A little more on Tookie Williams

I’m am (again) reminded of another case. The only injustice suffered by Mumia, who deserved to die and was not even defended by his own brother, a witness, was the fact that poetry he wrote in high school was read aloud at his sentencing hearing. You would think that a guy who shot a cop through the face as he lay on the ground would be a shoe-in for the death penalty, but apparently someone in the prosecutor’s office thought that whitey could do with a good scare.

Arnold is simply reaching to find a pretext for a decision that’s been made for him, so he can appear to be deliberating.
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You should read the whole statement. Schwarzenegger didn’t believe that Mr. Williams had shown repentance because he refused to even admit that he had murdered anyone. Furthermore, he continued protecting the Crips even after incarceration. That didn’t look like repentance or contrition. That makes perfect sense to me.

Furthermore, he continued protecting the Crips even after incarceration.

Which, considering the guy was in jail, is just plain weird.

Learn something about prison life, then try again.
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Frankly, I can’t even understand your point. If we agree (and we may not) that the dedication of George Jackson wasn’t the ‘tipping point’ (i.e. that dedication did not, in fact, cost Tookie his life), then what is controversial about not liking a dedication to a murderer who apparently was still prone to violence when he was killed?

“A book dedication hardly amounts to an endorsement of all of a person’s attitudes and actions anyway.”

No, but certainly it means something, doesn’t it? Tookie could have dedicated his book to Gandhi-instead he dedicated it to George Jackson, a murderer who died while (apparently) engaging in a riot that killed three prison guards. Is this really a non-controversial, even completely meaningless, choice? And if its has any meaning, what is remarkable about noticing that meaning?

Steve

Dylan rushed out a single eulogising Jackson.

“A book dedication hardly amounts to an endorsement of all of a person’s attitudes and actions anyway. What can Schwarzenegger have been thinking in including this in his statement?”

It shows that he was still willing to publically lionize a murderer.

It is a rather small point but still important. You should have little trouble understanding this since apparently you want to focus on a very small part of an easily understood document explaining Schwarzenegger’s position on the proposed clemency of Mr. Williams. Yes a dedication to a murderer says something about the person making the dedication. Not a hugely decisive something. It should be judged in the context of other things that lend hints into the requesting person’s repentance. And it was.

Yes mentioning that dedication in a statement about the denial of clemency says something about the person making the decision. But in the context of the denial in general it doesn’t say very much. Certainly not enough to be shocked under normal circumstances. The thrust of Schwarzenegger’s argument was that Mr. Williams offered no contrition and thus did not seem to be repentant. That combined with many other things (like refusing to divulge what he knew about the Crip’s inner workings) including a small thing like dedicating a book to a murderer who tried to escape from prison to reinforce the idea that Mr. Williams wasn’t deserving of clemency.

If your point is that mentioning the dedication invalidates the rest of the clemency argument, you are being silly.

If your point is that small bits of evidence can’t combine to give clues to someone’s current character you are being unusually fastidious.

Your use of the phrase “may have cost him his life” invests a shocking amount of weight on the word “may”. It almost certainly didn’t cost Mr. Williams his life. It was additional evidence used to show that Mr. Williams wasn’t repentant. On the scale of such evidence it was certainly less weighty than the fact that he never admitted guilt and never revealed his knowledge about the inner workings of the murderous gang he helped create.

Perhaps you were making a point about civilized you are by professing shock at such things. But whatever your point, you seem to be focusing on trivialities far more than Schwarzenegger did.

It seems to me that the reasons given by Schwarzenegger give a little ground for hope in other cases. He didn’t say that repentance (the personal factor in restorative justice) and restitution (the operational factor) are irrelevant; he could have said that Stanley Williams’ crimes are such that retribution must be exacted regardless. By contesting the adequacy of the prisoner’s efforts to make amends, he conceded the point that they do count. No doubt the decision is pure politics, but public opinion in Califormia at least is moving slowly towards a truer sense of fairness.

Chris tries to understand :

What can Schwarzenegger have been thinking in including this in his statement?

And all he gets is :

It shows that he was still willing to publically lionize a murderer.

See? Many people are willing to say, maybe even think this makes sense. That’s the point.

I really don’t think Schwarzy sincerely took it in account. It’s just a little bit of outrage/justification fodder for the comfort of the pro-death penalty on this case. That’s his comfort too, after all.

Hey, if you don’t take your arguments seriously I guess I won’t either.

Stan Williams was a militant racist who practiced what he preached. He deliberately murdered four people, expressly for being white or Asian.

George Jackson was also a militant racist; a Black Panther and founder of the revolutionary Marxist organization, the Black Guerilla Family. He killed a prison guard in what he regarded as a race reprisal, and incited his 17-year-old brother to a rescue attempt that culminated in a judge’s grisly death.

Stan Williams claimed to repent his crimes, and pled for clemency on the grounds of his putative change of heart. But he dedicated a book to George Jackson. This is a strong indication that, up to that time anyway, he never had a change of heart.

What seems to upset you, is that Williams may have been executed for something he said. But you would grant him clemency for some other thing(s) he said. Suppose we throw all he ever said in the balance; the things he DID still weigh heavily on one side.

I agree with the other commenters that Chris Bertram is objecting to something inconsequential, but I wonder if there wouldn’t be something non-trivial in objecting to this (from no. 16):

“Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption.”’

If a man is innocent (perhaps a low-probability event here), there’s nothing to be redeemed for, so this logic only makes sense if the man’s guilty. But how do we be sure of what’s happening in the heart of a guilty man?

This is no doubt a somewhat hoary/obvious(/stupid?) point, but isn’t there the worry that the truly sociopathic will be better (and perhaps more motivated) at pushing the buttons that Schwarzenegger is suggesting are there to be pushed here? Has it been established that the truly repentant are more likely to display repentance – especially if there’s something in it for them?

Williams (who planned, but did not complete a violent prison escape, that would have involved the murder of a prison guard) later dedicated a book to a person who in fact did murder a prison guard. That very same book was used by his supporters as the primary piece of evidence of his supposed reformation and renunciation of violence.

Given those facts, it does not seem unreasonable that the dedication was probative — not decisive, but probative — evidence that Williams’ renunciation of violence was insincere or incomplete, which was the Governor’s stated reason for refusing clemency. One can (and I do)take issue with the Governor’s approach to clemency, or the death penalty in general, but partial reliance on the dedication as part of a “totality of the circumstances” evidence of renunciation of violence was probably not unreasonable, at least in my view.

>Furthermore, he continued protecting the Crips even after incarceration.

>Which, considering the guy was in jail, is just plain weird.

>Learn something about prison life, then try again.

Well, I guess it’s a shame that it was inconvenient for Mr. Williams to help the police against the band of thugs and killers that he helped found. Hopefully he didn’t mind that it was inconvenient for Arnold to grant clemency.
But really, if he was primarily motivated to save his precious skin- i.e., by not testifying against other fellow Crips- why should Arnold or anyone else believe that he wasn’t just putting on a nice show to save his skin from the death chamber?

mj memphis:

It’s not like I care that he’s dead, I can just understand why he’d stick by the people who’re the only thing keeping him alive in jail.

So now you’ve arrived at: ‘because he didn’t do the thing that would’ve gotten him killed, he deserves no clemency.’ Sarcasm and false analogies won’t disguise the fact that that’s pretty piss-poor reasoning, and certainly not the basis of the decision.

Which, in case you’ve lost track, was the point.
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gmt,

Nope, I understand your point that cooperating against his gang would have been hazardous to his health. Just as it is for, say, mafiosi types in jail.

But that goes back to the alleged “redemption”. If he wasn’t willing to go out of his way, to take on personal risk, to atone for his crimes, then why on earth should he have been considered any more deserving of clemency than any other murderer? Just because he’s sorry? Oh, wait, he wasn’t willing to say that, either. Color me unimpressed.

mj, he was credited with negotiating a peace treaty of some effectiveness. He admitted to other crimes. The case against him depended on testimony by criminals rewarded for their testimony. The prosecution used preempts to keep blacks off the jury and was cited for racist statements. His probability of innocence wasn’t high, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with the above as a death penalty supporter.

If a dedication is material evidence in deciding whether to put a human being to death (and the substance of the book isn’t, for some reason), it surely behooved the state to get a reaction on that important point from the executee.

rilkefan,

Perhaps you have seen some numbers showing the effectiveness of his treaty efforts. I have heard they were of negligible effect, but will confess to not having seen the numbers. And really, has anyone said that the dedication to the book was anything other than a piece of supporting evidence, against a backdrop of much more damning evidence?

Oddly enough I find myself in agreement with the right-wingers here.

To flip things around, the case for clemency never struck me as logically stronger than “The death penalty is wrong” (and this is fine, that is my position), but I’ve heard plenty of things about Nobel nominations, children’s books, and so on. What on earth would someone’s writing ability have to do with whether or not he should be executed? Bizarre.

“he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems,” the governor said.

So, whens the Governor applying to have California admitted to the United Kingdom, as that unpleasantness in 1776 was clearly a Bad Thing.

As a reader of Crooked Timber, I like to think that this is one of the few places where an elevated discussion of ideas occurs, but I’m disappointed that this discussion has devolved as much as it has. You might believe, Chris, that some are missing your point, but I don’t see that as a reason for harshness, for not engaging others’ arguments point-by-point, or by using the facile excuse that “I’m a blogger.” If the point (as Rilkefan puts it, the degree of evidentiary merit the dedication has) is being missed, there should be a way to clarify it without attacking the supposed intellectual shortcomings of others. In addition, the points that others are making should be considered thoughtfully: that the evidentiary merit of the dedication cannot be divorced from its setting or that the dedication itself is incriminating. I haven’t seen that fully addressed.

Rilkefan begins a comment by stating: “If a dedication is material evidence in deciding whether to put a human being to death”; yes, this conditional statement is the issue. The dedication wasn’t material evidence in deciding to put a man to death; it was evidence (whether shaky or not) of an already-condemned man’s behavioral attitudes. From the state’s perspective, Williams’ dedication to Jackson looks like an implicit endorsement of behavior that Williams himself had planned to enact while in prison. Now, one might say that the state simply needed expedient reasons for denying clemency; one might also argue that a book dedication is hardly a measure of a man’s character or that it means nothing, but the only effective way to address this issue is to show exactly how the dedication is not an endorsement of behavior. I don’t think Chris’ post does this (nor do his responses), and I suspect that’s what’s needed here, and also why some readers are responding the way they are.

Rilkefan, I do understand what animated Chris’ response, as well as why he’s frustrated, but I just don’t think that the way he went about expressing those responses is either fruitful or becoming. I felt that Steve and Sebastian made some interesting points, and I had hoped that he would have responded to those points fully and thoughtfully.

I thought the post you linked to was funny (I read the whole thing, in addition to no. 1), and also makes a good point, as you say, about the unimpotance of a dedication. But this gets me back to why I think a healthy, more substantive discussion on all sides would be helpful here — because I think the issue of the dedication is open to question. Mjmemphis raised an interesting point about how we might respond if the dedication was to someone else, and I don’t think that point should be put aside. If we think outside the Williams case for a moment, imagine if someone dedicated a book to Adolf Eichmann. Now, I know that’s an extreme example, and I do not mean to draw parallels at all between Eichmann and Jackson; that’s not what I’m doing. I’m just trying to show how maybe, just maybe, a dedication in and of itself isn’t unimportant in all cases; that maybe, just maybe, a dedication can carry a certain amount of weight. I suspect if I saw a book dedicated to Eichmann, I’d cringe and then question the attitude of the person who wrote the book. Of course, whether or not a dedication of that magnitude should be used to determine clemency for a death-row inmate is another matter, but attitudes are things that are considered when it comes to clemency, parole, or other types of reprieves.

By the way, I’m not suggesting at all that the fearless Governator was justified in using the dedication as an example — I’m just saying there are other ways of looking at this and trying to raise certain questions to which I don’t necessarily have answers. (And, also, ultimately I think something like a dedication should matter much less in light of other more incriminating arguments.)

Shorter different chris: Who could possibly think what Schwartzy wrote had a single solitary thing to do with his decision?

He’s a politician, guys.

A bit off point (by which I mean completely off point) but one of the stranger angles to this saga is that Tookie probably lived far longer on death row than he ever would have had he not been arrested for these murders. He was a hard core Crip, and the laws of the jungle would almost certainly have caught up with him much faster than it took the laws of California to do so.

“He’s a politician, guys.”

Yeah, there’s definitely truth to that. The people who voted him into office (many of whom later voted against his resolutions) most likely support the death penalty, and he’s going to need their support in the not-too-distant future.

“And obviously the surviving relatives of his victims are different people: Tookie saw to that the day he destroyed their lives.”

An excellent point, and one that has not been made often enough. It’s really too bad that the murdered victims are easily forgotten in all of this. As I suggested in an earlier comment, the pedantic discussions of Mr. Williams’ execution make their absense all the more glaring.

Peter, thank you. What is more shocking, a plea for clemency based on authoring a book, or a response to such a plea?

goatchowder, if he’s innocent, then what the flying f*** does his “redemption” have to do with anything?

I generally see very little to agree with the right-wingers here, but in this case they’re right.

“if he’s innocent, then what the flying f*** does his “redemption” have to do with anything?”

We’re well past Kafka here. If you’re in prison, you must be guilty, therefore if you claim you are innocent you aren’t contrite and should be punished _more_, and if you’re a model prisoner after coming from a bad background and work effectively to help those likely to end up in prison, that’s just you’re being “innocent” so it doesn’t count.

Oh wow it must be maddening to live in such an insane world, rilkefan. But riddle me this: is Tookie innocent or not?

If Tookie is innocent, then people shouldn’t waste their time telling me that he wrote some books, because that kind of pales next to the gross injustice of an innocent man being put to death by the state. If Tookie is innocent, then he could be an illiterate insufferable thug for all I care, he shouldn’t be in jail much less put to death.

If Tookie is not innocent of murdering four human beings, then I’m glad he was a model prisoner and did some good things in prison before dying, but once again I don’t care that he wrote some books. Distinguishing between death-row cases shouldn’t be a matter of treating the literary types more leniently.

End of story. There’s a huge flaw in the redemption narrative, which is that he went to his death denying the murders. That doesn’t make him guilty, but it makes redemption completely irrelevant. Either he killed those people or he didn’t.

Gar Lipow,

So you are pissed that he is being executed for the wrong set of atrocities?

And you think writing anti gang books redeem this other set of atrocities?

But just vague stuff like founding the crips?

Nothing specific like rape or a different murder or robbery or a drug deal that that qualifies as a major felony? Right?

Because he has repented for a bunch of that stuff. Right? Specifically apologized to his victims etc. Right?

Please make me eat my hat, instead of engaging in some school boy debating antics.

“If Tookie is innocent, then people shouldn’t waste their time telling me that he wrote some books, because that kind of pales next to the gross injustice of an innocent man being put to death by the state.”

Allow me to doubt your interest in his guilt, given your failure to have read the clemency petition or any of the simple summaries floating around the liberal blogosphere, not to mention this very thread.

“Oh wow it must be maddening to live in such an insane world, rilkefan.”

Anyone not aware of the awful state of the world relative to reasonable ideals is dumb as a stump – sorry to be the one to enlighten you. However, as a nihilist, I’m able to take the insanity in stride most of the time.

Re the model prisoner question, check out the timeline.

Re Christianity and capital punishment, anyone who thinks Jesus would have injected Williams with poison, please speak up now so St. Pete can have a good laugh when the time comes.

Justice Blackmun wound up writing, “I shall no more tinker with the machinery of death”. He did think that it was, in theory, appropriate to kill people for their crimes, but despaired that, in practice, we could ever do it justly.

The problem isn’t just the occasional execution of innocents, something that most of us who eat meat and wear leather implicitly conscience, at one level or another, although preferably not consciously. (FWIW, I’m in that number.)

There is also the problem that entire groups of perpetrators reliably escape this ultimate sanction. The problem isn’t only that blacks are executed; it’s also a problem that whites aren’t executed. It’s unfair that the poor die; it’s also unfair that the rich don’t.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that advocates of capital punishment are rarely heard to complain that whites or the wealthy are so seldom executed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t outrageous.

This discussion has passed the point of being interesting, if it ever got there.

Its a shame that you feel that way: I think a lot of serious responses to your original post have been offered. If this is where you were going to end things off, then what was the point of getting going in the first place?

The reason this discussion is idiotic is because some people apparently think that fascist Arnold Schwarzenegger was digging for reasons to come up with justifying the execution, and he dug up some books Williams happeneded to write, found a dedication to someone he didn’t like, and thought that was a good thing to throw in there.

Look around the internet, or read some op-eds, and you’ll find plenty of people who think that the Nobel nominations and letters from children are compelling reasons to overturn a death sentence. To disgregard this context, and to pretend that the dedication point is a direct rebuttal to charges of inconclusive evidence and failed justice — well, if you live in a Kafkaesque world it is partly of your own making.

The case against the death penalty does not depend on Tookie reforming (when he denies committing the murders), Tookie writing books, Schwarzanegger citing a dedication, supporters of the death penalty being fascists, or rilkefan having doubts about how much I care about Tookie’s innocence. These points are logically irrelevant, and they don’t really seem to work from a poltical view either. An argument against the death penalty that dances around the fact that Tookie is probably guilty strikes me as politically harmful, not helpful.

I’m suspicious of the language of “redemption” here. It’s now essentially a term in Christian theology, and its original secular meaning of payment to free a slave or captive (Cervantes was redeemed in this sense from the Algerian galleys) is obsolete. It implies a final judgement of a person’s worth we – including Schwarzenegger – should be reluctant to make. (In Christian theology, redemption cannot be earned, and is only rarely known).

I suggest that in the context of restorative justice we should limit ourselves to three secular meanings:

– restitution, which can be observed in a straightforward way, either to the victims or their proxies;

– repentance, where the negative can sometimes be proved (“he had it coming and given the chance I’d do it again”) but the positive is a difficult matter of judgement;
– forgiveness by victims or their proxies, which is more or less impossible to fake, though if it had more weight in the penal system one would need to guard against coercion by associates. Of course, forgiveness has to be the free choice of the victims taking account of their view of the perpetrator’s repentance and/or restitution; non-forgiveness is the other side of the coin.

Most of those who argue (as in in this thread) for consideration of victims assume that all they want is retribution. I do not believe this is true as a matter of fact. Experiments in restorative justice that include opportunities for restitution and forgiveness have beeen carried out, I believe with success, in more civilised countries than the USA. Any hard data anyone?

For a current experiment in restorative justice google “Umuvumu Tree Project in Rwanda” or “Rwanda Ministry of Reconciliation”

Imagine having over a 100,000 murderers (genocide offenders) in your prisons awaiting trial.

“No one thinks the dedication was a tipping point [sic]”

Maybe people think it was the straw on the camel’s back, or the slip twixt cup and lip, or the last brick in the wall, or the wafer-thin mint down Mr. Creosote’s gullet.

Consider this hypothetical Arnold argument: “Tookie’s a bad bad man, and what sort of name is ‘Tookie’ anyway?” CT response: Arnold is being shockingly childish in a solemn moment. barbar‘s riposte: “‘Tookie’ wasn’t a tipping point”.

2 is nonsense.

3 ditto, plus the fry-Tookie crowd here apparently can’t be bothered to look into the clemency case.

Anyway, the man is dead. Oh well. Too bad about the quality of discourse at CT if this thread is an example.