Stoopid Stuff

Killing Tookie

On December 13th, Stanley "Tookie" Williams is scheduled to die by way of lethal injection in the death chamber in San Quentin prison. Our government is spending my tax dollars to kill a man who will never see a day of freedom no matter what, who counsels children not just to avoid gangs and violence, but offers them real practical advice on how to extricate themselves from a gang once they have decided they no longer wish to participate. This is a horrendous problem on two levels--One, the so-called "view from 50,000 feet", and the other, the view from street level.

There is no doubt that Tookie Williams is a bad guy. The co-founder of the Los Angeles Crips street gang, one could make the case that he helped create the "gangsta" culture so popular in American Inner City slums. There can be no doubt that in his life he has done much harm, hurt many people and caused much suffering. The question one must ask is now, finding ourselves where we are, what should we do about that? Will killing Tookie make the world a better place, or could a larger contribution to the general good be served by allowing him to live out his life in captivity, doing what good he can to offset the evil he did earlier in his life.

First, on the larger view, I am wholly and completely against the death penalty. It is appalling that in 2005, our government still indulges in barbaric acts of pointless revenge, shouting from the highest mountaintops that "Killing is WRONG" and then enforcing that message by killing. This is killing another human we're talking about, a rather serious act in anybody's book, so we'd better take it seriously and examine it honestly. It can be explained in no other way than as revenge, the ultimate revenge of society upon one deemed no longer fit to live among us. Oh, we use all kinds of code words, like closure and getting on with our lives, but it is truly nothing more than the most violent, base revenge. When one talks about "cold blooded murder", surely there is no more cold blooded act than an execution. We know what day, what hour, and by what method Tookie will die. We know who will kill him, who will be there, and what we will say about it. If a murderer on trial was shown to have this level of premeditation, this level of Malice Aforethought, the prosecuting attorney, in his summation, would call this the coldest, most viscious, most heinous crime he had ever seen. And yet, it is he who is committing it.

The way our system is arranged, it is neither cheaper nor more efficient to kill a prisoner than it is to incarcerate him for life. Capital Punishment is neither a deterrent nor an effective rehabilitation method. In fact, when you think about it, it is only one thing that life imprisonment is not--irreversible. If you have held a man in prison for, say, 12 years and you then discover that he is innocent, you can release him, pay him reparations and help him start his life over again. And as it has been shown time and time again, our system of jurisprudence is neither 100% accurate nor even 100% honest. Why should we allow our government to take the risk of murdering an innocent man in our name, ever, when it serve NO purpose under the sun?

But Tookie's case is special, even in the world of Capital Punishment. You see, Tookie is doing GOOD. He is making a real, genuine, measurable difference in the lives of kids all over the country. He is not spending his time in prison trying to beat the system, taking drugs, fighting, or even spending a lot of effort on his own legal issues. He writes childrens books that speak clearly, to them, about the choices they must make if they live in a place like South Central LA. He has made a small, but genuine contribution to the reduction of violence in our cities. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, he has done bad, but now he's doing good.

So now we have a choice. We could leave him where he is, locked up for the rest of his life, to do as much good as he can do from where he is, offsetting in whatever little way the harm he has caused. Or we can kill him. Stop the good. End any contrbution that he is uniqely qualified and completely willing to make. Kill him, burn the body, scatter the ashes, salt the earth. But I ask you: Where is the wisdom in that? To put it even more coldly, where is the cost/benefit analysis? What do we get if we kill him? What do we get if we let him live?

While it is beyond all understanding why we are confronted with this dillema in the twenty first century, when this sort of barbarism and arbitrary governmental behavior should have been left in the dustbin of history, confronted we are. And let us make no mistke--his blood will be on all of our hands if we allow this. Its time to tell our leaders that we'd prefer they use our tax dollars to protect us, not kill us. And that means locking people up when they commit unacceptable acts. But as we like to say, killing is an unacceptable act. And voluntarily ending a life being spent on the public good is more than illogical--it is bad government.

posted by mikey @ 8:50 PM