Harris Turns to U.S. Courts in Last Hope to Avoid Execution

SAN DIEGO —  Lawyers for condemned killer Robert Alton Harris filed a last-ditch appeal Monday with the federal court in San Diego, the first step in the last legal procedure Harris has left to avoid being executed next Tuesday.

Harris, convicted of the 1978 murders of two San Diego teen-agers, contended in his legal papers that new psychiatric evidence shows he had suffered from brain damage that could have led to the killings.

U.S. District Judge William B. Enright in San Diego, who initially handled--and rejected--Harris’ previous appeals in federal court, was expected to begin reviewing the case Monday night. The new appeal essentially set forth the same arguments that failed to persuade the California Supreme Court earlier this month to spare Harris.

In denying Harris’ first federal appeal in 1982, Enright called Harris’ death sentence “an appropriate and deserved penalty.”

Harris, 37, is in line to become the first person executed in California in 23 years.

His case has progressed further through the court system than any of the other more than 270 prisoners on Death Row in California.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected appeals of Harris conviction and sentencing four times, most recently on Jan. 16.

The California Supreme Court upheld Harris’ death sentence in 1981. On March 16, 1990, the state Supreme Court turned down an appeal Harris’ San Diego attorneys, Charles M. Sevilla and Michael McCabe, had filed on Jan. 5.

That rejection meant that, under the complicated court procedures for death penalty appeals, Harris’ last hope was to turn to the federal courts.