Even as a hippie pinko bleeding heart liberal, I can't bring myself to care that my state executed Tookie Williams half an hour ago. Like any good hippie pinko bleeding heart liberal, I know a little bit about the problems with capital punishment. I know that black criminals are far more likely to be executed, particularly when their victims are white. I know about the staggering number of death row inmates that were exonerated when DNA evidence became available. I think it was commendable when George Ryan suspended executions in Illinois, and I was disappointed when Connecticut (my real state) broke New England's 45-year tradition and executed Michael Ross last May. (At least in the Connecticut case, the inmate himself was advocating his own execution.)

But my objections to capital punishment are procedural things like that; I don't know nor particularly care about whether killing a killer is "right" in the abstract. I think a lot of people feel the same way. My problem is that we usually don't know for sure whether the condemned prisoner really is a murderer. That's what makes execution different from (say) life in prison: If we sentenced some guy to life in prison yesterday, and found out today that he was innocent, we can at least let him out. It still sucks to be him, but it sucks a lot less than if he had been executed.

So if you're a person opposed to the death penalty, and you want to convince somebody like me, who thinks execution is probably a bad idea but doesn't really care all that much, why on earth would you pick Tookie Williams as your case study? He blew away four people at point blank range with a shotgun in order to look tough in front of his gang buddies. He got caught because he bragged and laughed about it to those gang buddies later. (He also left his shell casings behind, criminal mastermind that he was.) Nobody seriously thinks that he was innocent. No doubt there were plenty of other violent crimes he committed in his career with the Crips (which, apparently, he did not found despite the reports).

I really don't give a damn how many childrens' books he wrote, or how many times he spoke at high school assemblies. Free time is cheap when you're doing 24 years on death row. The fact that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize tells me more about the Peace Prize than about Tookie Williams. I lived for a year in north Long Beach on the Compton border. I don't kid myself for a minute that I have any idea what inner city gang life is like, but I saw enough to know that the place is a walk-in septic tank, and I am not going to feel the least bit sorry for anybody that helped make it that way that gets the needle.

13 Dec 2005 02:08 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments