Death Penalty Case Upheld by Supreme Court

For the first time in three years, the state Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a death penalty case, ruling that the leader of a Fresno crime ring should die for ordering several murders while he was in prison.

Over the objections of ousted Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, the court voted 4 to 3 to uphold the death sentence of Clarence Ray Allen, 56, a former successful businessman who ran a major crime ring in the San Joaquin Valley.

Allen was sentenced to death for ordering the Sept. 4, 1980, shotgun slayings of three Fresno grocery store employees, including a young man who had testified against Allen in a 1977 murder case. The man convicted of carrying out the murders, Billy Ray Hamilton, also is on Death Row.

Grodin in Majority

“There was overwhelming evidence to support the prosecution’s version of what transpired at Fran’s Market that evening and the evidence linking (Allen) to the slayings was certainly substantial, if not overwhelming,” Justice Joseph R. Grodin said in the majority opinion. Grodin also was rejected by the voters in November.

Joined by Chief Justice-designate Malcolm M. Lucas, and Justices Stanley Mosk and Edward Panelli, Grodin said that while there were miscues by the judge and prosecutors, “it simply cannot be said there is any reasonable possibility that the complained-of errors affected this jury’s penalty verdict.”

“As pleased as we are, I just cried again,” Frances Schletewitz, the mother of victim Bryon Schletewitz, said by telephone after hearing of the ruling.

“It used to be revenge. But it’s not any more. It’s just justice,” said Ray Schletewitz, the father, who closed the family store after the murders and now lives in semi-retirement on a ranch.

Calling the crime “an assault on the judicial system,” Deputy Atty. Gen. Ward Campbell said, “Clarence Ray Allen’s is the most egregious death penalty case on Death Row.

”. . . The mitigating evidence was that he was nice to children, but three of the . . . people he has been convicted of murdering were under the age of 20.”

Campbell helped prosecute Allen in a four-month trial in Willows, the Glenn County town where Allen’s case was transferred because of heavy news coverage in Fresno, and he also helped argue the case before the high court.

Allen is only the fourth person whose death sentence has been upheld and the only one tried under the controversial 1978 initiative, sponsored by former Sen. John Briggs, which broadened the state’s death penalty law.

The other three men whose sentences were affirmed by the court--Robert Alton Harris, Earl Lloyd Jackson and Stevie Lamar Fields--are appealing their cases in the state and federal courts.

Like the others, Allen will not be put to death soon. He has more appeals in both state and federal courts.

“There is a lot more to go in terms of process. But this case has all it needs in order to bring Mr. Allen to his appropriate designation--which is to be executed,” said Assistant Atty. Gen. Steve White, who is in charge of the criminal prosecutions section of the state Justice Department.

White predicted that the appeal process would take a minimum of two years, but said he believes the California Supreme Court will begin taking a dim view of long delays in capital case appeals.

And Allen’s chances of success before the state Supreme Court seem bleak, in part because three of the four justices who voted to affirm Allen’s death sentence will be on the court for the foreseeable future. And those three--Mosk, Panelli and Lucas--will be joined early this year by three more appointees of Gov. George Deukmejian, who strongly favors the death penalty.

There was a touch of irony in the ruling, in that it was written by Grodin, one of the three justices who was defeated in the November election, largely because of his perceived opposition to the death penalty.

“My personal opinion was that Joseph Grodin was one of the best judges on the court,” prosecutor Campbell said. “While he is a liberal judge, I do not believe he was as prone as the others to substitute his personal viewpoint in these cases.”

Allen’s attorney could not be reached. But Michael Millman, executive director of a nonprofit group that helps lawyers for defendants in death penalty appeals, criticized the ruling.

“I am concerned,” he said, “that the court recognizes that several substantial errors were committed at the penalty phase trial but then rejects the possibility that these errors contributed to the jury’s death verdict.”

In all, Allen has been convicted of ordering four murders, dating back to 1974. From all appearances, however, he was an unlikely candidate to commit such crimes.

He lived in a large home in East Fresno, drove a Cadillac, and was once a successful businessman, operating a security business that provided security systems for markets and department stores in the San Joaquin Valley.

But at the same time, he directed a criminal organization of family members and associates, ordering them to rob at least 10 markets, including some for which he had provided security.

His ring began to unravel with the 1974 burglary of Fran’s Market. The crime netted $500 in cash and $10,000 in money orders. But soon, Mary Sue Kitts, who cashed the money orders for Allen, told the market owners--who were friends--that Allen was responsible.

Allen told his cohorts to murder Kitts. Complying with the order, a member of his crime ring strangled Kitts. She was then bundled into Allen’s Cadillac and dumped into an irrigation canal. Allen was sentenced to life in prison for the murder.

While in Folsom Prison in mid-1980, he met Billy Hamilton, himself a convicted murderer, and Hamilton became Allen’s lackey. When Hamilton was paroled in the fall of 1980, he took with him a contract for $25,000 to kill eight witnesses to the Kitts murder and the burglary of Fran’s Market.

Only one of the intended targets, Bryon Schletewitz, the son of the store owner, was at the store on Sept. 4, 1980, when Hamilton arrived. He took Schletewitz to a stockroom and shot him in the head, killing him.

Then he killed two more store employees--who were not on the hit list but happened to be in the market. A fourth victim survived Hamilton’s shotgun blast, and a fifth person, a neighbor who arrived to help, was shot, but also shot Hamilton in the foot.

When Hamilton was arrested five days later, police discovered the hit list, complete with the names and addresses of eight witnesses against Allen.

Sentence Reversed

The court reversed Hamilton’s death penalty sentence on New Year’s Eve, 1985, but took the unusual step of agreeing to rehear the case.

Like Hamilton, Allen was charged with the three revenge murders, and an array of special circumstances--factors that turn a murder case into a capital crime. Allen’s special circumstances included multiple murder, soliciting a murder in retaliation for past testimony, and committing a murder after having already been convicted of a murder.

During the trial when the defense urged that jurors spare Allen from the gas chamber, only one witness--his girlfriend--testified on his behalf, saying that he was good to children and wrote poetry. Prosecutors quoted from one of Allen’s poems: “I am a contract man, so they say/ Dusting off people for those who pay.”

In the most far-reaching legal aspect of the opinion, the court rejected a defense claim that courts must review each death sentence to decide whether it was meted out proportionately when compared to sentences for other similar crimes.

Grodin said such a mechanical review is not required, in part because death penalty juries are specifically allowed to take into consideration subjective factors when imposing death.

Only Bird endorsed the position that such a review was needed--even though the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in a California case nearly three years ago that such a laborious review was unnecessary under federal law.

Long Dissent

In a long dissent, Bird contended that the state Constitution requires such a review. The outgoing chief justice noted that sentences for other felons undergo such an analysis to determine whether they are comparable with those imposed for similar crimes.

“Certainly, an individual condemned to death has as much right to review as a ‘common’ felon,” Bird wrote.

She said that while the court is not equipped to conduct such a review, the Board of Prison Terms--which analyzes all other sentences--could undertake such a task.

Justice Allen Broussard and outgoing Justice Cruz Reynoso also dissented, claiming that the wording of the 1978 law, coupled with statements by the prosecutor, may have misled the jury into thinking it was required to impose death if it found that so-called aggravating circumstances surrounding the crime outweighed anything that might mitigate the crime.