Justice &U.S. admin on 07 May 2006 02:44 pm
California Botches Execution Record
(FiniteTimes.com) – When California executed 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen this week, they proudly laid claim to having executed the oldest person since capitol punishment resumed in 1976. Not so fast, says Mississippi.
“When we put John B. Nixon to death last month, he was 77,” Said Mississippi Corrections Department spokesman Morris Cleland. “The record is firmly ours according to a fax I received this morning from the Guinness Record folks. California, y’all should have done your homework a little more carefully.”
California corrections officials are crushed. They had kept Allen – blind, deaf and in a wheelchair – on death row for 23 years to claim the record, even reviving him last September after his heart stopped.
“Everyone here is just kind of down. About five years ago we realized we were getting close to the record, so we started milking it,” said a source at the California Department of Corrections. “Now, to start all over… I just don’t know. Texas is desperately scouring their files for an octogenarian serial killer to fry, which would pretty much lock up the record for years.
“That would give them the youngest, oldest, and most retarded executed. It’s just really tough to beat Texas at this game.”
The deaf, wheelchair-bound and blind Allen was allegedly quite the wizard on the prison’s one pinball machine. When they wheeled him to the gas chamber, he apparently thought he was going for ice cream.
Surprise.
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