Tookie Williams
So it's like this. Like the media slave I am, I got sucked into the 24/7 coverage of the Tookie Williams execution case as it approached the 11th hour.
Now this is complicated for me because I bounce between being an opponent to the death penalty and applying logic relative to the California penal system.
The obvious argument that everyone is being hit over the head with is that Tookie Williams is a changed man and is not the man he was when he was convicted. It's easy to get sucked into that. However, as I got to thinking more about it I realized that I don't actually care about the good work he's done. I'm sure if you got to know a lot of the guys on death row a lot of them will have made a change toward good. A death sentence can be a sobering event.
But all that being said, simply put I think the death penalty is wrong and I'll argue clemency for anyone on death row because I've yet to find a fool proof justice system that can assure me that innocent people will not be put to death.
Look at Chicago for God's sake. The governor had to set aside the death sentences for over 100 inmates because of corruption and unethical behaviour by the prosecution.
Can you IMAGINE, being on death row for a crime you did not commit? David Milgaard owes his life to today to the fact that we as Canadians have more second thought than to equate justice with vengeance. Proponents of the Tookie execution will say that he's had 24 years to uncover new evidence but hey, it took almost as long to get Milgaard out of prison. Good God, if he were in Texas he wouldn't have made it 1/2 that long.
I can't believe in 2005 America, the global cheerleader of humanity and democracy, could allow within it's own borders, practices that I'm sure history will regard as nothing less than barbarbic and archaic. I say this not of the act of the killing itself, which of course we agree is heinous, but of the system's, and dare I say the people's, ability to rationalize their own failures into 'we'll try our best not kill the wrong person'.
Anyway, as I write this CNN is reporting that another man has been killed in Missouri. I guess he didn't have celebrities on his side to warrant more coverage. All the same he's dead, his victims aren't any more alive for it. The families don't hurt any less. No future murders are being deterred as a result. God Bless America.
"Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Compensation." In Compensation and Heroism. New York, Boston, H.M. Caldwell Co., 1900. p 15
posted by @lex @ 10:30 a.m.
3 comments
3 Comments:
Part of me absolutely agrees with you - infallible, irrefutable and unexceptional proof positive is not always represented in death penalty cases.
However, both American and Canadian societies apparently cannot afford to feed, clothe and shelter law-abiding citizens - why then should we pay a lifetime (because life is the alternative to the death penalty) of care to those who choose to flout the laws which supposedly make us a civilized society?
We educate our known and proven criminals (Karla Homolka or whatever name we paid for her to be known as) and then are bombarded by requests for privacy and freedoms and will end up paying the costs of the hearings regarding same. Most of our youth cannot afford post secondary education. Those of us that make mistakes(?) do not start with a new name and clean slate. Take the cost of even 5 years of imprisonment and allocate the funds to victim restitution or affordable housing or education or health care or...
There are crimes and deeds that warrant losing the right to life. Whatever good Tookie Williams has accomplished (and he has made a positive mark) is forever shadowed by what brought around his change of life and the events leading up to it.
I believe that your life is what you make it - your choices, your decisions. With the exception of mental illness/incompetence, when you choose to commit a heinous crime, you choose the consequences, and sometimes the adage "an eye for an eye" is truly justice.
While killing someone does not reverse the effects of their actions, if proof as stated at the beginning of this diatribe exists, without interference and conjecture, then life should be forfeit.
Your first point is one of the great myths of propagated by the pro death penalty movement. It doesn't cost a cent more to keep a man in prison for life than it does to kill him. In that the death penalty is so severe a punishment, we must provide all means of appeal to all levels of the court, this costs a lot of cash. The natural, response is “why are we granting them so many appeals?” Well, given how tentative some of the convictions are already I'm unlikely to support even less checks and balances. So there goes the money argument, as if money should even be a criteria in dealing with human lives.
"There are crimes and deeds that warrant losing the right to life."
According to who? Presumably you mean murder, the taking of a life. So you think that the willful taking of a life necessitates the willful taking of a life? Why is it ok when we do it? Because we're not angry? Because we're just doing the job? So it's not about vengeance? Explain to me how it is different.
I can't believe in 2005 we are still talking about 'eye for an eye'. That's about a rhetorical and cliché an argument as 'Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve'. Oh and by the way, if you're going to site religious passage you'd be best advised to be a bit better informed and not just mindlessly spout rhetoric. The eye for an eye passage is one the most commonly misunderstood and abused 5 words in the bible.
http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/04/0407.html
In response to the misused context I borrow words from Ghandi "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind". Oh yeah and as long as we're waxing bible, you seemed to have just skipped over the whole section in the new testament about 'turn the other cheek'. If you are a religious person you'll have to take words of Jesus himself versus say Deuteronomy or Leviticus.
The point is, as you've stated, we can't ever be sure. No matter what. The likelihood of perfect certainly is so implausible that we should not kill because as we seem to agree, this is wrong.
I rather enjoy debating against the death penalty cause in my assessment, there’s not a single defendable point except to say “we as a society are ANGRY when someone commits crime and we basing our legislation on emotion and a primitive need for retaliation”. Anything else is just sugar-coating what you don’t want to admit to yourself.
First of all, I'm delighted that Google ads has now added a link to Pro-american websites, discussing patriotism etc..
Second, the bible does indeed make a distinction between killing and murder. There's no such commandment as "Thou shalt not kill." Look again. It reads thou shalt not do murder. There's a heck of a difference. Murder is the killing of an innocent person. Presumably the death penalty doesn't apply to those who are innocent.
However...
How can we be sure. I have no problem with God or Bono or whatever he's calling himself these days deciding who lives and dies. It's when People make this decision that I get my pantyhose in a knot. The bible says that suicide is a sin. This is because it's supposed to be God alone who decides when someone is supposed to die.
Well then, leave it to God. In the meantime, let the bastards rot in prison where they belong. And in the event we're wrong about someone's guilt, we'll all be able to live with that.
yer old pal
mink
Post a Comment
<< Home