back to his holding cell while federal attorneys argued by emergency telephone.
At 7:25 a.m., the Supreme Court of the United States intervened decisively. In a rare and unprecedented ruling, the Supreme Court vacated the fourth stay and issued a strict order:
“No further stay of the execution of Robert Alton Harris shall be entered by any federal court.”
The Execution
Harris was allowed a final meal consisting of a 21-piece bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, two large pizzas, a bag of jelly beans, a six-pack of cola, and a packet of cigarettes.
At 8:30 a.m., Harris was walked back into the gas chamber for the second time in two and a half hours. He offered no resistance and took his seat in Chair “B”. The straps were secured tightly across his legs, chest, and arms.
Before the hatch was closed, Harris spoke his final words to Warden Vasquez, quoting a line from the film Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey:
“You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.”
The airtight steel door was locked at 8:40 a.m. Behind the thick viewing windows, Harris caught the eye of Detective Steve Baker, who was watching from the first row. Harris looked directly at Baker, nodded, and mouthed: “I’m sorry.” Baker nodded back.
At 8:46 a.m., an executioner outside the room pulled the mechanical trip lever.
Under the seat, the packet of sodium cyanide pellets dropped into the crock of sulphuric acid, initiating a chemical reaction that generated a cloud of lethal hydrocyanic gas. The mist rose up around Harris’s legs and torso.
Harris held his breath for nearly two minutes. At 8:48 a.m., he gasped deeply, inhaling the cyanide fumes. His head snapped back, his eyes rolled upward, his mouth opened wide, and his facial muscles contorted. Over the next four minutes, his chest heaved violently against the leather chest strap, and his arms strained against the arm restraints.
By 8:53 a.m., the deep respirations subsided into shallow twitches, and his head slumped forward toward his chest. His heart monitor showed erratic activity before fading.
At 9:01 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time—fourteen minutes after the gas was dropped—the attending physician confirmed the absence of cardiac function, and Warden Vasquez announced that life was extinct. Robert Alton Harris was 39 years of age.
Exhaust fans evacuated the lethal gas from the chamber, and ammonia was pumped through the interior to neutralise remaining cyanide residues before guards washed Harris’s body with water and removed it for the coroner.
Harris was the 168th person executed in the United States since 1976 and the 501st in California history. His harrowing double trip into the chamber and the graphic observations of his death accelerated legal challenges against lethal gas; in 1994, US District Judge Marilyn Patel declared California’s use of the gas chamber unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment (Fierro v. Gomez), and the state subsequently designated lethal injection as its primary execution method.
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