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December 2005 Vol. 7 No. 12 | Submit stories, articles, letters, essays, poetry here!
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December 2005 Vol. 7 No. 12 | Submit stories, articles, letters, essays, poetry here!
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Governor Schwarzenegger Denies
Former Crips Gang Member ClemencyWashington, DC (12/7/05 - BlackNews.com) - His journey from infamous gang leader to death sentence and now fight for redemption is already the subject of Hollywood movie scripts. But as the reality of his scheduled December 13 execution date looms closer, BET News will go inside the case of Los Angeles "Crips" gang co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams and the growing controversy over whether he should be granted clemency for a quadruple-murder conviction. Hosted by BET News reporter Andre Showell, BET will televise Stanley Tookie Williams: A Question of Justice tonight (December 7) at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT, with an encore showing at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT.
This BET News production includes actual interviews with Williams and key figures involved both in his life and the high-profile case. Among those featured in the BET telecast are Williams' legal team member Verna Wefald, NAACP President and CEO Bruce Gordon, Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, actress Alfre Woodard, and noted radio host and columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
The Williams saga is a long one, dating back to 1971 when he co-founded one of the country's most notorious street gangs. In 1981, he was convicted of murdering four people during two robberies and sentenced to death row at California's famed maximum-security San Quentin State Prison. While imprisoned, the transformation of Williams has garnered world-wide attention, with Williams having authored nine acclaimed children's books educating youth to avoid gangs and crime. So compelling are Williams' works that he has received multiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize for literature.
In addition to presenting this in-depth review of the Williams case, BET News will follow closely and report on the pivotal events of this week which will determine Williams' fate, including his clemency hearing before California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on December 8; the anticipated decision by the governor by week's end; and Williams scheduled execution on December 13.
(12-6-05 BlackNews.com) The dangling question in the raging debate over the fate of Stanley "Tookie" Williams is what if the state kills him? Though President Bush didn't specifically mention Williams' pending execution, he recently took the occasion of the execution of a North Carolina inmate, to publicly declare that the death penalty saves lives. Death penalty opponents vehemently dispute that. They say that it's inhumane, and ineffectual. Victims rights groups say that killing Williams and other killers bring closure to the family members of the killer's victims. Many in the media worry that with passions running white hot over the case, Williams' execution could spark violence, and turn him into a martyr.
These are hotly debated and disputed points. There is no evidence that killing Williams or any of the other 1,000 men and women that states have executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 has deterred killers from killing. Eighteen of the twenty states with the highest murder rates impose the death penalty. Seventeen of twenty big cities with the highest murder rates are in death penalty states. Michigan and Indiana are next door to each other. One has the death penalty (Indiana), the other doesn't (Michigan), and two decades later their murder rates have remained fairly constant.
The murder rate in America did drop to a forty year low this year and that made headline news. But it made news only because the murder rate in America has been so stunningly high to begin with. Even with the drop, the 15,000 to 20,000 murders in America yearly, has remained fairly steady. The U.S. has the highest murder rate of any nation on the planet. Despite the nation's stratospheric murder rates, the death penalty affects relatively few Americans other than the condemned killers, their families, and their victim's families. That's because most killers, including some of the worst, don't get the death penalty. Only one of several hundred murderers among the thousands of murders committed yearly get the death penalty. Even tossing Texas into the execution total, who gets the death penalty depends on the victim, race, money, the location where the murder was committed, the quality of legal representation, and luck. Williams was one of the very few unlucky ones.
Even then it takes decades for the condemned to exhaust their layers of legal appeals, and face execution. Williams has languished on death row for nearly a quarter century. When executions take place, they are done out of public view, and barely stir a ripple in the press or among the public.
The talk of violence, if Williams is killed, is mostly media talk, and that's only because Williams is black, many of his most impassioned and visible supporters are black, and the death penalty is wrongly seen as a black and white issue. But death penalty opponents come in all shapes and colors, and the most vigorous of them, are white, and middle class with a sprinkle of high profile celebrities among them. There is also too much doubt, disinterest, and even support for the death penalty among many blacks for it solely to be a black-white issue. Pro-death penalty blacks are furious at him and other blacks that prey on poor, black communities. Williams' death in the words of Emerson about the execution of John Brown in 1859 will not "make the gallows as glorious as the cross." His death will be a great tragedy, a monumental waste of human potential, but it won't canonize him, let alone spark violence.
Then there's the wide belief that death penalty provides closure for victim's families. That's even more questionable. The state killing of Williams will erase his life, but it can't totally erase the pain, rage, and grief that victim's survivors experience. That's simply too intense, and personal. The debate over Williams's fate is a textbook example of that. The stepmother of Albert Owens, the 7-Eleven store clerk, and one of the four victims that Williams was convicted of gunning down, has publicly said that Williams must die, and that his death will bring relief for Owens' family.
Though Owens' brother, Wayne, does not support clemency, he's just as vocal that his execution is "a no-win" situation for everyone. He has no plans to attend the execution. Owens is no exception to the rule that murder victim's families routinely cork champagne at a killer's death. In 1995, reporters were stunned at the sight of a spirited demonstration by a contingent of family members and relatives of the murdered victims of at the federal prison Timothy McVeigh, the convicted Oklahoma City terror bomber, was scheduled for execution. They weren't there to revel in McVeigh's execution. They were there to condemn it. They bombarded President Clinton with letters and petitions demanding that he be spared.
They, and a spate of groups, such as Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation actively crusade to scrap the death for any and all killers, and that includes those facing death for murdering their loved ones. Williams' execution will not resolve these muddled and contentious issues. They will continue to tear states and the public for years to come. In other words, no one wins.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, a political analyst and social issues commentator. He is the author of The Crisis in Black and Black (Middle Passage Press).
(12/2/05 - BlackNews.com) The small crowd of clergy, community activists, and death penalty opponents that gathered in front of the courthouse recently in Los Angeles to demand clemency for Stanley "Tookie" Williams was no different than other groups that for weeks have kept up the drum beat for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Williams' clemency. There was one very loud exception. A young African-American shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer and should die. He was not an agitator or crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate.
I was not surprised that there are many blacks such as him that want Williams dead. The instant I publicly unabashedly went to bat in my columns for clemency for Williams, and against the death penalty in general, the emails and comments I got flew hot and heavy. The black critics bitterly reviled me for advocating clemency for him. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, that he helped found, has unleashed on poor, black communities. Their hardened attitude toward Williams flew in the face of conventional wisdom that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren't.
During the past decade, even as more whites say they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty, or oppose it, more blacks have said that murderers, even black ones, must pay with their lives. A Harris Interactive poll in August 2001 found that nearly half of black respondents supported capital punishment. Three years later, a Gallup Poll found that black support for the death penalty still hovered at near fifty percent.
The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black versus white racial divide issue, and with good reason. Whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims than whites. The Justice Department's annual crime victim surveys have consistently found that blacks are nearly twice as likely to be victims of murder than whites. The leading cause of death among young black males under age 24 is homicide. In nearly all cases other blacks will kill them.
Blacks are scared stiff and fed up with that continuing surge in murder violence that tears black communities. A hint of that came in June 1999. A Justice Department survey that year found that blacks in a dozen cities generally applauded the police. This shocked and confounded some black leaders who assumed like everyone else that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren't. They are anti-racist and abusive police officers, and expect and demand efficient, fair policing in their communities.
In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities, community activists have staged anti-murder walks, march, held vigils, and lobby city and state officials for tougher gun laws, and have also taken a step that once would have been racial treason. They have repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the police and help them identify the young shooters.
Then there's the myth of the "soft" black juror. It goes like this, black jurors are so hateful of white authority that they would gleefully nullify the law and let a black lawbreaker waltz out of court a free man or woman even if that person is a killer. This is nonsense. In most big cities, blacks make up a majority, or a significant percent, of those that sit on juries, and they routinely convict other blacks of crimes every day.
It's true, though, that in past years, blacks were the staunchest opponents of capital punishment, and they had good cause to be. The death penalty was a vicious, blatantly racist weapon welded by prosecutors, particularly in the South, against blacks for rape and murder on the flimsiest evidence as long as their alleged victims were white. However, crime fears, and the rampaging murder violence has partially trumped that and made more blacks than ever regard the death penalty not as a weapon to hammer blacks, but to hammer violent criminals.
Tookie certainly no longer fits the label of the violent predator. He has done everything humanly possible to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence prone youth. But many blacks have lost friends, and loved ones to those gun toting youth. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them.
That's unfair to blame one man for the sins of some in the youth generation but when the body count rises, people must blame someone for that and Williams is that someone. It's then only a short step from that for them to loudly say that Tookie must die.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst.
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