Nine years ago, the first man to be executed in California in over 25 years was Robert Alton (Bob) Harris. Back in the late 1970s, Harris and his teenage brother, Daniel, stole hamburgers from their young victims' bodies after shooting them in a car robbery. The fifth of nine children born to an abused mother and alcoholic father, Harris got into trouble early. A textbook case of foetal alcohol syndrome, he spent half of his life in prison. By 14, he was working with his mother as an itinerant fruit-picker, sleeping in cars or tents. At 15, he was jailed for stealing a car and did four years.
After his release, he married and settled, but was arrested for beating a neighbour and jailed again. After parole, he moved to San Diego, where he shot the boys with his brother and stole their burgers. He was committed to San Quentin's "North Seg", as inmates call death row.
The hamburgers stuck in the public mind, sealing Harris's fate 14 years later. He was convicted just after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, but not until 1992 did he make the last walk into the octagonal death chamber (now converted to accommodate lethal injections).
What made his San Quentin execution so widely covered was the number of extraordinary last-minute reversals, almost as many as Caryl Chessman's under Pat Brown. Two weeks before his death, he was reprieved by one court. When that decision was overturned, a new date was set, and when it came he was taken into the holding cell, then into the gas chamber for execution at midnight, and strapped down.
At the last moment, another reversal came from the circuit courts, and he was outside again. The appeal-block process was repeated until the US Supreme Court, with undisguised impatience to get on with it, overturned his final appeal in the small hours and forbade the lower courts to entertain any others.