Michael A. Kroll

     When not conveying us to and from the gas chamber, our “escorts” guarded us in a small, tidy office with barred windows facing the east gate, where a circus of media lights lit up the night sky, letting us see silhouettes in the darkness. There were two desks, the exact number of straight-backed chairs needed to accommodate us, some nineteen-cent bags of potat0 chips, a couple of apples and bananas, and black coffee.
     We -- a psychologist and lawyer who knew Robert Harris professionally, his brother Randy, whom he had designated to
witness the gassing, and I, a close friend for nearly a decade, entered at the west gate at 10 P.M. as instructed to present our credentials (a written invitation from Warden Daniel Vasquez himself) and submit to a thorough pat-down search and
a metal detector.

     Our escorts took us in a prison van to the
front of the old fortress and escorted us up a few steps into the office of one G. Mosqueda, program administrator. Thenwe began what we thought at the time would be a short vigil.
     It turned out to be eight hours. We’d been there only a few minutes when another staff person arrived wearing a civilian suit and a name tag that Identified him as Martinez. He walked up to Randy, pointed his
finger and said, “Randall Harris. Come with me!” Randy smiled, got up and followed him out. (Randy told me later that he thought they were taking him for counseling.

     It wasa fair assumption; counselors had been provided by the prison to assist members of the victims’ families who had come to witness the execution. This was to insure, Warden Vasquez told them, that “there 1s only one casualty in that room.”)
     “Where have you taken Randy?” the lawyer asked as soon
as he was gone.

     “I don’t know,” replied Mendez. “You’ll have to ask Martinez.” Mendez was our escort, you see. An escort only escorts. When they brought him back, he told his own
horror story. He had been ordered to submit to a full body cavity search. “We have learned from a reliable source that
you are planning something,” Martinez had said.

     Randy protested that he was there for his brother, a solemn responsibility he would rather not have. He asked who the “reliable
source” was. “None of your business,” he was told. He was ordered to take his clothes off, bend over, lift his testicles, pull
back his foreskin. He had to opehni s mouth for inspectlon.
     “If you try anything,” Martinez had threatened, “you’ll be sorry, and so will your brother.” His brother was waiting just a few feet from the gas chamber.
     After Randy rejoined us, shaken and humiliated, our escort gave us our marching orders. “When the phone rings and I get the order to go, stand and follow me quickly.’’       

     The phone, which had the kind of clanging ring that scares you to death even when you are not already scared to death, rang many times that night, and each time our hearts stopped. But the call did not come at midnight. It did not come for a long time.
     With no television to inform us, we waited, hour after hour, wondering what was happening, drinking bad coffee and asking to be escorted to the bathroom.
Later, we learned that in those hours, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had granted three stays of execution.
     One concerned newly discovered evidence that Robert’s brother Danny, who had participated in the crime, and received
fewer than four years in exchange for his testimony against Robert, had actually fired the first shot.

     The two other stays, including one signed by ten judges. were based on the pending
suit challenging the constitutionality of cyanide gas as a method of execution. Each of the three stays was dissolved by the Supreme Court.

     Finally, a little after 3 o’clock, the call came and Mendez said, “Now.”

      We followed him into the freezing, brilliant night, but Mendez stopped us just short of the entrance to the gas chamber.
Shivering, we watched other witnesses being led out of the cold -- the media-- into a building opposite the gas chamber, and the victims’ family members into the East Block visiting room just beyond it. After a while, responding to words over his walkie-talkie I could not hear, Mendez led us into the main
visiting room to our immediate right. I had been in this room many times, but never at night, and never, as now, was it deserted of staff and Inmates.
     We were in the middle of something indescribably ugly. It was nakedly barbaric.
(While we waited, unaware of the cause for the delay, prison officials were arguing fiercely about where to set up the video
camera that Judge Patel had ordered to assist her in determining whether death by lethal gas IS cruel and unusual punishment-
an order that had been vigorously opposed by the attorney general.        Just outside the entrance to the gas chamber, not ten feet from where I was pacing nervously and watching the clock, the man assigned by the defense team to operate the camera was met by San Quentin’s public information officer.
    

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