Stanley Tookie Williams Murdered by Schwarzenegger

The former Crips gang leader and convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed by lethal injection in California today.

Last-minute appeals by his lawyers and a clemency petition to the state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, were unsuccessful. Amnesty International today condemned the execution as a "travesty of justice."

Williams, 51, was convicted in 1981 of murdering four people during robberies carried out in 1979. He has always maintained he did not commit the murders, but did apologise for founding the Crips gang in Los Angeles in 1971. The gang has been blamed for hundreds of deaths during decades of fighting with rival gangs. (The Guardian)

"Tookie, I am a 20 year old man from Iowa. The other day I sat down after I watched your movie Redemption and thought about all the things that I've done in my life and counted how many years that I should be in prison. Every day between the age of 18 and 20 I risked getting 25 to life for the things I was doing. I counted the years I should be doing for the other things I did and in 6 months time I racked up well over 300 years doing the minimum time for each crime that I committed...The only way I can think to close this letter is to try to express my gratitude for the way you touched my life. It is with the utmost respect and gratitude that I say thank you."
(Tookie.com)

"Clemency is a part of the Constitutional scheme. When granted it is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed."
(Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes)

Stanley Tookie Williams was killed last night. This was not an execution. This was was a lynching. Williams died to save Schwarzenegger's political ambition and as a direct result of white America's pathologically 'Afro-phobic' relationship with 12% of it's own population.

It may be a cliche to say that we hate what we fear, but the fact that 12% of the general population makes up 49% of the general prison population hardly hints at affection. It seems a little hard to explain why, according to Amnesty International, "African Americans are disproportionately represented among people condemned to death in the USA...they account for more than 40 per cent of the country’s current death row inmates, and one in three of those executed" without suspecting racist motives somewhere along the line.

Whether left to rot in the flooded Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the penitentary or the economically neutered urban ghetto, it seems clear that the black threat will be contained. And what better form of containment is there than annihilation?

Many had reasonably cited Williams' now-positive power and influence on the young and disenfranchised as a justification for clemency. The irony is that in ghetto-ized America, where black power of any kind is feared by the WASP elite, it was probably that same power that doomed him.

Compassion Void

The standard 'conservative' reaction to any mention of clemency, was to wail "but what about the victims?" But can we really believe that the mob-minded vengeance seekers who celebrated Williams' death are really capable of giving a shit about the victims anyway? As a compassionate human being, I have nothing but sympathy for the victims of the murders Williams' was convicted for. But why should my sympathy for the victims make me any surer that Williams is guilty? Why does it seem that the more heinous the offense, the more guilty you must be and the louder the mob bays for your blood?

If Williams had been busted for shoplifting far more people would have felt amenable to his protestations of innocence. But because the crimes were so abberrant, fewer doubted the verdict of his ramshackle trial that relied totally on the self-serving testimony of convicted criminals seeking clemency for themselves.

The Case Against The Case

The following facts about the case were elaborated on in the plea for clemency presented to Schwarzenegger last month:

It is difficult to read the plea for clemency and not wonder how anyone could feel confident enough of Williams' guilt to let him die. It is unlikely that the State of California has ever been so determined to see a man die irrespective of his guilt or innocence or the veracity of the charges brought against him. The state seems to agree with many of the people who will be saying 'good riddance' to Stanley Tookie Williams tonight: that he deserved to die because of what he started, not necessarily because of what he did. The fact that being a gang member is not illegal, or that Williams has worked tirelessly to compensate for the mayhem he inspired, doesn't matter a damn. They wanted blood and they got blood.

Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stanley Tookie Williams, one of them is guilty of murder without a shadow of a doubt.

The United States is now amongst a minority of nations that retains the death penalty. Even worse, we are in a minority within that minority that implements it with such liberality. While it is unlikely to sway any conservatives, many rational people may find it disconcerting to see America rubbing shoulders with so many tin pot dictatorships, banana republics and theocratic hellholes on the shameful list of states who still use the death penalty. Without wishing to offend the fine nations of Myanmar, Burundi and Tajikistan, the list below is hardly a G8 role call. True, Japan looks out of place too. But then the Japanese haven't executed anyone since 1964 while America has killed in excess of 1,000 in the past thirty years.

The Death Penalty Does Not Work

Deterrence is about the only reason ever cited to support the continued use of capital punishment — apart from revenge and plain old blood lust. But the death penalty clearly does not work as a deterrent. America had one of the lowest murder rates on record when the moratorium on its use began in 1967. But following reinstatement of the big 'D' in 1977, the rate climbed steadily, hitting a peak of 24,530 murders in 1993. In 1970, by contrast, there were no executions and 'only' 16,000 murders nationwide. Currently, out of the 20 states whose murder rates exceed the national average, only two do not use the death penalty.

Of course, statistics prove little, but they certainly do not prove that the death penalty does a damn thing to stop people killing each other. But as a mechanism for enriching lawyers and boosting votes for 'tough on crime' pols, the death penalty works like a dream. It also has the effect of encouraging the innocent to plead guilty in order to avoid it, which is hardly conducive to good jurisprudence. But for those who are innocent and choose to contest the charges against them, such as may well have been the case with Stanley Williams, the maximum penalty will be forthcoming as a reward for their stubbornness if they are found guilty. As long as this death penalty Catch-22 is in effect that encourages the innocent to plead guilty out of self-preservation, the American justice system can make no claims to be fair.

More than half the world finds this system of state-sanctioned murder barbaric, immoral and unacceptable and has rejected it. Isn't it time we stopped pretending that it works or that it has any place in a society that considers itself civilized?