William Allain

He was born in Washington in Adams County near Natchez, Mississippi. He attended the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and received his law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law at Oxford.[2] Allain served in the United States Army infantry in the Korean War.[2] A Catholic,[3] he was a member of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.[2] After the war, he practiced law in Natchez, Mississippi, until his appointment as assistant state attorney general in 1962.

Allain was elected state attorney general in 1979, having defeated the Republican State Senator Charles W. Pickering of Laurel. Allain earned a reputation as a consumer advocate. He fought utility rate increases and stopped the storage of nuclear waste in Mississippi. State labor president Claude Ramsay sought to broker an agreement between Democratic Party presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale and Allain when the latter sought a veto over the federal storage of nuclear waste in Mississippi as a condition for his political support of Mondale.[4]

He also fought the powerful Mississippi Legislature, which for decades had diluted executive branch power by appointing legislators to executive department boards and commissions. The Mississippi Supreme Court, at Allain's insistence, struck the practice as a violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers. The resulting decision, Allain v. Alexander, is sometimes referred to as "Mississippi's Marbury vs. Madison," after the landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which delineated the powers of the three branches of the federal government. Allain's efforts strengthened the Mississippi executive and streamlined Mississippi's political processes. Allain as governor instituted a legal panel to study the possibility of re-writing the 1890 Bourbon state constitution and created an administrative task force of state agency heads to reduce the use of illegal drugs. He was unsuccessful in the former and successful in the later case, particularly in the interdiction and seizure of almost a ton of cocaine.[5][6]

In 1983, while Allain was running for governor against Republican candidate Leon Bramlett of Clarksdale, private detective Rex Armistead, formerly with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, helped to spread rumors that Allain had sexual intercourse with two African-American male transvestites.[7][8][9] Allain denied the charges.[8] The transvestites went on the record with a lie detector but in 1984 claimed they had never met Allain and had been paid for their testimony.[7][10]

Allain died December 2, 2013, in Jackson, Mississippi.[11][12]

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