Opinion In Brief
Things went according to plan earlier this week when California officials killed 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen before he could die of natural causes.
Allen, blind and nearly deaf, suffered a heart attack in September. According to wire reports, he asked prison authorities to let him die should he go into cardiac arrest before his state-sanctioned death.
Things went according to plan earlier this week when California officials killed 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen before he could die of natural causes.
Allen, blind and nearly deaf, suffered a heart attack in September. According to wire reports, he asked prison authorities to let him die should he go into cardiac arrest before his state-sanctioned death.
But prison officials wouldn’t have let that happen. “We would resuscitate him” so that we could kill him, a prison spokesman told the Associated Press. In other words, Allen wouldn’t have been allowed to die from natural causes.
Only the state of California had a right to put an end to this man’s life, and state authorities did just that on Tuesday. Allen had to be injected with poison twice before he died.
Prosecutors alleged that Allen ordered three people murdered in 1980 while serving a sentence for ordering another man dead. Thus, California ordered Allen executed because doing so is against the law.
