George Eliot (1819–80), English novelist
Stanley Tookie Williams is set to be executed Tuesday, if California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger does not provide a last-minute reprieve. Most of the blogs that I have seen (including B2 below) do not believe Tookie’s life should be spared.
I do and here is my reasoning. The hope of putting one into prison is to reform that person; however, we know that our prison system is not a place for reform. It’s more of a place to learn how to be even more brutal and uncaring. Tookie killed four people and he has refused to tell police what he knows about the crime that he contends he is innocent of, which is why he has not apologized. It’s obvious that he cannot be released upon the streets because he appears to still operate from a gang mentality, which is all he has known since being an adolescent. However, he has reformed to at least earn life in prison rather than being executed, which puts the state on the same level as a rival gang.Tookie’s efforts in prison have resulted in writing a number of children’s books, preaching non-violence. While he has taken four lives that can never be returned and caused grief to innocent families, he has also saved numerous lives. Should that not count for something? Maybe, living the remaining days of his life in a cage?
3 comments:
I have always opposed the death penalty for one simple reason and it is a reason argued even by George Will, of all people: government cannot be in the business of killing its own citizens. I don't think Will has any moral qualms about it, he just comes by this from his very conservative position of distrust in the competence of government, in general.
The recent spate of overturned death penalty convictions, via DNA evidence, should have already convinced us that the criminal justice system is far from perfect. It is highly likely that innocent people have been executed in this country, possibly many.
But even if it were the case that all death penalties convictions were exactly correct -- the convicted was the real guilty party -- it still should not be done. The execution of a convicted killer does not convery the message that killing is wrong. In fact, the message it does convey is that revenge is acceptable in some cases and that the state will conduct this revenge on behalf of the aggrieved parties. This revenge also appears to be very nearly arbitrary in its application. Some 1st degree murderers get the death penalty, many do not.
Support for the death penalty as exacting justice is, ultimately, a morally conflicted, hypocritical and abysmally wrong-headed stance, regardless of the state of a prisoner's rehabilitation.
Well said.
I asked a lawyer friend about this today, and he said:
"if he were in jail for forming them and killing people, i personally wouldn't have a problem with the execution. But the crime he was sentenced for was one murder, and think he has been "reformed" of the mindset that led him to do that. So there is no point in killing him other than a political one. So the penalty should be commuted."
I think that was a good summation. I'm against the death penalty, of course, and I also think that given that he denies his guilt for the particular murder he's doing time for, that executing him could be executing an innocent man--at least w/r/t that particular crime. So there is also that.
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