SAN QUENTIN, Calif., March 26 -- California planned to kill Robert Lee Massie just after midnight Tuesday, exacting the ultimate penalty at San Quentin State Prison for a murder that occurred across the bay in San Francisco nearly 22 years ago.
Massie, 59, recently dropped his appeals and said he was prepared to die by lethal injection for the Jan. 3, 1979 shooting death of Boris Naumoff during a liquor store robbery. He has been on death row at San Quentin since being sentenced on May 25, 1979.
The state planned to kill Massie at 12:01 a.m. PST Tuesday. If carried out, Massie would be the ninth prisoner put to death since California resumed executions in 1992.
In an article he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle on March 14, Massie said he had dropped his appeals as a protest against the appellate process that he charged was biased against the accused.
"I hope my death will give life to a challenge to California's machinery of death," Massie wrote. "Not simply because I got a raw deal, but because I see dishonesty and incompetence leading to unnecessary death all around me, every day."
He further complained that the appeals attorneys -- usually appointed by the state to handle the automatic appeal of death sentences -- often fail to tackle solid constitutional arguments against capital punishment and instead concentrate on minor technical points that are easily shot down.
"Death penalty litigation is the state's process from beginning to end," he said. "State prosecutors, state-agency lawyers appointed to represent defendants, an intricate scheme created by state legislators geared toward one inevitable result, and a court whose complicity constitutes a repudiation of the justices' obligation to honor and uphold the Constitution."
Massie's supporters continued last-ditch efforts to spare his life on Monday with a request to the full Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider their refusal to block the execution.
Death penalty protestors planned to gather outside the San Francisco Bay Area prison Monday night for a vigil that was scheduled to last until the execution is carried out.
Massie has escaped execution at San Quentin once before. He was sentenced to death in 1965 for a murder in the Los Angeles area, however his sentence was commuted to life in 1972 when the state's death penalty was overturned. He was paroled in 1978, nine months before Naumoff's murder. He was sentenced to death for the second time in 1989.
