Tookie, Tookie, Tookie Goodbye
So much for public officials opting to“always err on the side of life,” as George Bush insisted they should do during the epic battle over Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube. But even as much as Republicans love putting people to death, you would think that, if nothing else, cold political calculus would have prompted California’s Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to grant clemency to Tookie Williams.
Williams was the founder of the Crips, a violent LA street gang, who was convicted of four murders on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch. He was executed last night by the state of California. While there’s no doubt that Williams was, during his gang years, a very, very bad dude, he turned his life around in prison, and dedicated himself to persuading young people in urban areas to avoid gangs. He wrote numerous books, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. If anyone deserved clemency, it was Williams. If anyone demonstrated that a person could rehabilitate himself, it was Williams.
Even though Republicans love the death penalty, I thought they might, in William’s case, spare the man. The Feds stood by and did nothing during and immediately after Katrina as hundreds of black people suffered and died because, as Kanye West observed, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Those images will haunt the Republican party, obliterating any progress George W. Bush thought he was making with black voters. You might think the Republicans, acting in their own self-interest, would so something uncharacteristic and show a little mercy. But no. A Republican governor presided over the suffering and death—it took guards fifteen minutes and multiple stabs before they finally got a needle in Williams’ arm—of a man who may not have been guilty and, regardless, had utterly transformed himself in prison. This too will haunt the Republican party.
Democrats, for their part, fear being labeled as soft on crime, so they act like they love the death penalty too. But their liberal hearts aren’t in it—except for Bill Clinton, of course, who famously went back to Arkansas during his 1992 campaign to oversee the execution of a brain damaged black man.
On the night of his execution, Rector saved the slice of pecan pie to be eaten before bedtime, not realizing his death would come first. He also told his attorney that he would like to vote for Clinton in the fall.
The death penalty is barbaric, inhumane, and inneffective—and in this instance, unlike in 1992, politically stupid.
I guess conservatives are too busy reforming homosexuals to worry about reforming prison gangsters.