Robert Alton Harris was executed at San Quentin in April 1992. Before that, I understood my death sentence only on an intellectual level, but with the Harris execution it became all too real. Prior to that, California had not executed anyone since Aaron Mitchell, who was the 194th person to die in the gas chamber, in 1967.
The thought of execution hardly crossed the minds of men here, even though we were all sentenced to death. The threat of being killed was far greater on the exercise yard than from any state-sanctioned procedure during those twenty-five years between the Mitchell and Harris executions. On any given day, an attempt on my life could be made. Extreme violence was common and expected. That threat seemed normal. Put four hundred convicted killers on an exercise yard and, of course, there will be violence.
I’m not afraid to face a man coming at me with a knife and trying to kill me because I’m trained to deal with that. That’s a situation I’ve experienced and have total confidence I can win. In a fight, I determine the outcome, and, although I may be killed, I’m not afraid. Being strapped into a chair and executed by inhaling poisonous gas is a different story because I have no control. I can’t use my ability to survive based on my training. It’s being helpless that I hate. I have a deep-seated aversion to dying in a hopeless manner where I am nothing but a spectacle in a macabre theater. The most intimate moment, coming at the climax of one’s life, becomes a stage performance with a gawking audience and news reporters seated in rows on the other side of clear Plexiglas.
That was what gripped me so tightly, not the fact that Robert Alton Harris was being executed. I never spoke to him. He was one of many men in prison for killing children, and I have nothing to say to his kind. Still, I imagined how it would be for me at the moment of execution.
It was so real to me on April 21, 1992 that fear overwhelmed me. I shook violently. The walls seemed to close in on me until the act of breathing became difficult. Since the moment they came for him, a week prior to his execution date, my emotional state was totally out of control.
He lived directly above me, on the fourth tier in cell-77. I heard them tell him in hushed tones they were there to take him to North Segregation where he would remain in a cell just above the gas chamber while they waited for any last minute appeals or stays. They cuffed him and opened his door, and he compliantly walked with them on the last walk he would ever take.
I went outside every day during the week prior to his execution. I worked out as if my life depended on it. The emotional turmoil I experienced happened internally and no one saw the changes going on inside me. Each day when I went back to my cell from the yard I imagined it was my death walk, heading for my own execution.
Because Harris was the first execution in California since 1967, the media made it even more of a circus act. Every channel ran coverage of it, with the reporter speaking in front of the gates of San Quentin, and showing historical footage of his arrest. They called him the smiling killer. All of it drove me closer and closer to a breaking point, where my mind plunged into a state of hyper-reality. I relived the best and worst parts of my childhood, similar to the certainty with which a person who is drowning reviews in the span of a second all the insurmountable moments of his life. As midnight neared and his execution approached, I put on my headphones, hoping to block it out.
Suddenly, at 12:15 a.m., East Block erupted in the sound of men cheering. I took off my headphones and tried to understand what they were reacting to. I turned my radio to KPFA, a station that covered social and political commentary, and learned Robert Alton Harris had received a temporary stay of execution.
I didn’t share the relief the other men did. The pending execution triggered a thought process that made me realize my own mortality. The stay of execution didn’t change my state of mind.
Fear had been part of my life for as long as I could remember, but the conscious realization of my mortality was an element I never considered.
Sleep came to me late that night. But for the first time in my life, images saturated in color filled my subconscious. The colors were so intense I thought I would drown in them.
I woke suddenly very early in the morning. I washed my face in cold water and went to the bars of my cell, stopping to listen. It was absolute silence. Dead calm. Even the birds seemed to know that silence was appropriate.
I turned on my radio and heard that, during the night, Robert Alton Harris became the first person since 1967 to be executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber.
He received a stay of execution at the last moment while sitting in the chamber, and was escorted back to his cell. A short time later a higher court revoked the stay, and he was escorted back to the chamber, strapped in, and executed.
I didn’t know exactly how I felt about it, aside from tired and drained of emotion. I sat on my bucket and looked out the window in front of my cell. I wasn’t really thinking, just looking at the water of the bay and allowing its movement and color to touch me. I don’t know how long I sat there, but the breakfast trays being passed around brought me back to my surroundings. It was still very quiet, but I could hear men talking and the sound of toilets flushing.
When the bull working my tier came by with the trays, I refused and sat back on my bucket. We were all on lockdown that day with no movements, no showers, and no yard.
Around 10 a.m., a couple of shrinks came by asking questions to anyone who would speak with them.
“How are you this morning?”
“Do you feel like hurting yourself, or others? Are you hearing voices?”
I refused to acknowledge them and they didn’t press me.
I sat on my bucket the rest of the day, the execution fresh in my thoughts. I came to the conclusion that, more than ever, time was something I couldn’t waste. I didn’t have the luxury of an entire lifetime to ponder—not when someone would eventually decide my time had come. More than ever, I wanted to be heard, to be relevant, to make an impact. I didn’t want to be just another number on a long list of men who died in prison. I wanted my life to mean something.
Men with the strongest wills rebel when oppressed. I’m no different from the many men throughout history who’ve suffered the chains of oppression and struggled against them in order to change their circumstances and better themselves. However, rebellion without true cause, goal, or structure, is nothing more than chaos. True rebellion begins within. It may begin in the form of anger, but until it is purified in the fires of intellect, it is short-sighted.
Rebellion starts with rehabilitation. I don’t mean rehabilitation in the sense that prison administrators have in mind. Rehabilitation, in its purest and truest form, is to return to our true former self—before the influences surrounding us affected our behavior. To do this, we must become conscious that each of us holds the key to our own freedom. Not through religion, or by following prison rules, or through fear of torture. My rebellion is to survive these brutal circumstances and prove my worth. In doing so, I understand who I am, but more importantly, why. I know what I must do to grow and mature, channeling the explosive forces inside me where I alone control them, and I alone hold the key to my freedom.
Tamed? Nothing could be further from the truth, and those who say it see me, the world, and themselves through eyes permanently impaired by prejudice and intellectual impotence. My weapon of choice is my mind. And its product is to actualize itself in the form of expression—art, where I retreat from the world that surrounds me and escape its suffocating embrace.