Schwarzenegger Mulls Clemency for Williams
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday he would consider granting clemency to convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, the Crips gang founder who became an anti-gang activist while in prison and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The governor said he would meet Dec. 8 in a private hearing with Williams' lawyers, Los Angeles County prosecutors and others involved.
Schwarzenegger has the authority to commute a death sentence to life without parole, but he is not obligated to hold a hearing. In Schwarzenegger's case, he decides clemency requests on a "case-by-case basis," spokeswoman Margita Thompson said.
Two other clemency petitions have come before Schwarzenegger. Neither was granted.
WHAT DO YOU THINK SCHWARZENEGGER SHOULD DO?
19 comments:
I think the Governator should seriously consider granting Williams clemenacy and let him live out the rest of his life in prison. I don't know all the facts of the Williams case, so I don't know for sure that he is deserving of clemency, but if he truly has changed his life and is truly now living his life in a way that benefits society, I think he should be given a second chance. I don't think he should be able to get out of jail, I think his crimes are to horrific to allow that. But if Williams can turn away a few kids from gangs and prevent more murders, then his life still has some value to society as a whole and therefore he shouldn't be executed.
Also, I think the message of granting Williams clemency is a good one: it is never too late to turn your life around.
im not a death penalty advocate. i would ask that the following be considered:
tookie williams has been on death row for 24 years.
there is no rush to judgement as some of the 'free tookie' folks say.
the 9th circuit (the most liberal in america) voted 15-9 against him. if the 9th says your guilty, you are guilty.
he founded the crips! this organization with franchises around the country, has been responsible for the deaths of thousands. it has been responsible for the destruction of thousands more lives through drugs and gun running etc...they are responsible for terrorizing hundreds of communities.
nearly all of his victims were inner city blacks.
tookie has never shown any remorse regarding his murders that landed him in jail. clemency should be considered when one is remorseful and asks his victims for forgiveness. (i heard this on several radio shows and an article in the la times. if he has been remorseful i would be the first to apologize)
he has not cooperated with the police to help them bring others in the crips to justice.
yes he has "written" childrens books.
he has been nominated for nobel peace prize several times. i suspect that that is the way the committee could stick a finger in americas eye.
in his book, "is capital punishment morally required," author, attorney and scholar, cass sunstein; notes an emory university study that conservatively estimates that on average, every execution deters 18 murders. "if each execution is saving many lives, the harms of capital punishment would have to be very great to justify its abolition, far greater than most critics have heretofore alleged."
i can only appreciate the struggle that professor sunstein went through to come to his conclusions.
if you believe that capital punishment should be eliminated than there is no question for you. actually there is one question, why not work to overturn the law?
however, it is the law of the state of california. if it is to be applied, than how can one not agree that it should be applied here?
[note: i am not telling any one what to believe or feel. i am not advocating either position.]0
Tookie Williams should forfeit his life period. The Crips have killed and wounded more young people than can be counted. They are viscious killers and drug dealers who prey on poor people. He was convicted of brutally murdering 4 innocent people. Those victims will never get the chance to "turn their lives around". What message are we sending if we grant him life in prison? It is ok to be a murderer, just if you get caught write a childrens book and get some anti death penalty person to nominate you for the peace prize. This is the wrong message.
By the wat I polled my 4 high school classes and the vote was overwhemlnig for execution!
dad: how hard a struggle can it be to come up with the conclusion that pro-death penalty advocates have been stating since day one? furthermore, how is it possible to come to the statistical conclusion that one execution saves eighteen lives on the basis of a counterfactual claim? (this is actually not entirely a rhetorical question, i'm genuinely curious to know the argument). lastly, the major problem with the death penalty is its implementation in the criminal justice system, which is often not color-blind and therefore often runs up against the very American moral injunction that it is "better to let ten guilty men off, than to kill a single innocent man."
rob: The CRIPs (it's an acronym meaning "continual revolution in progress" founded in the late sixties/early seventies to fill the void left in black urban cities left by the illegal assassinations and imprisonments of Black Panther members by the FBI agents) have never killed anyone, only individual members of the gang have. Founding a gang (though illegal under the egregiously racist street terrorism provisions of then DA Jim Hahn) is not immoral: most black gangs in Los Angeles were formed to protect members from white gangs that formed to preserve a kind of segregation based on violence and harassment in communities and high schools after the desegregation laws in housing and education integrated blacks and whites. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with being a drug dealer when selling crack is the most economically viable option in your community, presuming, that is, that it is not just white businessmen who are rational individuals who make economic decisions motivated by profit maximization and according to the laws of supply and demand. The only thing wrong is the kind of racist drug laws that criminalize the inner-city while happily looking the other way at more egregious drug-consumption crimes in wealthy white communities. (Compare the rates of incarceration and lengths of sentencing for cocaine and crack use. Also the quickest way to clear up space in jails, presumably your objection to letting Tookie WIlliams stay in jail is that you are paying for him to do so, is to decriminalize the sale of drugs, which accounts for an overwhelming amount of non-violent crime populations in prison). Lastly, I'd hate to set the execution precedent too high: heaven forbid we should apply the same standards to our gangs as to our police force (let alone our political leadership). It would not be difficult to replace LAPD for The Crips, in your statement: "[Officers of] the LAPD have killed and wounded more young (and old) people than can be counted. They are vicious killers...who prey on poor people" etc. Think I'm being bleeding heart about it? I highly recommend reading Mike Davis' accounts of the political economy of crack, the LAPD, and the origins of the CRIPS and the Bloods (among other truly fascinating subjects about the history of LA) in his book _City of Quartz_ (from which the above information was taken).
as far as Tookie is concerned, i have no comment, as i don't know the individual case. i just don't think that being a founding member of the gang should be a charge against him. and, i look forward to a day when we are debating the executions of convicted criminals like Henry Kissinger,..
couldn't figure out how to delete the above, which according to will writing members of my immediate (nuclear, pronounced nuke-u-lar) family was at best morally perverse and at worst off-topic. i can't tell you how embarrassing it was to admit that, where the latter was concerned, he might be right, a first time for both of us. i still recommend mike davis, though.
Ryan--I don't think you should delete what you wrote, but if you still want to delete your comment, click on the trash can icon. You can only see the icon in the pop up window that shows up when you want to reply to a post.
Ryan--As to the substance of your post...I am sort of befuddled as to how someone can suggest that gangs are anything other than horrible. The overwhelming majority of the victims killed by gang members committing gang related murders are poor minorities. To suggest that gangs are a rational response to the poor economic conditions and high crime rates of America's inner cities seems entirely unsupportable.
Tookie Williams has been convicted of killing four people. Most poor inner city kids don't murder one person, let alone four. To suggest that Williams is an unwitting pawn in some sort of white conspiracy to keep minorites down is insulting to the upstanding citizens (who somehow manage to fight the urge to murder their neighbors or sell them drugs) who live(d) in the neighborhoods Williams and other CRIPS terrorize(d).
I highly doubt you will find one law abiding person of asian, latino or african descent who lives in the inner city and who thinks that gangs are anything other than evil.
fern, don't want to suggest that gang violence is a good thing nor that the indiscriminate killing of four (or any number of) people is either. if that is necessarily entailed in being a member of a gang, then i stand corrected (having read a little on the history of black gang formations, i believe that, initially at least, black gangs served community protection purposes and thereby, gang formation, an illegal form of private association according to our laws, is not in itself immoral). lastly, i believe i said selling drugs--and not forming gangs--was a rational response to poor economic conditions (which i'm going to stand by), nor do i think that doing so morally wrong. but i can see that i've been polemical at the expense of good sense, and that the above has implications with which i do not agree.
oh, and i still recommend mike davis. (read my lips: no new recommendations).
Ryan--You think that selling people substances that will eventually kill them and will seriously debilitate them in the meantime is a moral endeavor? Even if we were to exclude morality from a discussion, one would be hardpressed to find evidence of the positive effect selling drugs has had on economically disadvantaged communities. Certainly people should be able to ruin their own lives if they should so choose, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they are doing anything other than ruining their lives and often those of the people around them.
And Mike Davis has been on my list of books to read for a while now (since you last recommended him). :-)
see that's the thing: when did it become the task of the state to regulate people's behavior and consumer choices? it's not as if people aren't aware of the risks they take when consuming dangerous substances (even legal ones like cigarettes and alcohol). and i don't see what makes drugs different than any other commodity that can be sold, such that the exchange of it wouldn't at least be minimally advantageous to the individuals who exchange it. and i wonder what the differences would be like if it were a legal versus underground economy. i'd look into it myself, but i can't imagine getting IRB (internal review board) authorization for such a study. i guess i'll have to stick with theoretical entities (i.e. those things i've been trained to work with) for my MA thesis.
Ryan--I'm all for adults being allowed to ruin their own life if they should so choose. I just don't buy the idea that a person who uses drugs is better off in any measurable way than a similarly situated person who chose to do something else with his or her time, money and health.
Another problem with the "adults can ruin their own life" principle is that drug abusers are rarely living in a vacuum. Often they are ruining the lives of their children, stealing from their neighbors and doing other destructive things to the community. When a meth lab blows up, taking the surrounding houses with it, the drug dealer has gone quite a few steps beyond just ruining his own life. Likewise with the cracked out apartment dweller who forgot that the stove was turned on and burned down the whole building. At what point does society have the right to outlaw behavior that has an extremely high probablity of negatively affecting other people's rights?
thanks ryan for the introspection and the enunciation lesson.
Ryan, Im not sure where to start in response to your argument. First my objection to killing Williams is not to free up more jail space. He should be legally executed for murdering 4 innocent people who will never have the chance to live a full and fruitful life. As for the Crips and Bloods. To say they are protecting their community is a reach. Are you suggesting that drive by shootings and the consistent black on black crime is for their own protection?
These gangs and their gang members are courted in to the "protective Society" by killing someone. There are some branches of their society that reward their members for killing police officers. I realize that you have a distaste for police, but I don't think that killing an innocent CHP Officer outside a courtroom can be justified (this happened last year in Pomona). He was doing his job, he was not patroling a black area nor was he arresting anyone. He was killed so this person could gain acceptance into the club. I have seen firsthand the effects that gangs have on a community and it does nothing but destroy them and the families that live there. To follow your argument further you object to the "unfair implementation" of the death penalty against blacks. Then could I logically conclude that everyone who murders someone should be executed, regardless of their race. If this is you position then we can actually agreee on an issue.
As for the drugs, see Fern's comments about how drug users do not live in a vacuum and their actions effect others.
I will reserve comments on your political leaders position for another time.
Ryan--I thought you'd be amused to know that the leader of the People of Color Kwanza group said that CRIPS stands for "Community Reeducation Inter-Party Services." ;-)
I agree with Fern, the Governor should grant clemency to Williams, in response to the positive steps he has taken to change.
In my opinion, the willful taking of human life is wrong, period. There can be no equivocation here--it is wrong. Murderers should lose their freedom forever, as is the case for Williams. Also, it is wrong for the government to willfully take the life of a human being. It solves nothing; it does not bring the victims back to life, and it surely will not render whole the loved ones who have suffered so much. It appeals to our sense of vengeance perhaps, but still acccomplishes nothing.
Justifying the willful taking of life as punishment for the willful taking of life because the criminal "deserves to die" is not the place of humans or government. I do not believe that the government or my fellow humans should have the right to decide whether a person deserves life or not. Execution does not restore any balance to the world, it does not restore the lives taken, the damage done by the criminal, it merely increases the number of dead people.
Richard--I didn't say that the Governator should grant clemency, I said he should consider it. I also acknowledged that I didn't know very much about the case. The more I learn about Williams the less legit his "turn around" appears.
However, I don't think you should couch your belief that the Governator should grant clemency on the fact that Williams has supposedly changed while in prison. It is pretty clear from the rest of your post that you don't support the death penalty in any circumstances. If you think the Governator should grant clemency because you think the death penalty is wrong, then just say that. A lot of people who support the death penalty are suspicious of Williams supporters because they perceive the supporters to be anti-death penalty activists and thus don't trust their statements that Williams has changed. If Williams supporters were more honest about their real intentions a lot more Californians would listen to what they had to say. Afterall, the argument that the death penalty is wrong and the fact that we would still execute people who have made a positive change while in prison makes it more wrong is probably a compelling argument to many of Californias Democrats, Independants and moderate Republicans.
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