Family Drama Sears Wilson’s Death Penalty View

SACRAMENTO —  On a bookshelf in Gov. Pete Wilson’s office is a framed police badge, No. 2842. It belonged to Michael Callahan, a 30-year-old patrolman who one night did not like the looks of three men walking down a Chicago street, so he stopped them. One pulled a gun and shot him in the stomach.

Callahan fired back and hit one of the men, who turned out to be members of a gang of cocaine dealers and robbers. The officer died the next day; the man he shot went shortly afterward. The two other guys were convicted of being accessories to murder. One was hanged. The second spent the rest of his life in prison.

That was in 1908. Twenty-five years later, Callahan’s daughter gave birth to a son who, as a young adult, would move to California and ultimately be elected the state’s 36th governor--and deny clemency to the double murderer whose execution would reopen San Quentin’s gas chamber after a 25-year hiatus.

With a family background like that, it’s easy to see where Wilson is coming from on the death penalty.

“It has some impact,” the governor said last week of his grandfather’s murder and its influence on his thinking. “I am obviously aware that my mother grew up without a father because a thug on the streets of Chicago gunned down my grandfather.”

Wilson’s widowed grandmother went to work cleaning hotel rooms to support herself and her young daughter, eventually becoming a head housekeeper.

No other modern governor’s view of capital punishment has been rooted in such genealogical drama. But each of these governors has wrestled hard with his conscience, his own innermost sense of morality, before deciding whether--and under which heinous circumstances--the state is entitled to take a life.

As a district attorney and state attorney general, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. advocated the death penalty. It was not until he was elected governor and became “the last stop on the road to the gas chamber,” as Brown wrote later in an autobiography, that he began speaking out against capital punishment. He commuted the death sentences of 23 people to life imprisonment, but sent 36 others to be gassed.

“It was an awesome, ultimate power . . . that no person or government should have,” he wrote. “Each decision took something out of me.”

Ronald Reagan faced only two death penalty decisions as governor. He spared the life of a baby-murderer on grounds that the man’s brain may have been damaged. But he sent to the gas chamber cop-killer Aaron Mitchell, the last person to die there before Robert Alton Harris last Tuesday.

Despite his tough law-and-order rhetoric, Reagan sought religious counseling before denying clemency to Mitchell and later described it as the most difficult decision he had to make as governor.

Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who spent three years in a Catholic seminary, always has been strongly opposed to capital punishment and even helped influence his father against it. Jerry Brown never faced a death penalty decision as governor. Nor did his successor, George Deukmejian, who as a legislator had carefully studied capital punishment and concluded that it deterred some murders.

Deukmejian sponsored the law that reopened the gas chamber but became frustrated when it never was put into use on his gubernatorial watch.

Now, Wilson could be looking at several clemency decisions as governor. He seems to be neither welcoming the task nor cringing from it. “It’s not a pleasant duty, it’s simply a duty,” he said. “I will do what I have to do.”

“I am a believer in capital punishment,” he said. “I think that it deters--at a minimum--rational, premeditated crime.”

Many citizens, he pointed out, also support capital punishment as “retribution, (feeling) that there really isn’t an equal balance in the scales (of justice) when a life has been taken and no life is taken in return.”

But Wilson seems reluctant to justify executing somebody for retribution. “It depends on the nature of the act that was involved,” he said after a long hesitation. “I’m not sure I could generalize.”

The governor said he would have granted clemency to Harris if there had been proof that the killer “totally lacked capacity to entertain criminal intent, to understand the nature of his action” when he murdered two teen-age boys while stealing their car for a bank holdup. But the evidence did not come “anything close to showing that,” he said.

Wilson said he read voluminous material before denying clemency, including Pat Brown’s autobiography and a book on fetal alcohol syndrome, which Harris suffered from and is an affliction that long has interested the governor.

“It weights heavily,” Wilson acknowledged of his decision. “I mean, obviously, if you have somebody’s life in your hands, that is an enormous responsibility.”

As most governors have learned, that is the reality of occupying the office--grandfather or not.