A man on death row was guilty? Surprise surprise (NOT)

[Billo_Really]

Originally posted by RightatNYU
So whether or not I support it, I'm as much as a murderer as you?

Yes.

Originally posted by RightatNYU
Hell, if im damned if i do, damned if i dont, i might as well go with my beliefs.

I won't damn you. And I'm not going to argue against what you believe in.

 

[aps]

Three things:

Who cares how and when someone turns their life around as long as they do and are not the same person they once were. Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? How about 10 years ago?

I see your point about turning their life around; however, the criminal's sentence is based on the crime they committed--not whether they repented after all these years.

Are you sure he committed murder? He's always maintained his innocence. And the main evidence against him was the testimony of two jailhouse bitches. These are not fine upstanding young men of the community. Yet their comments were taken as the truth just to kill a man.

A jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That's enough to convince me that he was guilty. I trust that the jury knew that the witnesses were jailbirds and made their own assessment as to whether or not the jailbirds were credible or not. That is their right. I believe that juries take their jobs seriously and weigh the evidence when deciding whether someone is guilty.

It costs more to put someone to death than it does to lock them up for life. There is a lot of evidence to back this up.

Then let's keep him in prison for life without the chance of parole. You are preaching to the choir. If I had the ability to vote to ban the death penalty in my state, I would ban it without a second thought. But I am not going to lose sleep over people being put to death who have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, even accepting that the system isn't right 100% of the time.

 

[aps]

Aps, I consider you a death penalty supporter. If you say that you support the death penalty in theory, then you are a death penalty supporter. You also say that you couldn't live with yourself for killing somebody. Your support for the death penalty which you say is in theory, which equals actual support is tantamount to supporting murder. You have already murdered many in your heart. You have given your approval to murder by supporting the death penalty. I think, that anybody is capable of anything and that includes you. I think you are capable of murder, just like any other human being. I don't want you to take that the wrong way, because it is not meant as an insult, just a mere statement of fact. Anybody is capable of anything. Not only that, even though you have not murdered directly, you become no better than the murderer when you support the death penalty.

I stated in a response to Billo that if I had the opportunity to vote to ban the death penalty, I would--and I wouldn't even have to study this issue before my vote. I know it costs the taxpayers more $$ to have the death penalty in place. Also, if I went to jail, I would prefer to be put to death than sit in a jail until I die, so for me, the better choice is the death penalty.

Sure, I would be capable of murder if someone murdered my family. So just say I murdered someone. I would plead guilty because I would not be able to LIE and say I was innocent, unless there was a valid defense, such as self defense. But that's still admitting you killed someone, which, again, I would do.

The criminals that make me sick are those who continue to assert their innocence when they are guilty, and DNA has proven they are guilty. I'm not going to lose sleep over someone being put to death under these circumstances. I also didn't lose any sleep when Timothy McVeigh was put to death. He murdered hundreds of people, and he deserved to die. The advantage to his death is he admitted guilt, and he didn't appeal--thus, this death did not come at a serious expense. I support Scott Peterson being put to death. The man makes me sick.

Another thing I notice about people who do support the death penalty is the one thing they must do is demonize those who are sentenced to death. The person who was sentenced to death was an it, he was a demon, he was the devil, he was a monster, he was a thing, he was an it, he was not a human. This is generally the viewpoint of people who support the death penalty. They must objectify and turn the law breaking murderer into a monster, an it, a thing. He is not human. Just a thing. A barbarian. Anybody who says they are not capable of murder is a liar or doesn't know himself or human nature very well. Even though as humans we are capable of just about anything, we must strive to hold ourselves to a higher standard and to be above some of the criminal doings of other and most important, we must not stoop to the level of the wild murdering beast that exists in all of us. Nor should we stoop to the level of those people that do succumb to the wild murdering beast that is inside all of us.

Some of these people are monsters. I have no doubt that Scott Peterson is guilty. I won't care if he gets murdered in jail, like Jeffrey Dahmer did. There he is at a vigil for his wife and the a$$hole is calling his girlfriend pretending to be in Paris? Sorry, but I don't care about him or his fate at all. I hope he suffers the way his wife did as he murdered her.

As I stated above, I don't sit there and think about what these people on death row did unless I just happen to read about it or it comes up in the news. And while I admit I am capable of murder, it wouldn't be a situation like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and other criminals whose acts are unthinkable. In those circumstances, I am above that kind of behavior. That, I am sure of.

 

[robin]

By their very nature most criminals are dishonest & not to be believed. So if 98% in jail claim innocence when they are gulity then it's hardly surprising.
But never apply that rule across the board... because if 2% are innocent then they need to be believed, yet they aren't likely to becuase they are in a cesspool of liars, the poor 5astards !

 

[TimmyBoy]

By their very nature most criminals are dishonest & not to be believed. So if 98% in jail claim innocence when they are gulity then it's hardly surprising.
But never apply that rule across the board... because if 2% are innocent then they need to be believed, yet they aren't likely to becuase they are in a cesspool of liars, the poor 5astards !

You make the common mistake of most people, you put too much faith in an imperfect system (and believe me, the system is imperfect) But, based on moral grounds, even if one is truly guilty of murder, I would still oppose the death penalty.

 

[Billo_Really]

Originally posted by aps:
A jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That's enough to convince me that he was guilty. I trust that the jury knew that the witnesses were jailbirds and made their own assessment as to whether or not the jailbirds were credible or not. That is their right. I believe that juries take their jobs seriously and weigh the evidence when deciding whether someone is guilty.

I would ask you to do some research into this topic. It doesn't take long to find out that the information that jurys decide capitol cases on is far less than reasonable doubt. How can we possible consider ourselves a civilized society if this is the way we think?

 

[Billo_Really]

Reporter's eyewitness account of Allen's execution
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, January 17, 2006

The oldest man to ever enter California's execution chamber met his doom Tuesday the way he'd wanted to: With the faint lilt of Native American chants ringing in the air around him, and loved ones mouthing "I love you" to him as his damaged vision slowly faded to black.

A symbolic Indian feather lay on quadruple murderer Clarence Ray Allen's chest for the entire 33-minute execution, rising and falling until the lethal poisons piped into his veins through intravenous tubes stopped his breathing and he at last lay completely still.

"Hoka Hey, (an Indian saying meaning) it's a good day to die," Allen, who turned 76 on Monday, wrote in his last statement.

Those whose lives he savaged by ordering up the shotgun deaths of their loved ones in Fresno in 1980 looked as if they couldn't have agreed more.

Patricia Pendergrass, whose 27-year-old brother Bryon Schletewitz died when Allen's hitman blasted him in the head, kept her hands clenched together and her lips pursed tightly from start to finish -- and then, as the official notice of his death was read off, she allowed herself the slightest hint of a smile. Five chairs to her right in the ring of witnesses sitting at a railing alongside the death chamber, prosecutor Ward Campbell lifted his chin as if in victory.

"Mr. Allen finally received the justice he deserved tonight," Campbell said a half-hour after the execution. "I was always confident this day would come. I am just very glad to have it finally be done."

It only took a few seconds after Allen walked into the heavily glassed, apple-green death chamber at precisely 12:05 a.m. to figure out this was not going to be the sort of execution many had predicted it would be.

Allen, who has spent 23 years on Death Row, was said to be so ill from heart trouble and diabetes that he was blind, nearly deaf and could not walk. And indeed, when the oval door of the death chamber clanged open to begin the procedure, he was in a wheelchair.

But then he stood up.

The four guards alongside him -- two on each side -- put their hands under his shoulders and elbows to help him, but when his feet moved forward it was clear they did so on their own power. His portly face, pasty from living decades inside a cell, showed no pain as walked five steps to stand alongside the cross-shaped execution gurney.

He was a burly man, but when he put his thin arms on the sides of the gurney, he had little difficulty hoisting himself up and laying flat. And once he'd been strapped down and fit with the needles that would inject poisons into his tattooed arms, he vigorously craned his head and made eye contact with several people in the room.

He smiled broadly, calling out first, "Where are you?" and then, "I love you," as he raised his head several times to gaze at his former daughter-in-law, Kathy Allen, and four other supporters who came to watch him die. They smiled back, and when one of the women waved, he nodded his head.

It was all contrary to the impression given by his backers for months that he was an old man so feeble he would be unable to see anything, and would probably have to be carried bodily to the gurney. Such robust ability in someone whose eyesight was compromised by diabetes and who suffered a full heart attack just four months ago may have surprised some in the witness room -- but not prison officials who had been keeping close tabs on Allen.

"No shock to those of us who knew him," said San Quentin spokesman Vernell Crittendon, who also witnessed the execution, and all 12 others that have come before Allen since the state resumed executing inmates in 1992 . "I've watched him walk and read his own mail for a long time now."

Allen was referred to as a white man when he went to prison, but his Choctaw and Cherokee roots took on great important in the final years of his life -- and both his appearance Tuesday morning and the fact that he requested that his two spiritual advisors in the witness room be Native Americans testified to that.

He came into the death chamber with his long gray hair flowing to the middle of his back and held tight by a beaded headband of green, yellow and red. Around his neck was a white beaded necklace with an amulet hanging loosely down in front. He held a gray and white feather, with white leather thongs trailing off one end, in his manacled hands, and just before he was lashed tightly down by black straps he placed it on his chest.

The seven prison guards who spent from 12:05 to 12:17 strapping him to the gurney and inserting a needle in each arm -- the right needle digging in next to an eagle tattoo -- moved gingerly around the feather as they did their work. Unlike during the execution last month of Stanley Tookie Williams, the needle insertion went smoothly, taking just seven minutes instead of 13, with each needle sliding home easily.

Several guards patted Allen's shoulders and nudged his feather back in place as they worked. After taping his hands down to the gurney arms, mummy-style, they turned the gurney counter-clockwise a half-turn so he could see his supporters standing along the western wall of the witness chamber. Then they left and sealed the door. It was 12:17 a.m.

At 12:19, a piece of paper carrying the death warrant was shoved through a door porthole into the witness room, and a guard read it off. "The execution shall now proceed," she said.

In short order, unseen hands from behind the execution chamber walls sent three chemicals through the lines attached to the needles in Allen's arms: sodium pentothal to put him to sleep, pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing, and potassium chloride to stop his heart. A cardiac monitor attached to his chest registered him dead at 12:38 -- about five minutes longer than usual for the chemicals to work -- and Warden Steven Ornoski later said the staff had to send a second salvo of potassium chloride through the lines to finish the task.

"Basically, this guy's heart has been beating for 76 years, and it took awhile for it to stop," he explained. Two other executions required the same treatment.

While the strapping, inserting and injecting unfolded, the 50 witnesses watched mostly stoically, without speaking out loud. The silence was broken, eerily, by the distant sound of Indian chants about halfway through the execution when 300 protesters at the eastern gate of the prison, several blocks away, sent their drumming and chanting through a loudspeaker system. Through the thick stone walls of the execution room, their strains could be slightly heard for several minutes.

Once the chanting stopped, the only audible noises were nervous coughs, muffled talking from behind the room walls, where the poisons were being dispatched, and the irritating "cheep, chip, cheep" whine of what sounded like a squeaky fan.

Along one wall, on a two-tier set of risers, stood Kathy Allen's group. One of them, legal researcher Denise Ferry, appeared to struggle with the strain of standing so long, squatting down several times and wiping her face. Another, a woman with long black hair and sunglasses, shook her head back and forth many times, holding her arms tightly to her chest. Kathy Allen looked griefstricken throughout the execution, and managed weak smiles only when Allen looked her way.

On the opposite wall were 17 media witnesses, and along the wall between the two groups were state officials and what appeared to be relatives of Allen's victims. Standing in front of that group were state Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, who co-wrote a bill calling for a moratorium on executions, and -- next to her -- Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, who opposes the bill.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/17/MNG37GOHD715.DTL

 

[Billo_Really]

Reporter's eyewitness account of Allen's execution
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, January 17, 2006
(continued)

Lieber spent most of the evening with her chin in her hand, staring intently into the chamber. Spitzer stared, too, but shortly after Allen's head stopped moving he began cracking his knuckles and looking at his watch, seeming eager for the procedure to end.

Seated at a railing in front of the window of the death chamber were seven relatives of the three people whose slayings sent him to Death Row: Schletewitz, Josephine Rocha, 17, and Douglas White, 20. The fourth person whose killing Allen ordered -- Mary Sue Kitts, 17 when she was strangled by a hitman in 1974 -- reportedly had no representatives there, because Allen's life prison term for her slaying pre-dated his capital sentence in the killing of the other three.

The murders were all related, though. Allen, who headed a theft ring in the 1970s, had ordered Kitts killed because she told Schletewitz that Allen led a burglary of the Schletewitz family store in Fresno, Fran's Market. Then while in Folsom prison for that murder, Allen sent a hitman after Schletewitz and seven others who testified against him -- and when the killer finally caught up with his first mark as he closed out his shift at Fran's Market one night in 1980, Rocha and White had the awful luck of also being on shift.

White's aunt and uncle sat in two chairs Tuesday. Rocha's sister sat in another. Jack Abbott, who ran to Fran's Market the night of the triple shooting and shot the hitman, wounding him, was at the railing too -- and locked eyes and waved grimly at Allen at one point.

Pendergrass, 55, and two young women -- one on either side, one reportedly her daughter -- sat in three other chairs. One of the young women twisted her hands together nervously, continuously, and when Allen's eyes closed for good and head stopped moving at 12:21 she bowed her head and seemed to pray.

"I don't think this execution will wipe away the pain," Pendergrass told The Chronicle last week. "But what it will do is close a chapter. He made not just our families victims, but those in his own family who must now lose him victims too -- we have all suffered, for different reasons. I want it to be done."

The emotion shone like fire from her eyes Tuesday morning as the certitude of Allen's death became clear.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...G37GOHD715.DTL

So how did society benefit from this.

 

[RightinNYC]

So how did society benefit from this.

"Mr. Allen finally received the justice he deserved tonight," Campbell said a half-hour after the execution. "I was always confident this day would come. I am just very glad to have it finally be done."

"I don't think this execution will wipe away the pain," Pendergrass told The Chronicle last week. "But what it will do is close a chapter. He made not just our families victims, but those in his own family who must now lose him victims too -- we have all suffered, for different reasons. I want it to be done."

Thats enough.

 

[Billo_Really]

Originally posted by RightatNYU:
"Mr. Allen finally received the justice he deserved tonight," Campbell said a half-hour after the execution. "I was always confident this day would come. I am just very glad to have it finally be done."

"I don't think this execution will wipe away the pain," Pendergrass told The Chronicle last week. "But what it will do is close a chapter. He made not just our families victims, but those in his own family who must now lose him victims too -- we have all suffered, for different reasons. I want it to be done."

Thats enough.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

 

[XShipRider]

I really hate criminals who claim innocence.

I know there's a joke here, or at least a double-entendre.