Execution today for blind, deaf man in wheelchair
AP
Published: 17 January 2006

The US Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a 76-year-old convicted killer who argued that he was too old and feeble to be executed.

The ruling cleared the way for Clarence Ray Allen - legally blind, nearly deaf and in a wheelchair - to be executed by injection today for a triple murder he ordered from behind bars to silence witnesses to another killing.

Allen went to prison for having his teenage son's 17-year-old girlfriend murdered for fear she would tell police about a grocery-store burglary. While behind bars, he tried to have witnesses in the case wiped out, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to death in 1982 for hiring a hit man who killed a witness and two bystanders.

The Supreme Court has never set an upper age limit for executions or created an exception for physical infirmity.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Supreme Court and a federal appeals court previously refused to spare Allen's life.

Allen's final meal was chicken from KFC, a buffalo steak, whole milk, sugar-free pecan pie and black walnut ice cream.

Now, I’m sure that Mr Allen is not a nice man and he certainly did commit the acts of which he is convicted but what is the point in executing him? What good will it serve?
There tends to be three reasons put forth by people who support state executions.
One it stops the person re offending, two it acts as a deterrent and thirdly they get all biblical, an eye for an eye etc.
In this instance, I hardly think that a deaf blind man in a wheelchair is a danger to anyone and as for a deterrent, how many times has a Father ordered the murder of his teenage son’s girlfriend friend and then followed up by hiring a hit man to murder a witness? Not many I bet but if ever I’m in that situation, the execution of Mr Allen will certainly make me think twice.
And the eye for an eye, argument? I omitted a sentence from the original piece:

Allen's heart stopped in September, but doctors revived him and returned him to San Quentin Prison's death row.

Why? It looks to me that God was trying to tell the State of California something or at least trying to save them the cost of a lethal injection and the price of a KFC meal.