There have to be countless Americans who condemn gangs and haven’t brutally murdered four people, much less founded a gang that is responsible for hundreds of murders and tens of thousands of crimes by itself. Maybe some celebrities can pick one of these men or women and take up their cause.
Witnesses at Tookie Williams’s trial include the woman who sold Williams the murder weapon, his roommate, his roommate’s wife, an accomplice, three citizen-witnesses who corroborated the accomplice’s version of events, a jailhouse informant, and an expert who identified Williams’s own handwritten notes of the incident. Another accomplice, who has been sentenced to life and didn’t testify at Williams’s trial for Fifth Amendment reasons, has never wavered in his identification of Williams as a murderer.
Before his conviction, Williams attempted an escape in a conspiracy that would’ve killed two guards and one of the witnesses against him; he wrote a note indicating that he had obtained dynamite in support of this escape, which was foiled before he could commit additional mass murder. After his conviction, Tookie Williams looked at the jurors and told them he was “going to get all” of them. (One of the jurors, William James McGurkin, was black, contrary to several Williams supporter and press claims that blacks were excluded from the jury.) While in prison, Williams threatened two guards with death in two separate incidents (telling one that “I have dusted many officers on the street, one more would not make any difference,” chemically burned another guard in the eyes, engaged in several fights, and ordered an inmate stabbed by fellow Crips. The LA County’s DA’s office has extensive details.
The only reason Williams had a chance to at least pretend to redeem himself (through children’s books but not through debriefing prison officials on Crip activities, which Williams called “snitching” up to his dying day) is that his appeals (including five separate habeas petitions) took California and the Ninth Circuit twenty-four and a half years to resolve. Rich Lowry and Jack Dunphy have more.
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This whole Tookie story just bugs me. Tookie has never apologized or expressed regret for his crime because he says he didn’t do it.
And here’s the bug: His supporters do NOT claim that he’s innocent. They say that he’s reformed and is a different person. If Tookie is correct, and he is really innocent, then all of his supporters, every single one, is wrong. He didn’t reform, there was nothing to reform from IF he was innocent.
So we have to ask, why don’t his supporters simply claim that Tookie is innocent? At least they’d be logically consistent. And here’s the answer. The evidence is so overwhelming that they could never say he’s innocent. They know he’s guilty and to maintain an ounce of credibility they ignore the fact that he claims he’s innocent.
But this tactic does not work as Tookie’s supporters are STILL wrong. Because if he is guilty, as they admit he is, and if he refuses to admit any guilt or apologize, he certainly can NOT be said to have reformed.
Anyway you try to add it up, his supporters are without ANY support.
I have unfortunately followed the story for the past few months primarily because you can’t avoid it in the Bay area.
Williams’ “supporters” were, in my humble opinion, manipulated by Williams’ use of the liberal Bay Area media like so many sheep. There was one report this morning of a witness exclaiming, upon completion of the execution, “The State of California has executed an innocent man.”
As Governor Schwarzenegger pointed out in the 6 page statement on denial of clemency, after 24 years of judicial review and multiple appeals, there is no question of either Williams’ guilt or lack of remorse.
The largest injustice on this whole issue was the delay of 24 years before sentence was carried out. While a certain amount of judicial review on death penalty cases must be followed to ensure that the convicted truly are ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ guilty of their crime, here in California it has been taken to an extreme. The delay has undoubtedly taken an additional toll on the family members of the victims.
With such stellar examples of the human race as Richard Allen Davis (the murderer of Polly Klaas, who actually flipped off the jury prior to sentencing), David Westerfield (the murderer and torturer of Danielle van Dam), and the more recent addition of Scott Peterson in the queue for the death penalty, it is high time to reform the system in California to shorten the lengthy delay between sentencing and execution.
The current delays remain an insulting injustice toward the victims and their families.
This is one of those cases that just makes me angry at the stupidity of people.
How many lives whose innocence is unchallenged could have been saved with 1/10 the money spent on Tookie Williams?
This is like worrying about prison rape: sure, it’s bad, and we’ll get to work on solving it right after we solve world hunger, which kills millions of children every year.
PRIORITIES, people. [curse words]!
To avoid these comments going off the rails, let me step in to say that I do not endorse prison rape and that I find troubling the persistent implication in the popular understanding that rape is an acceptable component of modern-day imprisonment, especially when government officials suggest that it is. (E.g., Jul. 4; Jun. 3, 2001.)
Lawyers need to tell us why this took 24 years. There cannot possibly have heen 24 years of 8 hour days of legal work involved. I believe that the appeals process has become a filibuster against justice and I believe we need to appoint an umpire to throw the flag whenever the ball is dropped.
The law for capital punishment does not address ‘redemption’. Whether Mr. Williams has indeed been redeemed is a matter between him and parties other than the court or society at large. Capital punishment is not a last final attempt to redeem difficult people, it is a deterrant.
Mr. Williams’s death will serve as a stark, if delayed, reminder to street punks that they too can roll up their sleeve.
While I oppose the death penalty, I agree with Ted that Tookie Williams was not the right poster boy around which death penalty opponents should have rallied. Instead of prostrating themselves over the execution of Tookie Williams, celebrities should apply their resources to helping people who are trying to exonerate the wrongfully convicted who are sitting on death row. By embracing a man who refused to acknowledge his guilt and who refused to cooperate with the government in going after the Crips, Hollywood celebrities cheapen the legitimate arguments to abolish the death penalty.
“I do not endorse prison rape”
I didn’t endorse it. I said it was bad, and we need to fix it.
It’s just below many other, in my opinion, MUCH WORSE things that need to be fixed MUCH MORE.
Put it this way:
The prison rape victim is very highly likely to be an actual criminal, and has, at the very least, been convicted of a serious crime, which puts a pretty high bar on who the victims are.
Starvation (just to pick a single, simple example) kills largely children.
Which should we deal with first? Which is more important? Preventing children dying of starvation, or making the lives of criminals more comfortable?
It’s not “endorsement”; it’s priorities.
(In all fairness, there are many people who DO endorse it, and most of the ones I’ve talked to cite the opinion that prison today is basically a joke, not a punishment. Indeed, if I were in a different position than I am today, financially, such as looking at spending my life flipping burgers at near-minimum wage with no real prospect of improvement, especially if I were in such debt as to make life feel like enforced servitude, prison rape would be the primary thing that kept prison from being appealing. If one feels imprisoned by life already, then one might as well get not have to work or worry about the bills. It doesn’t make prison rape right; it does push it that much farther down the list of priorities to fix.)
I agree, Duqlaw98. In Alabama, the Birmingham News recently ran a week-long series about the inequities of the death penalty. (http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/?choosinglife.html) With so many stories of poor defendants who are poorly represented by the underfunded and overworked public defenders, I can’t remember one celebrity coming here to shine a light on the shortcomings of the system.
A problem can simultaneously be under-addressed and less important than a different problem. I think there are more important problems in the world than the problem of the state of the American civil justice system, but I also think that there aren’t enough resources being devoted to fixing those civil justice problems, and too many resources devoted to making those problems worse.
The misallocation of resources amongst various good causes pales in comparison to the resources devoted to bad causes—and I think Tookie Williams is a bad cause, rather than a cause that isn’t good enough to be worthy of attention.
On that, I completely agree!!!
tookie!
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