Editorials

SAN QUENTIN – Two-time convicted killer Robert Lee Massie is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, abandoning 21 years of appeals. 

Massie, on death row for killing and robbing San Francisco liquor store owner Bob Naumoff, is to become California’s ninth condemned inmate to die at San Quentin State Prison since state voters reinstituted capital punishment in 1978. 

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Sunday upheld a lower court’s ruling that said Massie was competent to drop his appeals and refused to block the execution. The U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to review the appeals court’s latest decision. 

Massie, known as the “Dean of Death Row” because of his lengthy tenure here, gave up his appeals to protest the snail’s pace in which the state’s death penalty system moves. 

California is home to the nation’s most clogged death row, incarcerating nearly 600 condemned prisoners. Massie is the only inmate eligible to die — the others are still challenging their sentences. 

Hundreds of the condemned also have not been provided an attorney for their mandatory first appeal to the California Supreme Court, the initial stop in a maze of state and federal appeals. 

“I don’t see any use in continuing this charade,” Massie, 59, said in a recent interview. 

Charles Harris, who survived a bullet from Massie’s gun, but saw his friend Naumoff die Jan. 3, 1979 at a Twin Peaks liquor store, agrees it’s time for Massie to go. 

“I want an end of this and that’s that,” Harris said. 

California’s last state-sanctioned killing was March 15, 2000. Serial killer Darrell Rich was executed by lethal injection for throwing an 11-year-old girl more than 100 feet to her death. 

Rich, 45, was sentenced to die for the death of the girl, Annette Selix, and the murder of Linda Slavik, 28. He also was convicted of murdering two other women in and near the town of Redding during what prosecutors called a “reign of terror” in the summer of 1978. 

Massie also has killed more than once. He went on a crime spree Jan. 7, 1965, robbing and assaulting five people in the Los Angeles area. He received a death sentence after confronting a San Gabriel couple outside their home, fatally shooting Mildred Weiss. 

At one point, Massie came so close to execution he had ordered his last meal. 

But in 1972, his sentence was commuted to life with the possibility of parole by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that abolished the death penalty. He was paroled in 1978, when California voters overwhelmingly endorsed reinstating the capital punishment. 

A year later, Massie killed Naumoff. 

A capital crime in California is a murder in the commission of a felony, such as a rape, robbery or kidnapping. Killing a police officer and committing multiple murders also is punishable by death. County district attorneys choose whether to seek the death penalty or a life sentence in capital trials.