The manufactured controversy over California’s plans to kill Stan “Tookie” Williams demonstrates once again why all but 12 states and the District of Columbia returned to executing prisoners after the Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling authorizing its resumption. In a word, the anti-death penalty movement comes across as a bunch of loons.
Idiot actors like Jamie Foxx and rappers like Snoop Dogg glamorize a piece of trash like Williams, and don’t even get me started on the morons who nominated Williams for the Nobel Peace Prize (for the record, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination is about as easy to get as a nomination to appear in Who’s Who Among American High School Students, okay? How do you think a terrorist like Yasser Arafat won one?) I wonder if Foxx or Snoop even know the names of the four people Williams was convicted of murdering?
Meanwhile, what passes for the more serious side of the anti-death penalty movement keeps retreading bogus claims about racial disparities in the way the U.S. executes prisoners (since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, it is white murderers who have been executed disproportionately, not black killers).
Nonetheless, I still remain strongly opposed to capital punishment on general grounds, and it seems to me Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has two choices. He can either kill Williams and move on or he can grant him clemency and never authorize another execution.
In fact, if California cannot execute Williams, it should abolish the death penalty altogether. If capital punishment is morally permissible, Williams is the model of the type of person who should be executed. Williams not only killed those four people, he created a criminal organization — the Crips street gang — that was and is responsible for untold murders and other acts of violence.
Williams has more blood on his hand than any serial killer or other psychopath that California has killed. If California does not execute Williams, it has no business executing anyone else.