Inclusion Daily Express -- Attorney: Convict's Walk To Death Chamber Would Violate ADA

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Attorney: Convict's Walk To Death Chamber Would Violate ADA
By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
December 29, 2005

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA--The attorney representing a condemned man who is blind, has diabetes, and uses a wheelchair, claims the state would violate the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act if executioners force him to walk to the lethal injection table.

Clarence Ray Allen, 75, is scheduled to die San Quentin State Prison early on January 17 for arranging the murders of four people in 1974 and 1981.

Allen's attorney, Michael Satris, filed a petition Tuesday with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's office after learning that San Quentin spokesperson Lt. Vernell Crittendon had announced on a Fresno television station that Allen would have to walk the final 15 feet to the execution chamber.

"The spectacle of Ray Allen slouching toward execution, stumbling and faltering dangerously while his executioners prop him up and lift him over the lip of the execution chamber, would only further invite worldwide condemnation and ridicule of California for such barbarous treatment of its citizenry -- treatment that would also violate both the Constitution and the Americans With Disabilities Act," read Satris' petition.

Deputy Attorney General Ward Campbell, who has been prosecuting Allen through the original trial and appeals, said of Allen: "I know he's capable of doing some walking with a walker. He's not totally immobile."

After the petition was filed, Crittendon made a new announcement, proclaiming that Allen would be taken in his wheelchair and moved to just within two feet of the table.

"So it's really nothing that's going to be an issue," Crittendon said. "We've been accommodating his needs up to this point, and nothing will change."

Related:
"Disability act raised in capital case" (Sacramento Bee)
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/ca/story/14023760p-14856133c.html

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