21 April 1992 – Robert Alton Harris
The gas chamber marked California’s return to the death penalty in 1992 – the first execution for over 25 years and certainly since the sentence was reinstated in 1976.
It was the dubious honour of callous killer Robert Alton Harris to christen the noxious enclosure, after he was found guilty of the senseless murder of two young lads.
Descent into hell
There’s a school of thought that believes psychopaths are born with killer tendencies. But it’s nurture that ultimately morphs those tendencies into full-blown depravity. If that is the case, then Harris didn’t have a hope in hell. Even in the womb he was a victim, having been born three months premature after his mum got kicked in the stomach by his surly dad.
By the age of two, he’d suffered a broken jaw at the hands of his nutter of a dad. And he’d be forced to run outside and hide within 30 minutes, or his dad vowed to shoot his children down. So was it any wonder his destiny was to descend into killer?
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. He then proceeded to persecute them before burying a bullet in both their brains. He then calmly finished off the burgers he’d stolen off them.
The brother had no hand in the murders, however later that day the two of them did do a bank over. But the real clincher was that Harris had already done time for manslaughter. His original crime had been deemed manslaughter, because he heaped his defence on the fact that he’d been protecting a woman against her husband. Of course, that didn’t explain why the first victim was beaten to death as well as doused in lighter fluid in an attempt to set him alight. Harris bizarrely even cut the victim’s hair off.
The fact that Harris had previous meant that his card was marked. As a result, the punishment was death. He was sent to the gas chamber and poisoned to death.
Of all the profundities Harris could have reserved for his last words on this mortal coil, he plumped for a quote from that seminal film, ‘Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey’
Also on this day
21 April 1876 – Johnny Dolan
21 April 2006 – Willie Brown Jnr
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May 5 at 1:30 am
I guess the only problem I have with the punishment my father received is this. Can we be absoulutely sure that the man who was executed in 1992 was infact the same man that committed the hanus crime in 1978. Do I believe that Capital Punishment is a necessary evil. Yes, I actually do. But, at some point, we as a society must come to the realization that the human body has the ablility to heal itself. Thus, the mental defect in my fathers brain could have been corrected those many years later when he was put to death. So the question is, are we punishing the man for what he did, or what he was? Can we still hold a person who was sick at the time the crime was committed guilty if he is later cured of the sickness that compelled him to commit these crimes?