The Death Penalty and Tookie Williams

By the time you read this, Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the founder of the Crips, convicted robber, murderer, and drug kingpin, will have died, having been executed on the lethal injection gurney at San Quentin.

According to numbers recorded by the Department of Corrections, California will have executed 2 criminals in 2005. The last execution was of Donald Beardslee in January. The last executions before this year’s were one each in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and 3 in 1999 (technically it’s actually two; one was extradited to Missouri and executed there).

Executions in California are not quite yet routine, as much as the Department tries to make them so. Californians still debate the morality and utility of the death penalty every time we execute another inmate. But Williams’ execution has made the debate even more prominent because he’s been the subject of a campaign for clemency that has been publicized for years. The reasons claimed for clemency – the fact that much of the testimony against him is suspect and that he’s written several books that urge children and young adults to avoid the kind of life he led – have done much to publicize his plight.


The last execution which stirred this level of doubt was that of Robert Alton Harris in 1992, California’s first in over 25 years. In many ways the two cases couldn’t be more different from each other. Harris was a mildly retarded brute who killed mainly when poor tactical choices led him to no other option. Williams however, was regarded as a gifted operator who killed mainly to expand a burgeoning and deadly illegal enterprise, and his “reform” – despite the nine Nobel Prize nominations – is often described as a cynically overstated sham. But the social consequences of their executions will be similar.

With public attention focused upon California’s first execution in a quarter century, increasing the focus upon crime and police abuse, it’s no accident that barely 8 days after Harris’ execution, the lopsided verdict in the Rodney king police brutality case led to riots which immolated Los Angeles and threatened to scorch other major cities. The fact that our state was going to start executing people again, and that executions tend to fall disproportionately upon poor and non-white people was as much on peoples’ consciousness as was the aggrieved King. This despite the fact that Harris had put up no illusions of reform or self-insight as Williams has: his last meal was a pizza and a bucket of KFC and his last words were a cutesy rhyme. Williams is skipping his last meal and plans to die with some semblance of dignity, if there really is such a thing.

People are planning marches, vigils and protests, and some police are worried: some of the scuttlebutt going around Bayview station is that since the Tactical Squad is out patrolling the hood instead of the beat cops now suspended in the Videogate fracas, that tensions in that district may get out of hand.

Death penalty advocates quietly wish that all this societal hand-wringing would simply evaporate and that a just society would routinely snuff out murderers eye-for-an-eye style and thus deter further bloodshed. Opponents continue to wring their hands, arguing that killing someone who is no longer free to threaten others offends modern civil sensibilities.

Instead, both sides should be asking themselves not whether executions are moral, but frankly, whether they are practical. Because of the legal guarantees that we all rely upon to live in a free and civil society, executing criminals will always be more costly than simply locking them up. And I don’t just mean in dollars: there is a social cost as well – our multicultural and ideologically free society will always ensure that every execution will become an opportunity to impugn the integrity of government and instill hostility among the disenfranchised. Meanwhile the supposed benefits of capital punishment – the satisfaction of victims, its deterrent effect upon other offenders - are largely dubious.

The fact is, the only societies that can successfully live with capital punishment are authoritarian ones. With no due process there is no publicity, no delay, no cost, no social criticism; executions cause no problems. As societies become more open, the utility of the death penalty becomes more problematic. The problem is that we are a democracy, based upon individual rights. We can’t sentence anyone to anything with out a guarantee of remedy in case of error – and there is no way to unring the death bell.

The fact is that scum like Harris and Williams – and they are indeed scum – cost society even more when we execute them than when we simply lock them up.

Link: Joan Ryan - Suspend executions -- for now