I’ve been wrestling with my views on Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams and whether he should be granted clemency. It’s been a tough call for me.
I’ve come to be generally opposed to the death penalty. Why?
Two reasons.
One is simple: to kill someone in cold blood…not in the heat of defense or battle…seems to me to be simply inhumane. The deliberateness and spectacle of it contradict much of what I believe I would be willing to fight to defend about our society.
The other is simple as well: the justice system is deeply flawed. It doesn’t make sense to make irrevocable decisions using a system as imperfect as ours – even if it is likely to be better than anyone else’s.
On the other hand – there’s always another hand – I’d have no qualms seeing Saddam executed. Or Hitler.
It’s not to prevent recidivism; it’s not likely that the 1950’s would have presented Hitler much chance to retake the reins of power in Germany.
It’s because certain acts are so far beyond what we can and should accept that they deserve some special, significant sanction. It’s not because I believe that vengeance should be served, or blood repaid; Saddam could never – not if he were tortured unimaginably for decades – repay the debt that he’s incurred.
It’s a way of setting up boundary stones at the edges of our human culture. You and me, over here. Saddam, Hitler, over there. Ted Bundy…over there as well, I’d say.
There are criminals whose crimes are so great, and whose guilt is adequately certain, that I’d probably put them on the other side of the markers as well.
Not ordinary criminals; not the ordinary stickup-gone-bad killer, or the sullen wife murderer. Not even the glassy-eyed killer of one’s own child.
But the extraordinary criminals. The truly evil.
And, I have to say, I’d put Tookie in that camp, which puts him on the far side of the marker, and scheduled for the table, restraints, and sharp needle.
Not because of the four people he killed in cheap stickups, and mocked to his friends afterward.
Those were cheap crimes, and not worthy of more than a locked door and a forgotten man behind it.
Because of the twenty thousand young black men (and women) who died in the gang wars he helped trigger.
For that crime, he should pay.
It may well be that if Tookie hadn’t come along, the social conditions would have given that role to someone else.
And if someone else had bought Sierra DOS, Bill Gates would be an upper-middle class techie.
Yes, he’s written books, and lectured. I’ve read them, and read his work. And I’ve listened for the voice of redemption in it, and not heard it.
He may be redeemed; I hope he is. But he’s still on the wrong side of the boundary marker. His redemption is a matter for him and whatever God he may accept, not for the powers of this world.
I appreciate the honesty and candor of your comments, but to me they expose a flaw in your logic. In spite of our flawed legal system, it is still able to identify and convict many truly guilty criminals, most without a doubt in the world as to whether the right person was convicted.
I am comforted that despite your views against the death penalty, you do find it appropriate to use on certain individuals such as Hitler or Saddam Hussein.
However, as correct as that position may be, you’ve not made the connection between their cases and those of supposedly “lesser” evil criminals. Who are you to minimize the magnitude of a murderer’s evil act just because he/she did not kill the requisite number of people in YOUR eyes. Shall we quantify how many people a person must kill before being subjected to a death sentence? The answer is, we already have, and the answer is one, under the right conditions.
Using the same logic, do you suggest having different views regarding the appropriateness of a death sentence that depends on the importance or stature of the victim? Again, you are setting yourself up to be God in determining which victims (and families) are deemed important enough or not important enough to have their murderers pay for their crimes with their own lives. Well, society has already rightfully determined which individuals are important enough to have their attackers pay the ultimate price for their crimes, and again that answer is almost everyone is deemed important enough.
What if the victim was your spouse, or child? Don’t just gloss over this possibility; think on it long and hard and then give your honest answer.
I recognize the legitmacy of those arguments, but I’m generally on the side of favoring the death penalty.
Its refreshing to hear someone on the otherside with something of a nuanced position.
Just a few quick counter arguments.
1) To not have a death penalty is an admission of weakness in the face of evil. It’s an admission to the monsters of this world that no matter what they do, at some level they can always say, “Nope. I was just kidding.”, put there hands up, and have immediate sanctuary. It’s to forever admit that even if we believe someone justly deserves to die, that we are too squimish to actually do it.
2) It is I think disengenious to claim that it is too incomprehensibly inhumane to kill someone, yet at the same time believe that it is perfectly decent to lock a person up until they die. There is no difference really between the two. One is quick and the other is slow. One is expensive and the other is cheap. More importantly, one lets us forget about what we are doing by squirreling it away to some place were most of us will never go. I’m not sure which is more cruel, because it probably depends on the particular person you lock up, but I’m fairly sure that they are morally equivalent.
3) You cannot overly worry about the fact that with the death penalty it is impossible to make restitution to a person when there has been a miscarraige of justice. If you lock a man up for 25 or 50 years, and then discover that you’ve locked up an innocent man, can you give him his life back? Can you even give a single year of a man’s life back to him, once you’ve taken away his freedom and put him in a box? Yes, in the case of the death penalty, the problem is more immediate and more pervasive, but its not a problem unique to the death penalty. You cannot allow the one counter example of an egregious miscarriage of justice to rule out a particular penalty, for soon we’d have to rule out everything that could be called punishment.
4) Despite what you say about recidivism, there are some people that are simply too dangerous to encarcerate. Saddam Hussein is a good example. Napoleon is another. Hitler would have been another IMO. So long as there remains some chance that they will escape, be released or pardoned in an act of folly, or otherwise get out of the box you’ve confined them to for the duration of thier living death, its just not worth it to put them thier. AFAIC, violent pedophiles go into this group. Statistically, 95% of them become repeat offenders after being released.
5) In the press, they are always quick to find some friend or relative of the victim who doesn’t want to see the person dead. This isn’t always a fair picture of the families relationship to the murderer. I had a friend in high school whose family was the victim of a mass murderer. The surviving family members wanted that person dead. It wasn’t revenge. They were too stunned and too grieved to worry about revenge. They wanted him dead so they could put some closure on the incident. They didn’t want to go to bed another night thinking of their loved ones being dead and thier murderer still taking breaths. They wanted the incident behind them. They wanted the guy buried so they could start working on forgetting him. There are times I think that death is the just penalty, and the victims feelings about what constitutes a fair and just penalty should be respected.
I’ve always thought that opposing the death penalty showed less respect for life, not more, for much the same reason as Celebrim’s #1.
Murder crosses a line as much as mass murder.
I believe that the death penalty has a political function, much as AL indicates. There are some acts that go beyond our normal ability to deal with. Acts that if left unattended, would result in the deterioration of our trust in government to protect us.
I know both people who were murdered and people who were put to death for murder. I think what AL was missing was that this judgement of “over the bounds”, this acknowledgement of our limits, is subjective for each person. There is a reason why the DA is a political appointment!
So even though I view the death penalty as heinous, barbaric, un-christian, non-reflective of our shared values, and yes, state-sponsored murder, I support it. It is a necessary part of a free society where the people are moved to action by certain crimes. Note that this is not the “revenge” argument.
But Tookie is not “reformed”. He has never disavowed the Cripps, and I saw a high school kid defending him at one of the “teach-ins” wearing a blue do-rag. The colors of the Cripps gang.
The Bene Gesserit feel that the lack of sincere reformation obviates any requirement for clemency.
Also, at this Tookie is a consumer of resources that continues to exert a malevolent memetic influence on youth.
A waste of DNA.
It frightens me!
Im against the death penalty except as punishment for war crimes and treason (essentially seperating acts of war from domestic crime). I might favor the death penalty in a perfect world, but i’ve seen _far_ to many miscarriages of justices and close calls to be willing to put people lives in the hands of government (outside of war, which by definition puts lives in the hands of government).
If “this”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025962.php#025962 doesnt give you pause, i dont know what will. Some cracker jury sentences a black man to death for shooting a white cop who broke into his house in the dead of night, unnannounced, serving a warrant on the wrong house. The fact that the cop was the chief of police’s son just adds a ‘This should be a Steven Seagal movie’ air to the whole thing. This case should be the poster child for anti-death penalty advocates, but unfortunately the soon to be victim never hung out with Snoop Dogg.
My 2 cents is if you’re against the death penalty anyway, then that’s that. But granting the legitimacy of the punishment, redemption comes from taking responsibility for your acts and accepting the consequences of them, not trying to avoid them by offering a substitute you find preferable.
Also, if the death sentence is commuted, it’ll send the message you don’t have to worry as much about shooting that guy in the back with a shotgun, because even if you’re caught you can just write a few childrens’ books while your appeals are pending and get your sentence commuted, just like Tookie did.
The only basis for commuting a death sentence is if there’s lingering questions of possible innocence, which doesn’t appear to be the case here.
While I can philosophically favor the death penalty, I must oppose it in practice.
There is no way to redress a miscarriage of justice and to many prosecutors are politically driven. Many times the decision to push for the death penalty is more about who the perpetrator is, than what the crime was. Such an imperfect system must be humble enough to refrain from imposing the ultimate punishment.
I dispense with my reservations in cases of murderous dictators.
“If this doesnt give you pause, i dont know what will. Some cracker jury sentences a black man to death for shooting a white cop who broke into his house in the dead of night, unnannounced, serving a warrant on the wrong house. The fact that the cop was the chief of police’s son just adds a ‘This should be a Steven Seagal movie’ air to the whole thing. This case should be the poster child for anti-death penalty advocates, but unfortunately the soon to be victim never hung out with Snoop Dogg.”
The thing is, I consider the fact that the person was sentenced to death to be rather irrelevent. I big miscarriage of justice occurred here, and a big and embarrassing miscarriage of justice occurred here whether the person was sentenced to death or given ‘just’ 5 years in prison. In either case, this seems to be exactly the sort of situation for which executive pardons exist.
The “cracker jury” argument is flawed for several reasons.
First, whenever the state sponsors murder, there will be innocent people killed, either directly or indirectly. Any kind of public law has life-or-death consequences, but especially those involving lethal force. The correspondence is direct.
2, there is a difference between morality and pragmatism. Morally I can abhor certain actios, like abortion, that nonetheless I support for practical political reasons. We must all get along, and that means the society must act in ways I find immoral. It is my right to speak up about these matters.
C, it’s the baby and the bath water argument. If one innocent dies, is the entire system bad? Would we stop policemen from arresting crack dealers because every now and then a ten-year-old with a pop gun gets cut down in the crossfire? Would we stop bombing AQ because we are unintentionally killing women and children at times? Would we stop high-speed persuits because we are endangering the welfare of innocent drivers. These are NOT yes or no questions — a lot of thought goes into them. Therefore, it is illogical (in my view) that based on this line of reasoning we can say for sure yes or no in this matter. It varies. And we’ve got a system for dealing with things that aren’t so clear cut. It’s our legal system.
With the cases of innocent people killed, we can certainly join together in figuring out how to keep that from happening.
Daniel, i dont think there is anything wrong with seperating the issues of life and death. 5 years in prison is certainly a miscarriage of justice, but it pales in comparison to death. As a society, we have no choice but to lock up lawbreakers, that is a pragmatic imperative and there are things we can do (that we dont do enough of btw) to at least partially remedy false imprisonment. How does one even begin to address a death penalty error? And moreover, the death penalty is not a pragmatic necessity. It can be argued over its utility, but i dont see many people argueing that it is an imperative to the survival of society.
I share Mark’s position and I wonder if it might be because we’re both from Illinois. A lot of death supporters were made a fool of in this state when 13 death row inmates were proven innocent and significant questions were raised about others. The conclusion here is that the system is broken and the fixes are (a) expensive and (b) unpallatable because they treat law enforcement officers as potential criminals.
War is different. In a state of war, there can be no justice for anyone. And I’m talking about a Hobbesian state of war:
bq. “For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known . . . . [T]he nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.”
Former tyrants, their followers, insurgents, and revolutionaries should be killed, unless by forbearance peace can be more readily achieved.
Mark:
I respectfully disagree with you. As AL pointed out in his post above, there are really bad people in the world that do really bad things to people, as in that case with the little girl in Florida. That slimebag needs to be killed, not for revenge, not for prevention of crime, not for religious reasons — he needs to be killed because there are a lot of parents of little girls who need to feel secure that their government is doing something, anything to keep these crazy people from them. This is a political disucsion, not a moral one. “We’re locking them up, but we’re too good to kill them” has little weight with bereaved parents, and with the general public at large. Politicians can’t win on it, and over time the death penalty is not going away. To me that is the reality on the ground.
Now. Can we raise the bar? Make it harder to kill innocent people? Yes. I would welcome a discussion into that. It sounds like DNA testing has done a lot in this regard. But just remember that any system is imperfect. Expecting never to kill an innocent person is simply not realistic.
“That slimebag needs to be killed, not for revenge, not for prevention of crime, not for religious reasons — he needs to be killed because there are a lot of parents of little girls who need to feel secure that their government is doing something, anything to keep these crazy people from them”
Locking them away until they rot and are dumped in a potters grave is doing something. No offense intended, but that sounds like an emotional argument. Realistically kids are no more or less safe with the murder locked away in high security prison than planted 6 feet deep. So what we are really talking about is are we willing to accept the (as we agree) inevitable fact that we will accidentally execute the innocent in exchange for erasing the tiny possibility that the joker could escape or be released somehow and commit another crime.
How do you weigh the ‘moral authority’ of bereieved crime victims against the berieved of those innocently executed?
Mark. It is an emotional argument. It is simply not my emotions I am expressing. It is the emotions of the public.
We live in a representative republic. Representatives must deal with the emotions of the electorate. So it’s not a classical emotional argument — whether I am offended or not simply does not play into this at all.
I don’t presume to weigh the moral authority. In fact, I don’t get into that area at all. Don’t have to.
You might have a more logical and utilitarian argument for life in prision, and you might not. That’s not the point. Our system of government is a compromise between groups of people that many times feel morally outraged one way or the other. Like I said, we are all certainly welcome to speak out against all forms of state-sponsored murder, but that’s another can of worms. You can be right, moral, correct — whatever you choice of adjectives — and still not have a convincing way of letting people get along with each other.
I think I agree with that. I don’t argue that execution is illegal or anti-constitutional. My argument is political as well, at its heart. Shaw is quite correct, seeing how the sausage is made here in Illinois really made my head spin. I think as the public becomes more aware of how our justice system often works it will grow more wary of the death penalty.
The emotional needs of the community made me think about the problem of “confessors,”:http://www.trowbridgefoundation.org/docs/suggestibility.htm people who will confess to crimes they didn’t commit:
bq. Voluntary” false confessions are offered by people without any external pressure from the police. These individuals simply report themselves to the authorities, claiming they have committed a crime, often a notorious one they have read about in the newspapers or seen on television. Sometimes voluntary false confessors are unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy. Sometimes they are trying to protect the real culprit.
These people are typically mentally ill, but what this article doesn’t indicate is that some people might commit a crime, become mentally ill as a result of their incarceration and begin confessing to crimes they didn’t commit. Prosecutors will use such “confessors” to clear up unsolved cases, giving the victims a sense of closure and justice.
The emotional needs of the victims and the community are being met; the victim, possibly thinking of himself as a Christ-like figure, might even be happy with the outcome. In capital cases its euthanasia.
Good post. While I appreciate AL’s moral filing system: “Ordinary criminals here, True Monsters there”, from my vantage point, working DNA for forensic cases, there are some truly demonic individuals, or at least people who’ve unleashed (what I hope for most people would be) unimaginably senseless/sadistic cruelties on essentially random people – aggravated infant sexual assault/murders, thrill kills during robbery and the like, who fall short, of his criteria, but still, I think, deserve State murder. Texas has a web page of all of its death row members, and the crimes they’ve been convicted of, and it’s a pretty sobering read – I recommend it to either side of the debate. http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/offendersondrow.htm By and large, they’re poor, male, and’ve been found guilty of truly horrendous crimes. By my moral intuition, such people have willingly declined participation in the human endeavor through their actions, fallibility of justice system/dubiousness of many pro-death penalty arguments notwithstanding (though I’d imagine this thread will degenerate into the standard pro/anti arguments shortly). While I’d prefer the burden of proof to be higher, and that people be better by choice or circumstance, so that the death penalty is as rare as possible, there are some acts that are simply beyond the pall. I guess where I’m going with this is that it takes somewhat less than mass/serial murder to make someone a monster for me. YMMV.
“And if someone else had bought Sierra DOS, Bill Gates would be an upper-middle class techie.
Yes, he’s written books, and lectured.”
I take it that the “he’s” in the second sentence refers to Mr. Williams, not to Mr. Gates. Although there is no reason to believe that the later is repentant either.
Great comments here on the death penalty.
Let me change the focus slightly to this *specific* case and not the death penalty in general. Given that we *do* have a legal death penalty, and that Tookie is subject to this, why should he be granted an exemption *in particular*?
I would argue along with AL that Tookie is particularly evil. I’ve listened closely to those asking for clemency and I while I have heard many good principled arguments against capital punishment, I have not heard a single Tookie advocate put forward even *slightly* compeling evidence for clemency.
Can anyone provide a counter arguement?
–Fred K (the other Fred)
There are individuals who are simply at war with civilized society. I personally feel there is no moral reason for society to keep them in its midst — even in prison where they represent a continuing threat to other inmates, the guards and society at large if they escape.
I do have grave concerns about the ability of the legal system to dole out justice effectively. I would not trust my home state of Massachusetts for a second with a death penalty. Look at the Fells Acres case during the child care/abuse witch hunt where children were effectively tortured by the authorities to provide testimony to crimes for which no physical evidence existed. Constrast that to the treatment of our senior senator in a incident that would have put any other citizen of the commonwealth behind bars for manslaughter.
I sometimes feel that the entire legal system in this country has become inherently corrupt. The surest way to fame and fortune as a lawyer is to put an innocent man in prison or get a guilty one out. Politically ambitious procecutors gin up spectacular show trials timed to make them household words by the next set of primaries.
Perhaps prosecutors, attornee’s general and states attornees should be banned from running for political office for a fixed term following their tenure in office.
Another solution would be to treat police or prosecutorial misconduct as equal to the crime being tried. If a police officer is convicted of purjury — or a prosecutor is shown to have suppressed or manufactured evidence in a capital case — they should face a capital charge.
If I honestly felt that the law could be enforced with reasonable competence and fairness, I see no reason not to have a death penalty. I would even support a death penalty for serial convictions of serious but non-capital crimes. A individual convicted three or four times for serious — particularly violent — felonies is not a likely candidate for reform. He or she is an individual at war with civil society and should be treated as such.
As to the inevitable cry that some errors are inevitable, I would reply that we would have to deal with them as we deal with friendly fire deaths in combat — as something we must strive mightily to avoid but otherwise accept as possible. Do we lay down before the nazis of the world because some good people might get hurt by our own fire? Such arguments focusing only on human fallibilty are formulas for paralysis.
In the end, however, I would rather not see the current criminal justice system exercising the ultimate penalty until there was some assurace that true accountablility for malfeasance existed.
As the death penalty is the law of the land in California, and as ultimately the rule of law must stand over emotional arguments, I see no reason Tookie should be spared. Im particularly unswayed considering the guy has never fully flipped over on his gang, he can hardly plead fear for his life as _he’s on death row_.
Subsequent good deeds shouldnt be used post-facto to reduce a punishment. Our penal system isnt designed to judge behavior, it is designed to punish a given crime. If we start deciding certain acts can mitigate felonies we will quickly be in chaos. Furthermore it becomes an open question as to whether the reform is genuine or simply designed to seek clemency.
On Tookie in particular, I see no reason for clemency.
We punish for acts of evil, not thoughts. Williams took four other human’s lives and gloated over it. I don’t need a complete definition of evil to recognize it there.
As we do not punish for thought, how can we redeem for thought? Even if I could know for a fact that Tookie was genuinely repentant, I would not save him. It would not bring back those he took.
I agree with A.L. that his moral culpability may be just as great for unleashing the Crips meme on the world, with ensuing death and misery. Others might have, but he did. But that’s a crime of thought, and we do not punish it (unless we can prove specific conspiracy towards an ACT). I can hope he rots in hell for it, but it’s not why he will die.
My opposition to killing Tooky is based solely upon my opposition to the death penalty. Otherwise, I do not believe Tooky’s “good works” on death row constitute grounds for clemency. I am not familiar enough with Took’s story, but as a general matter, I would consider clemency under two circumstances:
1. Errors in the court proceedings which were non-reviewable because of procedural issues.
2. Request of the victim’s families.
Don’t know if those apply here.
I appreciate the honesty of your remarks, and that of the commenters. I have no such qualms.
I know that a lot of people are uneasy about executing convicted murderers, but I cannot understand it. Sure, mistakes are made in the justice system. Life is not fair, and never will be. Deal with it.
The Death Penalty is like ANY other sentence.
It is punishment, pure and simple. From one who knows, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
The only reason I feel any ambivalence at all about executing this guy has to do with the quarter century that has passed since the particular crimes were committed. It is utterly ridiculous that cases such as this are not disposed of quickly. That they cannot be dealt with expeditiously greatly diminishes the deterrent potential of capital punishment (and yes, capital punishment does have a deterrent effect (contrary to what many argue) even if only upon the executed one).
I am afraid that increasing population density and Balkanization, coupled with economic and other social challenges indicated by current trends, will in the not too distant future combine to greatly worsen crime rates. Perhaps some readers of Winds of Change have lived in countries where such conditions lead to the creation of death squads and “un-official execution”:http://skeptacles.blogspot.com/2005/03/torturous-execution.html because people see no other way.
Isaac Asimov apparently believed that “democracy cannot survive overpopulation”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=asimov+democracy+cannot+survive+overpopulation&spell=1. I’m afraid the same is true of “human rights” as the term is applied by opponents of capital punishment.
Improvement of the administration of capital punishment, to speed up the process and enhance its deterrent effect, is well in order. It’s a shame that it ain’t gonna happen until conditions get much worse, if then.
By the way, here’s “another one”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker who should have been executed. There are plenty more. Violence is not required to define a monster.
How about BrokeBack Mountain… story about a gayeee cowboy.. must be a story about John Kerry… teeheeheehee ^_^V XDDDDDDDDDDDD
hey my carets got chomped up, na fair!!!!
Judicial killing is a wate of governance.
1) the difference in cost between life imprisonment and death penalty are actually fairly close (if not more for the death penalty)… since death penalty cases tend to have more extensive (and expensive) appeals involved.
2) If you talk about the heinous crimes in texas, here’s something else to consider:
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld at least three death sentences from Houston, in which the lawyer for the defendant slept during trial. One of those trials was described in the Houston Chronicle as follows:
The judge presiding over McFarland’s trial in Houston permitted the trial to continue on the theory that “[t]he Constitution doesn’t say the lawyer has to be awake.”
The Court of Criminal Appeals also upheld convictions and death sentences imposed on Calvin Burdine and Carl Johnson, even though Joe Frank Cannon, the lawyer appointed by the trial court to defend them at separate trials, slept during their trials. Cannon is known for hurrying through capital trials like “greased lightning,” occasionally falling asleep, and has had at least 10 clients sentenced to death.
http://www.schr.org/reports/docs/champion/
I understand the use of the death penalty, but cannot support it as long as injustices like this occur.
I ‘get’ the concept of a difference between small-time crooks and ultra-violent, widely influential criminals.
Tookie Williams was executed this morning, but it was somewhat anticlimactic. He did the most damage in the decade after he was put on Death Row, extending extreme violence in gangbanging to the prisons of the country to continually fuel the street gang phenomenon he already had started.
I’m no big advocate of the death penalty, but I would say that in the case of seriously dangerous criminals who ‘turn on’ others to commit murders, the death penalty would have to be applied with all deliberate speed to be worthwhile.
Otherwise, my solution set is to reopen Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. Put the influential offenders away beyond the reach of celebrity and the ability to shape events beyond their cell doors.
If US government was smart enough to recognize this phenomenon in the 1930s and cut short Capone’s Leavenworth criminal career by shipping him to Alcatraz and obscurity, why couldn’t California have done the same with Tookie?
well i think that Arnold is full of shit i dont understand how he can be in all these movies killing and shooting up people and letting kids see him those movies but deny a man of pardon who has changed his life and has relized he was wrong. Isnt that what prison or a correctional is for. What books has arnold wrote.