New Interview With Tookie Williams
Notre Dame professor Phil Gasper interviewed Stanley Tookie Williams by telephone a few days ago. He talks about his redemption, why gang life grabs hold of kids and how the death penalty has become a pawn of politicians.
You can write to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (governor@governor.ca.gov), or call him in Sacramento (916-445-4821), and implore him to grant clemency. [Via Counterpunch and Justin E.H. Smith.] More from Smith:
I have emphasized repeatedly in this space that the details of a particular death-penalty case should not matter so much in our opposition to it. Whether the person executed is mentally deficient or a genius, whether the crime was premeditated or an act of fleeting passion, whether the prisoner denies the crime or admits it, the death penalty is always and equally a perversion, a malignancy, and it by itself ensures that the United States will remain outside of the civilized world, behind Turkey, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, and Liberia, but in good company with China, North Korea, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Dostoyevsky said that you can tell what a nation is like by the way it treats its prisoners. If this is true, a nation whose government continues to engage in ritual human sacrifice, of victims culled largely from an underprivileged minority, is certainly as open to scrutiny as one that relies on Subarctic labor camps to maintain its iron-fisted grip on power.
The Christian Science Monitor examines clemency in death penalty cases, including Tookie and Karla Faye Tucker. It also provides these stats:
Thirty-three states give their governors exclusive, unconditional power to grant pardons or reduce prison sentences.
- Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, and Texas have stripped their governors of the power to pardon and instead established clemency boards, whose members are appointed by the governor.
- In nine states, the governor can only consider clemency recommendations issued by a clemency board.
- In Nebraska, Nevada, and Utah, the governor sits as a member of a pardoning board, making clemency decisions in cooperation with board members.
Clemency and pardon law expert Margy Love sums clemency decisions up this way:
... "clemency is a very lonely decision," says Margaret Love, former head of the pardon office in the US Justice Department. "It is a question of how to blend mercy with justice, the human and the legal in light of all circumstances before you, with life on the line."
I'll be discussing Tookie's clemency bid tonight on KABC radio (Los Angeles) at 7pm PT on the Al Rankel show. You can listen in online through this link.
TalkLeft background on Tookie is available here.
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