The Liberal Patriot

On Tookie and Execution

J.G. Schwam - December 14, 2005

If you spent your high school and college years in Los Angles in the seventies and eighties you not could escape the rise, influence and violence of the gang wars between the Crips and Bloods. If you where young enough to pay any attention at all to the omnipresent graffiti tags on overpasses, signs and buildings you knew who Tookie was. If you were black and a Blood, or Mexican and part Los Sobrinos De Atzlan or part of no gang at all you were better off if you didn’t. Tookie Williams was one powerful and scary dude. Mentioning his name in the wrong place or to the wrong guy could get a blade clicked open or a gun drawn on you. The gang wars and the struggle for power, turf and drug dealing territory between gangs in those days was no joke. Lots of guys died or got cut up trying to take their piece or just for being in the wrong place and the wrong time.

Tookie was a ruthless scary guy and just about every kid, white, black or Mexican in LA in the seventies and eighties knew it. But many years latter and hundreds of ended or wasted lives, and years in prison gave pause to one of the guys that started it all. When you are trying to survive on the streets, hold on to your corner or just trying to stay alive in bad times you don’t have time to think about carving up or taking someone out, just to live until tomorrow.

Tookie had the time to think. He had time look out from behind his bars, watch the news from LA and hear and read about his friends dying to keep his legacy of violence, anger and hatred alive. He had time to feel the shame his angry, youthful exuberance created. As many men who made mistakes in their youth age they look back on their wasted youth and wish they could change them. Unlike most of these men Tookie had the chance to do it.

And by most measures he did. Since he renounced his violent legacy and began imploring others to do the same, membership in the Crips began to decline. The Crips listened to Tookie, they looked up to him. He was their leader and mentor. However wrong a mentor he may have been, in the poverty and desperation of South Central, Inglewood and Compton the power and respect he commanded was something, amid little else to aspire to. So they listened to him. If the life he had lived was wrong, then theirs had to be too.

As time passed, time and appeal chances ran out for Tookie. But some noticed what he was trying to do. It was something profound. Something no other in position like his had ever tried to do. There were and still are hundreds if not thousands of Crips and Bloods in California’s prisons, most still angry a believing they were slighted by life and wronged by justice. They, despite their culpability for their actions in most cases had no reason to grow beyond their despair and anger. At least until Tookie explained his to them and told them that they could learn to values themselves and gave them hope toward their finding a purpose in life; a purpose beyond pain, anger and shame hidden behind the tough remorseless exterior necessary to survive a life of poverty and desperation on the mean streets or inside the mean walls of a maximum security prison.

It is almost amazing that a cartoon character that made a career of glorifying violence on the silver screen for profit like Arnold Schwarznegger could turn blind to what Tookie tried to achieve as he began to grow older and reflect on reversing his legacy. A legacy he was ashamed of. I doubt we will ever see Bernard Ebbers convicted former CEO of Wordlcom, Dennis Koslowski former CEO of Tycho pending trial or Ken Lay CEO former of Enron also pending trial try to reverse their legacy of lives ruined in a different way , by different crimes; but crimes none the less and no less damaging, widespread and pervasive in different ways. I doubt they will ever renounce the arrogance and lust for power and privilege that drove both them and Tookie to take the paths they did. But Tookie did and turned a measurable portion of the damage around. At least he tried in earnest. I doubt Ken Lay will ever try to do the same.

In our own anger and blindness as nation we failed to see what kind of conviction and drive to right ones wrongs remorse and effort can achieve. It is arrogant for us to turn a blind eye in a basal lust for vengeance to what four Nobel Peace Prize committees and the Pulitzer Prize board saw. It is a shame that the simple partisan mind of Schwarznegger could not say perhaps Tookie was not remorseful for crimes we now may never know if he actually committed. It is hard to believe that Tookie who tried so hard to be the person he never was as a free man would not have been openly apologetic and remorseful if he had committed the crimes for which was condemned to die.

Nearly every Holy Scripture, be it the Bible, Koran or another writes about, giving the benefit of the doubt and showing mercy when there is even a small reason to do so. It is better to err on the side of life than death.

The death penalty is wrong for many reasons but perhaps the most compelling is the execution of one innocent person cannot justify the execution one hundred guilty ones. Even if you support the death penalty, wrongly taking one life should be reason enough to simply end the practice.

We as a supposed just and righteous nation have blood on our hands for the legitimized killing of innocents. Tookie may or may have been one of them. We may never know. But we do know that we have executed innocent men. Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project has freed many proven to be wrongly condemned to die. A countless number more were not so lucky. Juries, judges and lawyers are no more infallible than you, I or any other mortal.

Should we not err on the side of life instead of death, even if that life is spent in prison for its duration?

It is time that we as a nation wash the blood of future innocents from our hands and stop executions. At least since we cannot wash away the blood of the dead innocents of the past, we can start now and end the shame of wrongly justifying the institutionalized taking of a life, perhaps in vain.

Would not life behind bars with no possibility of parole whatsoever be suffering enough for you? Because we are not infallible, because there is never truly no shadow of doubt it is time to end the death penalty.

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