Coalition Plans March to Protest Death Penalty

SACRAMENTO —  Hoping to prevent California’s first execution in more than two decades, activists launched a new campaign Thursday for the abolition of the death penalty by announcing plans for a 120-mile protest march.

With folk singer Joan Baez, Assemblyman John Burton (D-San Francisco) and the mother of a murdered child at their side, leaders of a coalition of activist and religious groups said by bringing attention to the issue again they hoped to spark a groundswell of support for the abolition of capital punishment.

They conceded that their numbers are small and support in the state for the death penalty is widespread.

“Everything starts with a step,” Burton said. “This is people with their feet and with their bodies saying, ‘We do not believe in state-sanctioned killing.’ It will call attention to both execution and the movement and I think things will change.”

Burton said the group will try to show that the death penalty is costly, has failed to reduce violent crimes and is morally wrong.

In his own life, Burton said his conviction that killers should not be put to death has remained strong even though a best friend--former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone--was murdered by former supervisor Dan White in 1978.

“I did not, nor would he (Moscone), have called for the death penalty against the perpetrator of that crime,” he said.

Protesters said they will begin the 10-day march on the Capitol steps Friday morning. They plan stops in Davis, Vacaville, Vallejo, Richmond and Berkeley before they end with a rally at the gates of San Quentin prison Oct. 21.

California has 265 convicted killers awaiting execution. State prosecutors say the first execution--probably of Robert Alton Harris, 36--could come as soon as next spring. Harris was convicted of killing two San Diego teen-agers in 1978.

Aaron Mitchell, the convicted killer of a Sacramento policeman, was the last person executed in California. He died in the gas chamber in 1967.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all existing death laws. Then, in 1976, the high court upheld some revised capital punishment statutes in a decision that set the guidelines for permissible laws. That paved the way for adoption of a new California death penalty law in 1977. For years after that, a state Supreme Court dominated by liberal justices overturned all but four death sentences until 1986, when its chief justice, Rose Elizabeth Bird, and two of her colleagues were ousted by the voters.

Baez, who cannot participate in the actual march because of a concert engagement, said the protesters will try to show that the resumption of executions “doesn’t solve anything.”

“This is a moral issue,” she said.

In a sense, by executing killers, she said, society says to people such as Adolf Hitler, “Well, maybe you were right. Maybe this is how we do solve our human problems . . . by killing each other because it seems the simplest.”

The Rev. William J. Wood, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, said most people on Death Row are “desperately poor” and all of them “have been abused as children.”

“Spending millions of tax dollars to kill those who have killed doesn’t solve any problems and it brings out the uncivilized savage in us,” he said.

Janice Gay, the wife of Death Row inmate Kenneth Earl Gay, said a petition with more than 7,000 signatures urging the abolition of the death penalty would be presented to Gov. George Deukmejian’s staff.

Her husband awaits execution for the 1983 murder of Los Angeles policeman Paul Verna.