Tookie Williams - More Blood On State Hands

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Tookie Williams is dead. He was executed last night. No stay was granted, no appeal was approved. Neither Governor Schwarzenegger or George Bush saw their way clear to stop the state murder of a possibly innocent man. Many choices were possible - even a delay in the execution. Tookie Williams maintained to his death that he did not kill the four people he was convicted of murdering. Schwarzenegger said that Williams never showed contrition for those murders. Williams maintained that he could not show contrition for crimes he had never committed. For other actions, such as his gang activities, he did show contrition. Tookie Williams was active in trying to show a different way than the way of the gang, but he was also highly vocal about the racial injustice of the "Justice" system. Perhaps that is ultimately what he was executed - he was too influential a voice.

Williams was no innocent. He had a criminal record and he helped found the Cripps. However, one could argue that it was the CIA that launched the Crpps to prominence. In his book, "The Dark Alliance" by Gary Webb (now dead of suicide), he traced the CIA facilitated flow of cocaine from Nicaragua to the streets of Los Angeles (and beyond). The pipeline provided covert funding for the illegal provision of arms to Iran/Contra. The Regan administrations attempt to do an end run around Congress, and the beginning of the "war on drugs." But that is another study.

One could argue that Williams was a "big fish," and whether he committed those murders or not, he "deserved" to die last night. However, that is not what our "Justice" system is supposed to be about. It is to punish those guilty of the crimes which they are proven to have committed. There were all kinds of reasons to cook the books against Tookie Williams; all kinds of reasons why a jury confronted with an angry Black man who was acknowledged head of a feared gang would vote for death. Innocent or guilty, racism or not, Williams was a dangerous man. But that is not what justice is about. Not then and not now.

In a purportedly Christian nation, the argument has been made successfully in the past that a death row inhabitant had been "redeemed." People "born again" and washed clean of their sins are presumed by many to deserves to be released from a death sentence. Tookie Williams was a clear case of redemption. Unfortunately for him, it was not a Christian redemption, and he was a Black man.

Williams changed during his time in prison. He reached out to children to direct them away from gangs. He was a powerful voice for a different path for unknown numbers of children in dire, and brutal circumstances. Would it have been such a miscarriage of "justice" to spare his life. Sparing his life did not mean declaring him innocent and releasing him from prison. With a simple stroke of a pen, that sentence could have been commuted to life in prison. Williams could have continued to stand as a light and a voice. Now the message will be that there is no justice, and that transformation to a constructive path will end with you dead. One way or another you are dead.

If Williams is ultimately found to have been innocent of the murders that sent him to death, will those who refused to commute his sentence be tried for the murder of an innocent man? No, they will not.

A man, very possibly a man innocent of the crimes for which he died, has been murdered by the state of California. Whose hands does his blood stain? What constructive message has been sent?