ALONG THE COLOR LINE — DECEMBER 2005
Shortly after midnight, December 13, 2005, correctional officers at San Quentin Prison executed Stanley Tookie Williams. The 51 year old black man was killed by lethal injection.
In the months leading up to Williams’s execution, thousands appealed for his life – from the prominent and powerful to everyday people. The Reverend Jesse Jackson had personally visited Williams twice, and called upon California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to commute Williams’s death sentence to life in prison. “One of my fears,” Jackson explained, “is that if we disregard redemption, if we disregard his social contribution, if those who have shown evidence of redemption and change are rejected, it rushes in a wave of cynicism.”
Not even his strongest advocates and defenders claimed that the young Tookie Williams had been a decent human being. As a teenager, Williams had co-founded the notorious Crips Gang in Los Angeles. In that capacity alone, he had been directly involved in a series of violent, criminal acts that had terrorized the African-American community. In 1979, Williams had been convicted of brutally murdering four people, which led to his death sentence.
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But Tookie Williams’s sojourn was not finished yet. Inside the bowels of prison, he reclaimed his soul and life. Williams transformed himself, renouncing the criminality and gang violence of his career with the Crips. By authoring a series of children’s books and memoirs, Williams became a prominent advocate of nonviolent social change and prisoners’ rights. In 2004, actor Jamie Foxx stared in a television film, “Redemption,” based on Williams’s extraordinary life.
The state-sponsored murder of Tookie Williams once again raises the legal, philosophical and moral debates surrounding the death penalty in the U.S. Nearly thirty years ago, in 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. In less than three decades, over one thousand individuals have been put to death. In 2004, the US executed more people than any other nation, except China, Iran and Vietnam.
Social scientists and legal scholars have long documented the racial bias that is built into the application of the death penalty. Although about one-half of all murder victims in the US annually are non-Hispanic whites, over 80 percent of victims in cases that result in an execution are white. Murderers of blacks, regardless of their race, by contrast, are far less likely to receive the death penalty than those who kill whites. An African American convicted of capital murder is over four times more likely than a white person to receive the death penalty.
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Equally troubling are the gross errors and incompetence of the criminal justice system in carrying out the death penalty. As of 2005, 122 individuals who had been sentenced to die have subsequently been cleared, many through the use of new DNA-evidence. Should our government execute innocent people, when life imprisonment is surely a more effective deterrent to crime?
For these reasons, millions of Americans who once embraced the death penalty have now come to oppose it. Back in 1994, for example, a Gallup Poll found that 80 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. By 2005, according to Gallup, support had declined to 64 percent. When given the option of a death penalty vs. life without parole for convicted killers, American support for the death penalty declines to 40-50 percent. Even several Republican governors in several states have called a halt to the death penalty. Tookie Williams’s tragic and unnecessary death should challenge us to outlaw this most barbaric weapon of the prison industrial complex.
