Ive never experienced anything like it in my 10 years here, said Toni House, the high courts public-information officer. Robert and his brother Daniel, then eighteen, decided to rob a bank themselves. Randy Harris said he once spoke to his father about the life and crimes that led little Robbie to the gas chamber. According to the Los Angeles Times, Clark had had a vivid dream a few weeks before the execution, in which Harriss death unleashed a cloud of black gremlins that shrieked and flew in circles around his head before descending, tornado like, into hell. Our sense of civilization requires that this someone be guilty of murder. What are the obligations of each? He had run-ins with police as early as age 10, and was first placed into juvenile detention at age 13 for stealing a car. He just slowly started looking around the gallery, and the minute he saw me he stopped, and he didnt look anymore, said Baker, a San Diego police detective. [2] The Harris family moved to Visalia, California in 1962 following Kenneth Harris' discharge from the Army. Taught from the womb onward that the world runs on senseless violence, Harris behaved with a chronic viciousness that clearly suggested he was incapable of making sensible choices. After taking the boys to a deserted wash near the Miramar Reservoir, Harris shot the two boys four times each. The month that Robert turned 10, his father was deemed a sex offender and sent to Atascadero State Hospital for a year and a half. It was a solemn act. He made his way to Oklahoma, where sister Barbara and brother Randy lived. In the hard wiring that is human nature, maybe all those contradictory messages that alternately tell us to hit back, run, or stand tall in the face of violence can give us a clue that there is no simple solution. Had he been judged not responsible because of insanity, he would most likely have been sentenced to life imprisonment and psychiatric treatment. [2][3][5] After making his way to Oklahoma to live with his brother and sister, he stole a car and was subsequently arrested in Florida. In response, Harris attorneys filed a new lawsuit raising the same issues in a federal court in San Diego. Our criminal laws are absurd. Robert Harris was sentenced in 1979 to die at San Quentin Prison, but his case has been bouncing back and forth between the Supreme Court in Washington and the 9th U.S. Robert Alton Harris | Found a Grave Right now, I cant actually say it has.. Nor does not executing a convicted murderer. Rather than interpret this irony as another example of the fallibility of human justice, I interpret it as another example of the perfection of divine justice. To have forgiven him would have been to say, We will no longer teach vengeance to you or your victims. Convinced that Robert was conceived in an affair, Sgt. Son of Executed Killer Faces Trial : Crime: It was a shock for Robert WebRobert Alton Harris was born on 15 January 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, USA. For every monk who devoted his life to God, there were a hundred barbarians whose idea of a good time was to burn his books and throw him down a well.