As I write, news is coming out that Stanley Tookie Williams has just been executed at San Quentin prison California. A founding member of a notorious LA street gang, he has been on Death Row for 24 years, but has since become a reformed character, writing books for children urging them away from gang culture and brokering peace deals between warring gangs. As a model for rehabilitation he has nonetheless been a figure of debate, not least for the fact he has always denied committing the murders for which he was convicted. Today it fell to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and offer Tookie a life rather than death sentence, but he chose to reprise his role as Terminator, and now Tookie Williams is dead, and redemption is rendered meaningless.
Out of the death-penalty states, California is not exactly major-league. Tookie was only the twelfth to receive capital punishment here – compare that with the 355 or so that Texas has killed (source: BBC). The US recently passed its 1000th execution mark – a thousand, that is, since the death penalty was reintroduced back in the seventies (Gary Gilmore was the first, him from that song by the Adverts). President Bush terminated many during his reign as Texas Governor, but of course not nearly as many as he has condemned to death since the invasion of Iraq. This weekend he finally addressed the mind-boggling number of Iraqi citizens who have perished since he ordered the troops in – about thirty thousand. Their ghosts would fill White Hart Lane (and probably make more noise, too). If he has few qualms about those sorts of figures, then sparing the lives of convicted killers is unlikely to keep him up at night. But what gives the State the right to commit what is effectively murder with an official name?
What’s more, it seems to be the Christian right-wing that is the strongest supporter of capital punishment, quoting ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. Surely as Christians they should be focusing more on the New Testament than the Old, on forgiveness rather than vengeance? Murder never solves murder, even for the families of the victims. Sure, the temptation to give in to base hatred is enormous when you have lost loved ones, but as a society aren’t we striving to rise above hate? Besides, if a man were to go out and kill in order to exact revenge, the State would class him as a murderer. Why then is the State not seen as a murderer when it carries out executions?
Because, as the Iraq conflict has shown, the State has no problem with being a murderer, none at all, and therein lies the problem. Why should we be surprised if there are people who want to kill us for the crimes of our State? We call them madmen, but our State is the one encouraging that kind of thinking. As one wise fellow standing outside San Quentin tonight lamented, “‘an eye for an eye…’ makes everyone blind and everyone toothless.” Murder does not appease Hate, it foments it.
petescully 