California executes inmate, 76

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. – In the end, California’s oldest condemned inmate did not seem quite as feeble as his attorneys made him out to be in their efforts to save his life.

With the help of four big prison guards, Clarence Ray Allen shuffled from his wheelchair to a gurney inside San Quentin’s death chamber early Tuesday, a day after his 76th birthday. Though legally blind, Allen raised his head to search among execution witnesses for relatives he had invited.

“Hoka hey, it’s a good day to die,” Allen said in a nod to his Choctaw Indian heritage. “Thank you very much, I love you all. Goodbye.”

Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor. “At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life,” said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. “We would resuscitate him,” then execute him.

But the barrel-chested prisoner’s heart was strong to the end: Doctors had to administer a second shot of potassium chloride to stop it.

“It’s not unusual. This guy’s heart had been going for 76 years,” said Warden Stephen Ornoski.

Allen, condemned for ordering from behind bars a hit that left three people dead, was the second-oldest inmate executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed nearly 30 years ago, behind only a 77-year-old in Mississippi last month.

His attorneys had pleaded with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the U.S. Supreme Court to spare his life, claiming that executing a man as old and feeble as Allen amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Among other things, Allen was nearly deaf and had diabetes. Medical records show he was indeed ailing, and prison officials did not dispute his condition. However, some observers saw a man in better condition than he had been portrayed.

The family of one of Allen’s victims, Josephine Rocha, said in a statement that Allen “abused the justice system with endless appeals until he lived longer in prison than the short 17 years of Josephine’s life.”