Clarence Ray Allen

The California Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, today upheld the death sentence of Fresno murder-for-hire killer Clarence Ray Allen. The decision is only the fourth death penalty upheld by the state's high court since the 1977 and 1978 capital punishment laws went into effect. The high court has overturned 59 death penalties since 1977. Allen was convicted of hiring Billy Ray Hamilton in 1980 to kill a witness to an earlier crime in which Allen was involved.

SACRAMENTO -- More than a quarter-century after he was sentenced to death, a man convicted of carrying out the contract killings of three people in a Fresno grocery store has died of natural causes at a hospital in Bakersfield. Billy Ray Hamilton, 58, used a shotgun in the Sept. 4, 1980, murders of Douglas Scott White, Bryon William Schletewitz and Josephine Linda Rocha at Fran's Market. Hamilton died Monday after a long battle with cancer.

CALIFORNIANS SHOULD NOT put Michael Morales to death on Tuesday, and the reason has nothing to do with DNA evidence, innocence or exoneration. A jury convicted Morales in 1983 of the brutal rape and murder of 17-year-old Lodi high school student Terri Winchell, and even his defense team makes no claim that the guilty verdict was wrong. It has nothing to do with redemption, remorse, atonement or sympathy.

The mayor of an Austrian city wrote to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday expressing regret that relations between the governor and his homeland have become strained over the death penalty. He sought to reassure the governor that people from the region, which includes Schwarzenegger's hometown of Thal, still admire him despite his support for capital punishment, which many of them oppose.

The state Supreme Court refused Friday to reconsider a decision in December in which it affirmed a death sentence for only the fourth time since capital punishment was reinstated in California a decade ago. In a brief order, the justices, without dissent, rejected a rehearing petition filed on behalf of Clarence Ray Allen, 56, who was convicted of arranging the murder of three persons while he was a prisoner serving a life term for a previous murder.

In its Dec. 13 editorial "It's not about Tookie," The Times stated that the governor denied clemency "because he does not consider capital punishment to be about our values as a society, but about the merits of the convicted supplicant." California voters decided capital punishment was a "value" of our society. For The Times to suggest the governor use anything but the voters' mandate is absurd. The Times also stated, "The people of California don't deserve to play the role of executioner."

The California Supreme Court on Thursday reinstated the death sentence of a convicted triple murderer that was overturned in 1985 in a controversial ruling under Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird. In a 6-1 decision, the court upheld the death penalty for Billy Ray Hamilton, 38, convicted of the shotgun slayings of three people during the robbery of a Fresno market in September, 1980.

Agreeing that lethal injection may cause excessive pain, a federal judge told state corrections officials Tuesday to change the way they administer the fatal dose, or face a delay in death row inmate Michael Morales' Feb. 21 execution. U.S.

IMAGINE this: You're in a doctor's office. He's just told you you're going to die. But he's not sure when. Maybe Tuesday, maybe not. Maybe Monday. Or Thursday. Maybe you'll live for years. It all depends. He'll determine when. The fear of dying would become far more agonizing than death itself, an easing into darkness, an almost gentle farewell to a life that wasn't all that great to begin with. But it was still a life.