COUNCIL OF EUROPE. COE CONDEMNS CALIFORNIA EXECUTION

Terry Davis, the head of the 46-member Council of Europe, condemned the execution in California of a 76-year-old blind and disabled prisoner.
"The death penalty is always wrong, but tying a blind 76-year-old man to a chair and injecting him with poison is grotesque," said Davis, secretary general of the council, a leading European human rights body.
"I regret that the governor of California has not listened to all the appeals to spare the life of Clarence Ray Allen. As a friend of the United States of America, I look forward to the day this great country will leave the axis of capital punishment," he said.
"If the moral argument is not compelling enough, the American public should compare the murder rate in states which keep the death penalty and states which have abolished it. Then they would realise that executing people is not only inhuman, it does not work as a way of reducing the number of murders."
Allen was killed by lethal injection at the San Quentin prison in California the day after his 76th birthday and in spite of many appeals for clemency.
He was sent to death row in 1982 after being convicted of arranging the 1980 murders of three people from his prison cell in order to silence witnesses in another killing.
He was California's oldest death row inmate and the second oldest prisoner to be put to death in the United States since the US moratorium on the death penalty ended in 1976.