The Ultimate Horror Show

By Jill Smolowe

The voice-over is easy to script. "Robert Alton Harris was executed yesterday at San Quentin prison. He was the first California prisoner in 24 years to be put to death "

The video images are also easy to imagine. Harris being strapped to a chair. Cyanide pellets dropping into sulfuric acid. Fumes filling San Quentin's green-walled gas chamber. Harris gasping his final breaths, twitching.

Far more difficult to predict is how viewers will react to the video footage of the event. When -- and if -- the time comes, what will spectators do? Lean in toward the screen, fascinated? Cringe in horror? Cover their children's eyes? When Harris' body goes limp, many will breathe a sigh of relief. But will it be for the murderer? His victims? Themselves?

We may have a chance to find out, if public television station KQED triumphs in a June 7 hearing before a federal court in San Francisco and is permitted to broadcast Harris' execution. A career criminal, Harris was convicted in 1979 of the murder the preceding year of two teenage boys in San Diego. He is the first of 301 death-row convicts in California in line for execution.

In its lawsuit, which was filed in May 1990, KQED argues the public's right to know. "Giving voters accurate information about the administration of the death penalty is especially important in California, where capital punishment was enacted by voter initiative." Television correspondents with cameras, the station contends, should have just as much right to cover the event as newspaper reporters carrying notebooks. (In the wake of the KQED lawsuit, San Quentin authorities barred all journalists of any kind from the execution.)

But the issues go beyond an abstract debate over First Amendment press rights. At the heart of the case are troubling emotional questions about whether a social need is met by graphically showing justice being served in its most extreme form. Viewing an execution could repulse so many people that it might lead to a backlash against the death penalty. Or it could kindle a disquieting Dickensian excitement that appeals to society's most morbid instincts. Or, at a time of fear about rising lawlessness, televised executions might grimly satisfy the public's urge to see that society's most brutal criminals receive the full brunt of justice.

Capital-punishment opponents are divided; the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, an organization with 120 affiliated groups, has taken no stance. Some members argue that if Americans want the death penalty, they should face the consequences of their action squarely. If they cannot bear the thought of watching public executions, then they may realize that it does not make moral sense to permit executions in private either. Other death-penalty opponents maintain that whatever the potential gains, televised executions are too ghoulish to consider. Says Donald Gillmor, professor of media ethics at the University of Minnesota: "I don't like our return to an era of public hanging."

Death-penalty proponents are similarly split. Ernest van den Haag, a former law professor at Fordham University who supports the death penalty, fears that televised executions might stir a misplaced sympathy for murderers. "Our compassion for the murderer whose life is cut short before our eyes may overcome our sense of justice," he argues, "for we are not shown his innocent victims nor how he murdered them." The fear of a public backlash is countered by the argument that once citizens view their first execution, the next one will not seem so terrible, and anti-death penalty fervor may even subside.

The debate over whether the death penalty is a deterrent to crime is writ large when it comes to televising it. The horrible images, proponents say, would certainly give pause to potential criminals. Others contend that the gruesome thrill of watching a state-sanctioned murder could, in some twisted way, make all murder seem more acceptable. "There is evidence that immediately following an execution, violence increases," says Martin Rosenthal of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. "It puts out the subliminal message that the solution is violence." Inside San Quentin, authorities are concerned that other death-row inmates, who have TV sets in their cells, may be impelled to violence if they witness Harris' execution.

But the debate over the death penalty is about more than deterrence, and so too is the debate over televising executions. Some crimes are so heinous that society thirsts for vengeance against the perpetrators. That base yet understandable desire, in addition to mere morbid curiosity, is what prompted thousands of spectators to turn out in Kentucky for the last public execution in America, the hanging of Rainey Bethea in 1936, and at other such spectacles throughout history.

If KQED wins its case and the scene of Harris' last breath is broadcast into the nation's living rooms, will people judge it to be a disturbing atrocity or a darkly satisfying rite? And how will they feel when the image replays not only on their screens but in their minds, as it undoubtedly will?

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/New York and Robert W. Hollis/San Francisco