Clarence Ray Allen Watch: Americans With Disabilities Act – The Latest Excuse

The Sacramento Bee has Disability act raised in capital case

Condemned inmate’s lawyers raise novel angle in appeal to governor.

State executioners will be violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if they make the aged and infirm Clarence Ray Allen walk the final steps to his death, the condemned murderer’s attorneys say.

In their latest plea for clemency, Allen’s lawyers cited a Fresno television station’s news report in arguing that prison officials are planning to make their client – a 75-year-old blind diabetic confined to a wheelchair – walk the final 15 feet into the execution chamber.

So, the apologists and anti-death penalty folks are now using the pathetic argument that this four time murderer cannot walk to the execution chamber?

San Quentin State Prison spokesman Lt. Vernell Crittendon response is accurate and classy:

Crittendon on Wednesday said prison officials instead are planning to wheel Allen right to the doorstep of the execution room, leaving him only two steps to the table, where he is scheduled to die Jan. 17 at 12:01 a.m. of a lethal injection.

“So it’s really nothing that’s going to be an issue,” Crittendon said. “We’ve been accommodating his needs up to this point, and nothing will change.”

And what are Allen’s crimes?

Allen, who once ran a security company in Fresno, became the leader of a theft ring in the San Joaquin Valley and was convicted of ordering the 1974 murder of his sonâ€™s girlfriend. While serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison, he was convicted of ordering three more murders at a Fresno supermarket in 1980, including the killing of a witness from his earlier trial. The gunman, Billy Ray Hamilton, a former fellow inmate, is also on Death Row.

Read the pathetic “Sob Sister” letter of deposed California Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Grodin, here.

Remember in 1986, Justice Grodin along with Chief Justice Rose Bird and Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso were thrown off the court by a vote of Californians. This action was in part due to the California Supreme Court’s reluctance to enforce the “Death Penalty.”

Clarence Ray Allen’s reply to the state Attorney General’s response to his petition for clemency is here.

Clarence Ray Allen deserves to be executed in January. He has lived for twenty years because of countless and needless legal appeals and obstruction by anti-death penalty zealots.

BIG JAB for Allen on January 17th