“Tookie” Williams: the Death Penalty Debate

This past December marked more than the 1000th and 1001st victims of the death penalty, as Kenneth Lee Boyd was put to death in North Carolina and Shawn Humphries a few hours later in South Carolina.

Well-known for his establishment of the Crips, as well as his nine children’s books and countless speeches to America’s youth about violence, Stanley “Tookie” Williams was also put to death last month. Williams not only left his reputation as a gang member-turned-reformed death row inmate behind, he also left a lasting mark on thousands of individuals who are fueling the current death penalty debate.

In 1971, at the age of seventeen, Williams co-founded a street gang originally created for self-defense in South Central LA. The Crips quickly became one of the largest and most feared gangs in the United States, and by 1978 Tookie was number one on the most wanted list in LA.

By 1981, Williams was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death by lethal injection. It was on death row that Williams made his famous transformation from a violent gangster to a peace seeking bridge between politicians and today’s African-American youth.

While Williams is credited with opening the eyes of thousands of America’s youth to the consequences of gang violence and involvement, his road to reformation ended in death at the hands of politicians and others who must truly believe in the unmistakable perfection of our judicial system. The truth is, our judicial system is not perfect, and most likely never will be. There will always exist flaws in social institutions, and to compensate for those flaws, nothing within those institutions should be absolute and irreversible.

Death is an absolute and irrevocable consequence. Since 1973, over 100 death row inmates have been acquitted, while over 900 have been executed. Therefore, for every nine people executed, one is found innocent. If a company produced those same statistics for failures in production, they would quickly be put out of business.

A recent study by Columbia University Law School found that, when retried, 80% of capital trials contained errors which resulted in the defendants escaping the death penalty. Seven percent of those retried cases resulted in acquittals due to new evidence and witness testimony, or advances in DNA testing, a valuable tool only made available by the early 90s.

Many argue that the death penalty serves as a form of deterrence; a warning to society of the consequences ensuing illegal actions. However, there is no study that confirms this assumption. In fact, there is no evidence that the death penalty serves as a better deterrent than the threat of life imprisonment. Studies show that most murderers are individuals who do not expect to be caught and do not consider the consequences of their actions beforehand. Many homicides occur as a result of substance abuse, when individuals are not in a completely conscious state of mind at the time of their actions. Therefore, to argue that the death penalty serves as a more effective warning than life imprisonment to individuals who fail to even consider the consequences of their actions at the time is idealistic and illogical.

Victim’s families, among the primary proponents for William’s death, claim retribution as an argument for the death penalty. But encouraging revenge or “pay-back” in the form of murder only extends the chain of violence our society claims to be breaking.

Religiously, many use the notion of an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” as a silly and simplistic attempt at defending a practice deemed inhumane by 109 nations and 12 of our own states. We do not allow men guilty of domestic violence to be beaten as a form of punishment, much less rapists to be raped. While revenge is a basic human instinct when we or someone we love is hurt, our current laws are meant to protect the rights of all people, including murderers and other criminals.

I will not argue that violent rapists, murderers, and other criminals deserve the same rights and freedoms that I, a law-abiding citizen, receive. Nor will I argue the questionable innocence of Williams and other criminals like him who never pled guilty to the crimes of which they were charged.

I consider Williams just as guilty of his crime and deserving of punishment as Timothy McVeigh or any other violent criminal because I have some degree of faith in our judicial system. But I do not have much faith in the perfection of any institution. And I have no faith in irrevocable sentences that stand hypocritical to the standards of the “higher” society in which we live.