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.

Ruth Ellis: Love, Lust and Death on the Gallows

Feb. 29, 2012

Ruth Ellis

It was a time of “no sex please, we’re British.”  Women, if they had to mention the three-letter word, preferred to spell it out in a whisper. As for men, they hypocritically joined private men’s clubs where sex was on the menu along with beer and French fries covered in salt and soaked in vinegar.  The girls who provided the sex – models they called themselves and club owners called them hostesses – dreamed of meeting a sugar daddy. One such girl – Ruth Ellis – saw her dream end on the gallows, a rope around her neck.

 By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

There is no sweet story to write about the childhood of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang in Britain.

Even the reminiscences of her sister, Muriel Jakubait, in her 2005 book, Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, could not pretend that the first years of the life of her little sister, six years her junior, were idyllic. 

Describing Ruth as dark-haired, skinny and quiet and wearing second-hand clothes, Mrs. Jakubait wrote of how the 11-year-old pre-menstrual Ruth screamed when their father abused her sexually. Muriel, also abused by their father and having borne his child, wrote: “I heard her scream … I knew what he was doing… I encouraged her not to come home straight from school … Most of the time I’d stand in front of her, screaming for him to leave her alone … Nothing stopped him …”

Ruth was born in Rhyl on the northeast coast of Wales on October 9, 1926, her parents, Bertha and Arthur, having moved to the resort not long before. Arthur – Nelson Arthur Hornby – was a cellist, working when and where he could which meant that he either provided the accompanying music to a silent movie, or he played the cello in the band of an ocean liner sailing between England and America. Bertha was half-Belgian half-French: Catholic nuns had evacuated her with other orphans from Belgium to England during the First World War. As for Arthur, he used the surname Neilson for professional reasons. This meant that Bertha also some days said that her surname was Neilson. Thus, some of the couple’s children were given the surname Neilson instead of Hornby. So was Ruth.

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.

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