The Death Penalty and Stan Tookie Williams

The death of Stan Tookie Williams has inspired me to start a new blog against the death penalty, accessible at http://stopdp.blogspot.com. This note, which I also emailed to the governor's office, is also part of the first entry.

Governor Schwarzenegger,

I'll never be able to watch your movies again. The man did everything he could to apologize for his legacy as a Crips leader in writing those books for urban youngsters who might be tempted by the gang life. It really looks to me like he might not have committed those murders, that false evidence was used against him. If this is so, we cannot have expected him to apologize for the murders themselves, to admit them. The death penalty is wrong to begin with; anyone who claims to have the power to decide who dies thinks much too much of themselves. This goes for judges and governors as well as "murderers". But to kill a man who might be innocent of the crimes, and who has in any case brilliantly proven that he has become a good man and done so much good, and could still have done so much good... The Terminator indeed. I will be publishing this on RavingModerate.com and stopdp.blogspot.com. Sincerely, Thomas Marshalek, The Raving Moderate

I would add that it some articles on the subject appear to suggest that Schwarzenegger was hedging his bets by complaining that Williams had not apologized for murders by Crips in general. If this were the case, he would truly be wrong in denying clemency, perhaps even abusing his power in a sense, because it is a principle of justice in this country that at least one should only be punished for the crimes for which one is convicted, not the ones for which one has not been convicted. Were he killed for someone's anger at murders by Crips in general, while the actual convictions for which he was sentenced to death were highly questionable, then the system has truly failed, and the Governor, in making this shift, would have a certain special responsibility. However, this is hypothetical at this point. I say, of course, that the system has failed whenever it executes a human being in the first place.