Stanley "Tookie" Willliams

(of course, I'm against the death penalty and think everyone on death row should just have their sentences commuted)

...or some bullshit like that.

This Tookster case? I don't know. If the evidence stinks, then no. If it's 100% sure he did kill those people, then what he did after that doesn't matter, the law of the country/state where he killed is the law that should decide what happens. Whether that law is right or wrong doesn't matter (if you don't want to die, then don't smuggle drugs into Thailand or kill anyone in states where the death penalty is used).

But not so much I'd ever vote for him.

But not so much I'd ever vote for him.

OTM and OTM.

Selling drugs = mass murder?

WTF?!?

Neither did StanM.

I don't follow

It's just... what's the alternative? If you kill someone, should you be fed and given shelter for the rest of your life when other people have to work for those things?

Yes, I know, those other people are "free" - but some non-killers are starving or are homeless while murderers are kept alive!?

There is just no simple yes/no, I believe, so every discussion about this can only end in tears. :-)

i flip-flop on the death penalty thing all the time.

definitely the only good thing that old fucker did. even without the licenses-for-bribes scandal and various other ryan administration corruption, i doubt that the death row moratorium woulda helped him get re-elected. definitely a bold move, esp. by a republican.

Of course, there's no way to prove that they will "reflect upon their crimes."

You are not alone.

has more to do with punishment, etc.

The given reason now is closure for the family... but I imagine alot of the family members have in reality moved on a long time ago. When you start listing the nations that still do this (china, iran, etc.), we really don't stand in very good company. Even Mexico doesn't have the death penalty.

Had the governor so desired, he could have said that he was in no position to gainsay the verdict of a jury but despite the lack of avowed remorse, the convict has consistently pleaded his innocence and has shown a great capacity not only for personal reformation but for contributing to the awareness of the bleak future that awaits gan members in prison and out.

It is hard to address the effect of such efforts in concrete terms, but the continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one to question the efficacy of Williams' message.

Which would just be a bit of totally irrational sophistry if not for the fact that it's also just totally fucking COLD! I mean, damn, dudes.

The whole "you can't be redeemed if you're innocent" issue is actually much more effective here, though it kind of just talking across opposite things: the statement still manages to include in its main text the fact that Williams was a founder of the Crips, which is precisely the guilt that he's claiming to have redeemed himself from. (It's not specifically the guilt he's being executed for, is the problem.)

ep, i'm with nabisco. i don't really have a position on the death penalty, but "I didn't do it, but I've reformed" really isn't a compelling argument. Unfortunate that they felt the need to bolster that argument by shooting down everything else, but whatever...

The whole "relatives can't move on" argument is bogus. Spend money on victim counselling then, not executions.

After 20 something years is the weird thing about it, to me. That you'd still feel so vengeful 20 years later. She was on television talking about how Williams wrote her a letter apologizing how gang violence took her son away but didn't apologize for being the murderer (which, of course, is because Williams maintains he didn't kill these people), and therefore he deserves to die and she doesn't care what "so-called" good he does! Psychotic.

Gee, guys, thanks for clarifying that.

In Anglo-Saxon law, people had various values placed upon their lives called vergeld, which a murderer owed to the family of the victim. This lives on in a way through the civil penalties of wrongful death. Of course families being what they are and humans being who they are there were often long standing feuds between families and clans which princes and kings sought to reduce by instituting the idea of murder being not only a crime upon the victim and the victim's family but upon the 'King's peace', and royal exhortation for the kingdom's subjects to be peaceable so that any violence now concerned the king too. Similarly, the crime of murder today, is not only a crime against the victim/s but against the people of the State of California. It's not surprising that the close relative of a murder victim should want to see the perpetrator dead or worse. I understand that. However, I think it's counterproductive to indulge in this return to barbarism. From what I've read as well, the 'closure' afforded to the families of victims is fleeting if non-existent. No matter how you're loved ones die, you're likely to grieve for them 'til the end.

So sad tonight.

That's a perfectly normal emotional reaction to the violation of oneself and loved ones.

If we, as right-wingers and 'victims rights' (not to be confused with protecting the rights of actual victims, rather than their families), want so desperately to take the feelings of family into account, why not do away with the courts completely and try out vigilanteism?

Also, sorry to dash everyone's hopes, but there will be no riots in LA tonight. There's no real consensus on his guilt in the potentially, er, sympathetic community.

http://www.pagetutor.com/jokebreak/images/texas_firing_squad.gif

Kinda screwy, but then Williams is kinda playing a screwy rhetorical game, too -- he's claiming to have been redeemed for stuff that's theoretically not related to his execution! I mean, isn't he saying he's been redeemed from a gang life that didn't include killing these people, but included lots of other unpleasant stuff? Which makes it super-easy for the governor to say, you know, "well and good, but what you're being executed for is killing these people.

You're totally right about the strangeness of his not admitting culpability for these crimes, but there's a good explanation for that: he had to maintain innocence in order to go through the whole appeals process, didn't he? And then exhausting that and suddenly making confessions and becoming remorseful in your clemency plea ... that would smack of serious opportunism. Which is really what the governor's denial seems to revolve around. The idea is that he had two routes with regard to this specific crime: either try to get off based on culpability and remorse and redemption, or try to get off by proving he didn't do it. And he failed at establishing the latter.

That said, a wise governor might rise above those legalistic burdens and just figure that having a deeply "credible" anti-gang advocate would be more to the good of the state than having executed him -- which, so far as I understand governors' clemency powers, tends to be totally within their power to decide.

I'd need to read the whole statement, but that quote makes no sense to me. At the appeals stage, do you need "clear and convincing" evidence of your innocence, as opposed to creating a reasonable doubt about the safety of your conviction?

Innocence or guilt aside though, fuck a death penalty. And like I said a month back, a system that allows Schwarzenegger or anybody else with an eye on their political popularity to have the final say on whether somebody lives or dies is a seriously flawed system.

Is that better?

Sorry for being an idiot, but what exactly does "to stay" mean in this context?

a stay of execution is an immediate hold on the mandate for further review.

xposts

that might be his stepmother, actually. she was just on larry king. apparently his sisters have campaigned for clemency and claim that the stepmother has ignored the rest of the family for the past 20 yrs and are quite angry that she has stepped in with calls for execution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the whole world would soon be blind and toothless."

http://www.discod.com/arnold/arnoldvsdisco.mov

Williams has written books that instruct readers to avoid the gang lifestyle and to stay out of prison.... Since 1995 he has "tried to preach a message of gang avoidance and peacemaking.... "It is hard to assess the effect of such efforts in concrete terms, but the continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one to question the efficacy of Williams' message";

In November 2005, the Fontana, California Police Department advised print and television media that a warrant had been issued for registered sex offender Lafayette Jones. Jones, wanted for allegedly molesting an ex-girlfriend's 13-year-old daughter at gunpoint, was identified by the police department as the son of Stanley Tookie Williams. [30] [31] Williams' official Reply Petition for Executive Clemency submitted on November 21, 2005, by Peter Fleming, Jr., stated that this was a lie purported by the police department, including an attached declaration from Lafayette Jones' mother, which declared under penalty of perjury that Lafayette was not Stanley Tookie Williams' son.

Anti-death penalty arguments are not assisted by

1) Racist comments like the one above

2) Bizarre adulation of unrepentant mulitple murderers

3) Comments like: i hope his ghost haunts the shit out of that nazi fucker Not even sure what catagory of uselessness such a comment falls in.

4) Moronic posturing that after decades in the courts, multiple governors, it's the present governor's fault this gangster was euthanized. Why don't all 50 governors pardon everyone on death row like the guy in Illinois? This is really Gray Davis's fault. He did nothing.

5) There's much to be said against the death penalty. It needs to be heard. It needs to be said by people other than Hollywood crackpots and publicity whores like Jesse Jackson. And it applies to everyone on death row, not just to special cases like Williams, a vile, guilty murderer.

Is that the term officially sanctioned by the Nazi Party?

Ok, this one doesn't hold up.

-- andy -- (and...), December 12th, 2005 6:26 PM. (later)

Replace "firing squads" with "lynchings," and "cages" with "tent compounds," and find out what you get.

(If Wisconsin or Massachussetts weren't available...)

why show both of these guys all buffed out? is there a competition?
m.

Is that better?

Dude, the APOSTROPHES

I was replying to the "death penalty = vote-winner" comment and added the race issue because, well, this case already had some of that (all African American jurors being removed from the jury).

So, I thought, if this is a racially influenced discussion and vote-winning is involved, then this "just because the Californian population is mostly..." was not too far fetched a question.

But whatever. Someone anonymous yells racist at me and I go into defensive mode. Man, I'm such a n00b.

"An eye for an eye" was an old testament commandment that actually LIMITED the personal retribution allowed by law to equal whatever the harm was.. prior to "eye for an eye", if somebody cut off your hand, well, you might go over to their house and kill them and the government didn't really bother you about it. It was a humane law for the time.

Jesus mentioned "an eye for an eye" in the sermon on the mount, when he reeled off every touchstone moral law of the old testament and offered his new interpretation (aka "the beatitudes"). Ever the vote-winner, he was careful to say that he came NOT to contradict the old laws, but to breathe new life into them. the fact that this quote even survives in the texts we read now -- whether it was said by jesus himself or added later by his followers -- attests to how potentially inflammatory his teachings were. He said christians had an even greater responsibility than limiting their vengeance to equal the offense done to them. Christians had to go farther -- to limit their vengeance to even LESS than the original offense. He hyberbolized this responsibility to its limit point -- i.e. if someone smacks you, turn your other cheek to them so they may smack that one as well.

to my mind, the seeds of revolution are in this way of thinking -- christians will not use the letter of the law as their guide, but will adhere to their own moral code.

i'm not up on this entirely, but it's said that St. Paul interpreted Jesus' admonition as a purely personal one and held that governments still had the moral authority to punish pretty much how they saw fit. i personally find this kind of thinking totally bankrupt, but i don't doubt St. Paul is what the modern Christians who support the death penalty base their support on. it's hard to see on what else they can base it.

Another thing that really hamstrings moral opposition to the death penalty is deciding that "vile, guilty murderer[s]" aren't worthy of that opposition, a position that makes you ... well, a supporter of the death penalty, surely?

leftist protests are really impressive aren't they.

"Williams was convicted of murdering four innocent bystanders with a sawed-off shotgun in 1979. There was nothing peaceful or compassionate about the way Albert Owens, Thsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang and Yee Chen Lin died. Owens was a white teen-age clerk at a 7-11 convenience store, shot twice in the back of the head -- execution-style -- as he lay unarmed on the floor during a hold-up. A witness testified that Williams mocked the gurgling sounds Owens made as he lay dying. "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," the witness quoted Williams.

The Yangs were Taiwanese immigrants who, along with their daughter Yee Chen Lin, were gunned down during a motel robbery two weeks after Owens died. Half of the daughter's face was blown off by the shotgun blasts, former L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Robert Martin told me in an interview this week. Williams called them "Buddhaheads," Martin recounted, and robbed them of petty cash.

(xpost: Yikes.)

At least he doesn't think we're as bad as China.

I think your interpretation is correct. Paul was more concerned about kowtowing to Rome and not getting the Christians persecuted by the government, if he could help it, so he tended to neuter a lot of Jesus more revolutionary statements, especially when they potentially conflicted with Roman policies.

Associated Press

VIENNA, Austria - Political parties in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's hometown have started a petition drive to remove his name from a sports stadium.

The dispute stems from the governor's decision this week to deny clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. The co-founder of the Crips gang was executed early Tuesday in San Quentin State Prison for four 1979 murders.

Opposition to the death penalty is strong in Austria, and the once-popular Schwarzenegger has lost much of his shine since becoming California governor for refusing to spare convicted murderers on death row.

The outcry was especially sharp this week after the clemency denial for Williams, who had written children's books warning of the dangers of gang life. Politicians from the Greens party in the southern Austrian city of Graz, Schwarzenegger's hometown, reacted by calling for his name to be removed from the "Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium."

On Thursday, the local Social Democrats said they would support that appeal, meaning there likely will be majority backing in the city council for renaming the stadium. The council, which is responsible for the stadium, is expected to take up the matter on Jan. 19.

The Union for Austria's Future wants to keep the stadium's current name, arguing that generating controversy around it could lead to financial loss by prompting sponsors to withhold funds from sporting events there.

A spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger said the office would not comment on the matter

anyway, in person protests are great precisely because you have no fucking idea what might go down. which is more interesting, at least.

He loves China too. He has a liking for murdering barbaric regimes.