From the Editor

By Peter Allen
     
      As a deputy prosecutor in Fresno County for seven years, James Ardaiz handled about 150 homicide cases, either as they related to an on-scene investigation and arrest or by prosecuting them himself. One of the defendants he prosecuted was Clarence Ray Allen, who on January 17, 2006, became the latest person executed by the state of California. Ardaiz, now the presiding justice for the Fifth District Court of Appeals, traveled to San Quentin State Prison to witness the execution, the only one he has ever seen. This month's cover story ("Witness to an Execution," page 22) is his sobering account of both the execution and the murders that led to it.
      "After all the homicides I prosecuted or supervised, I have a clear recollection of only four or five," Ardaiz says. "Some murders stick with you—break into that shell you build up to protect yourself. If it's a child, a woman brutalized, an especially innocent victim, you remember the details; you can't help it. In Allen's first murder case—the one he was sent to prison for life for—I remember standing on the high bridge where the body of the victim, a young woman, was tossed into a deep ravine that held a canal. She was wrapped in a blanket and weighted down with stepping stones. Her body was never found. She was so young, so pointlessly killed, and so callously disposed of. I'll never forget that. I was angry and I felt an obligation to be her representative, in the same way I later felt a responsibility to Allen's victims who were murdered while he was in prison."
      Ardaiz's anger about the murders had dissipated by the time Allen was executed, almost 30 years later, and the judge's presence at San Quentin had more to do with his grim sense of duty, his need to follow the case to its bleak conclusion. As his story recounts, on that January day he ran into three men who had worked on the murder investigations that helped send Allen to death row. "They were there for the same reason I was," he says. "None of us knew the others would be there. It was like going to a sparsely attended funeral out of a sense of obligation because you didn't think anyone else would attend, and you find others who are attending for the same reason."
      As we were preparing the piece for this issue, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel was holding hearings in San Jose on whether California's use of lethal injections to execute condemned prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Ardaiz declined to comment on the federal court proceedings, but he says Allen did not appear to suffer: "It was peaceful."
      After the midnight execution, Ardaiz and his companions returned to their San Francisco hotel at 2 a.m., but no one could sleep. "We opened a couple of bottles of wine and talked for the rest of the night," Ardaiz says. "We shared our feelings, why we had come, and what it meant to us. We didn't feel happy, no. But after all these years, we felt, finally, a sense of completion."
     
     

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