Capital Punishment

The Life and Times of Clarence Ray Allen

Dec. 1, 2009

Clarence Ray Allen

A coward and a megalomaniac, Ray Allen gave orders that resulted in the deaths of many people.  At age 76, he was the oldest person ever executed by the State of California.

 by Randy Radic

His name was Clarence Ray Allen.  Born in Blair, Oklahoma in 1930, he asserted he was part Choctaw, which meant he laid claim to being a member of the Muskhogean Indian tribe, which included the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes. 

The Allen family was dirt poor, so Ray grew up picking cotton.  But Ray was ambitious.  Later, he moved to Fresno, California, where he got married and started his own security company.  Charismatic and hardworking, Ray’s company flourished.  He went from renting a shack for $75 per month to owning a ranch where he raised fancy show horses – Thoroughbreds and Arabians – owned an airplane and had a swimming pool in his backyard. 

For some reason, success and wealth weren’t enough for Ray.  There was a discordant element inside Ray.  Maybe he was simply bored.  Some said he simply went insane.  Whatever the reason, his psyche became tainted.  Ray turned to crime, forming his own gang, which he baptized as the Ray Allen Gang.  Because of his outgoing personality, Ray attracted people like a magnet.  Some of those he attracted were young ne’er do wells, impressionable, impulsive and reckless men who sought an outlet for their dissatisfied lives.  

Ray recruited them and gave them direction.  He turned them into criminals.  The Ray Allen Gang’s most important rule was no snitching.  Ray told the gang that snitches would be killed.  To make his point, he pulled out a newspaper article about two people who had been found dead in Nevada, telling his gang that there was only one punishment for snitches.

The Execution Photos

Allen Lee Davis

[Ed's Note: On Jan. 14, 2000, following the barrage of controversy created by the execution photos posted by Justice Shaw, Florida barred any further executions by electrocution, opting for lethal injection. On Dec. 16, 2006, then Gov. Jeb Bush suspended all executions in Florida after it took two doses and 34 minutes for Angel Diaz to die by lethal injection.]

 by J.J. Maloney

 

The execution of Allen Lee Davis in the Florida electric chair on July 8, 1999, was so violent that it set off a shock wave that rippled around the world. When the Florida Supreme Court ruled, yet again, that execution by electrocution is not unconstitutional, a dissenting justice attached three photographs of the execution to his dissent and posted them on the Florida Supreme Court web site.

The photographs drew attention from all over the world, with many foreign visitors expressing disgust, while many Floridians rallied in support of "Old Sparky," as the Florida electric chair is known. One Florida woman, in an email to the court, described the photographs as "wonderful."

Each person can view the photographs, and read the following lengthy excerpt from the dissent of Justice Shaw and come to his or her own conclusion as to the propriety of capital punishment, and electrocution in particular. As Justice Shaw points out, the United States is the only country in the world that uses electrocution as a means of execution, and even in the United States only three states still use this method of execution.

Mothers Who Murder

Nov. 28, 2011

Ana Cardona

There are over 3,500 inmates on death row in the United States, spread out over the 34 states that still use the death penalty.  Less than 1 percent of death row inmates are women and all 61 of them have been convicted of murder.

by Amanda Carlos

Since 2000, 11 states have executed 28 women. The last female executed was, Teresa Lewis, in Virginia on September 23, 2010. Lewis’s execution was controversial because her IQ score was 72 and 70 and below would have excluded her from being given the death sentence. Lewis along with two accomplices, Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller, killed her husband and stepson for insurance money. Shallenberger and Fuller were sentenced to life without parole by the same judge who sentenced Lewis to death calling her the mastermind of the murder.

Fourteen of the women on death row are there for murdering their own children.  Here’s a look at the crimes they committed.  

Pulling the Trigger – How Hate Groups Influence Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

April 27, 2011

 

An excerpt from Mel Ayton recently published book Dark Soul of the South – The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

by Mel Ayton

The Last Days of Lepke Buchalter

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter

Thomas E. Dewey built a political career around hounding the Jewish gangster Lepke. His execution in 1944 — the first of a major underworld figure – riveted the attention of a nation and was in doubt up to the last minute.

by Allan May

It was Thursday, March 2, 1944, and time was running out in Sing Sing prison for Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and four of his henchmen who were facing execution with him. Condemned to the electric chair with Lepke were Emmanuel "Mendy" Weiss and Louis Capone, for the murder of candy storeowner Joseph Rosen; and Joseph Palmer and Vincent Sallami, for the murder of Brooklyn detective Joseph Miccio.

From the pre-execution chamber that the underworld called the "Dance Hall," Lepke seemed confident that the legal maneuverings of his attorney, J. Bertram Wegman, would pay off. After all, his execution date had already been changed five times. Weiss and Capone were optimistic too that if reprieve came for the boss that they would escape the electric chair too. Palmer and Sallami both sat dejected. Only a last minute word from New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey could save them.

The Lynching of Leo Frank

March 14, 2005

Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)

Virulent anti-Semitism led directly to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and lynching of the innocent, but Jewish, Leo Frank. Police and prosecutors fabricated evidence to win a death by hanging verdict. When the governor of Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a resurgent Klan mob stormed the prison and re-imposed the original sentence.

by Denise Noe

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

She was soon identified as 13-year-old Mary Phagan, the child of a working-class family. She had been employed at the factory putting metal tips on pencils. She had recently been laid off because the factory had run out of the metal required for her job. On Saturday, April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, she planned to see the parade but first wanted to stop off at the factory to collect $1.20 in wages owed her.

The killing captured the Monday headlines and news about it would appear on the front pages of Atlanta newspapers for more than a year afterward. Much of Atlanta suffered a paroxysm of grief over this murder. About 10,000 people showed up at the morgue and over 1,000 attended her funeral. Those grieving over this stranger were nicknamed ''Mary's People'' while she became known as ''the little factory girl.''

American Lynchings

 

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These photos of whites torturing and lynching black men present a side of U.S. history that most history books ignore. They provide one of the many reasons why blacks (and Indians) hold a different view of U.S. history than whites. Notice the carnival atmosphere prevailing as these crowds of U.S. citizens watch the completely lawless and most inhumane executions imaginable.

In the U.S. we often pass judgment on people in other countries: Germany, for the Holocaust; Japan, for its war crimes in Asia; Stalin for his purges.

We conveniently forget our own past, however.  A past in which we enslaved hundreds of thousands of blacks -- beating them, working them in inhumane conditions, and killing them.

There are many photographs, showing crowds of U.S. citizens attending the most inhumane butchery imaginable, and getting away with it.  If you'll notice, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

This page is a reminder that the beast dwells within all of us -- Americans, Germans, Japanese, Russian and all other nationalities.  The urge to participate in butchery is not unique to any nation -- it is a universal affliction.

If we forget that fact, the beast may prevail.

Master Hangmen

October 26, 2008

Strangeways Prison

Entrance to HM Prison Manchester (Strangeways) where, in a special execution room, Albert Pierrepoint carried out the famous "quickest hanging" in 7 seconds. (photo credit: Stemonitis)

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Pierrepoints, first Henry, then Thomas and finally Albert, were chief executioners for Great Britain, responsible for hanging hundreds of British citizens. After World War II, Albert would hang some 200 Nazis on orders of Field Marshall Montgomery.

by Robert Walsh

"Prisoner at the Bar, you have been found guilty of murder and it is now my duty to pass sentence. It is the sentence of this Court that you are to be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be afterwards cut down and buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were last confined before execution. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul. Remove the prisoner."

To many British people over a certain age, the name Pierrepoint is an unusual one. Not so much because it is a rare name in Britain (although it's certainly an unusual one) but for what, and often who, it has come to represent. The best known of the Pierrepoint clan, (and subject of a recent biopic simply entitled Pierrepoint) was Albert Pierrepoint, who achieved a large measure of fame (and notoriety) as Britain's chief public executioner or "Master Hangman" as he sometimes called himself.

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