MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
On December 13, 2005 a few minutes past mid night a well built, healthy man walked the last few hundred feet between his cell on Death Row at San Quentin and the excecution chamber. That Tookie Williams was a ruthless killer no one denies. That he had a violent youth in which a dissipated life careened out of control uder the influence of poverty and drugs too no one denies. He along with Raymond set up a violent street gang, Cripps, this too is a fact. And he killed four people in typical gang land style. Having said all this can we say that he deserved a chance to straighten out his lfe.
I do not buy the theory of procecutorial misconduct during the course of the trial. That he was responsible for killing four young men is certain.
After his trial, Tookie Williams had embarked upon the worthy course of warning Black youth of the dangers of gang warfare and drugs by writing a series of books. He also wrote his autobiography which explains the social context in which he grew up. A fatherless childhood and two children from two different women by the time he was 18, and an irresponsible attitude towards his children, made him seek the refuge in a gang. The gang is probably the one social group that provided a degree of self worth and then the drift into crime.
It is not quite right to disscount the race factor in the debade on the Death Penalty. Tookie Williams was probed fro nearly 1 hour with hypodermic syringes before the vein to let the lethal mixture was found. This is ceratainly a cruel and unusual way of killing an individual, Further it took Mr Tookie Williams nearly 10 minutes to die. Some agony.
The federal jusdes had reccomended clemency for Tookie Williams on the ground that he had behaved in an exemplary manner in the last half of his life. He died at the age of 52 for a crime committed at the age of 24. Obviously he was a completely different man to the callow youth who had done the horrible deeds.Can this factor not be the ground for mercy?