Old, blind, infirm - and fit for execution

Clarence Ray Allen before life in jail. Picture / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - Clarence Ray Allen is 75, legally blind, nearly deaf and crippled. This week he will be executed by the State of California after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied him clemency.

Although Allen still has an appeal pending before the Supreme Court, the Governor's decision increases the likelihood he will be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday night (NZ time), a day after he turns 76.

Scwarzenegger ruled the oldest prisoner on Death Row will not be spared, saying a murderer is still a murderer whatever his health. The decision, was denounced as an affront to human dignity by campaigners.

Allen's case, the latest in a long line to raise disturbing questions about the way capital punishment is administered in the United States, is filled with ghoulish ironies. He almost died of a heart attack four months ago but doctors at San Quentin prison resuscitated him - fulfilling their professional obligations, just as the prison's executioners are now preparing to fulfil theirs at 12.01am on Tuesday (9.01pm Wednesday NZ time).

Special arrangements will have to be made to get Allen into the death chamber, which does not permit wheelchair access because of a steep bump running across the floor. Prisoners' hands must be manacled and their feet shackled as they make their final journey from holding cell to death chamber.

Two prison guards will help Allen drag his feet over the lip of the door or carry him bodily on to the stretcher where he will be injected with drugs to knock him out, collapse his lungs and stop his heart.

CLARENCE RAY ALLEN

* Blind, hard of hearing, confined to a wheelchair and barely able to speak.

* Organised robberies in Central Valley in the 1970s, then arranged the murder of four people who snitched to the authorities.

* The last three murders were ordered after he was behind bars.

* Due to die on Wednesday, the day after he turns 76, by lethal injection.

* Governor Schwarzenegger turned down Allen's petition for clemency.

- INDEPENDENT