Who knew that so many Huffington Post readers would be so thirsty for the blood of death row-inmate Stanley “Tookie” Williams? In my first post on the subject last week I had wanted to avoid the larger issue of the barbaric inanity of the death penalty to try to reach across the aisle to even the usually pro-death penalty people. If Mr. Williams is granted clemency by Governor Schwarzenegger he will merely keep doing what he has been doing for the past two decades behind bars: trying to convince others not to follow in his footsteps. I tried to argue that as a symbol of redemption he better serves the public good alive than dead.
For example, in the first four months of January of last year thirty-two Bloods and Crips in Newark, New Jersey, had been murdered in their senseless, ongoing feud. On April 11th, Easter Sunday, Redemption, the made-for-TV movie on Mr. Williams’ life starring Jamie Foxx, aired on the F/X channel. Some Crips and Bloods saw the show, immediately went online to Mr. Williams’ website and downloaded his “peace protocol.” By May the details were ironed out, a truce was signed and former Crip Kevin Tate and Blood Lawrence McKinnis now head an extremely non-criminal organization called, “S(aving). O(ur). S(elves).”
Clearly, an alive Mr. Williams serves as a better criminal deterrent than would his corpse.
This brings us to the larger issue of the death penalty itself and its pointlessness on all counts. Why not?
COST: Many readers seemed offended that their tax dollars were being spent on feeding and incarcerating Mr. Williams and viewed his execution as just another of the Governator’s budget cuts. If price were the only factor than why stop at lethally injecting only those on death row? If we really wanted to save money by going after anyyone who was a drain on public coffers then we should lethally inject, electrocute or hang every smoker.
And according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty a capital case costs the state between one- and three- million dollars while when a prosecutor seeks life without the possibility of parole the state spends an average of $500,000 including incarceration. That should make sense even to those believers of “an eye for an eye.” You have to be absolutely positive about the guilt of the accused (more on Mr. Williams’ case later) and that costs money. Since 1987 eight innocent people in the United States have been executed.
DETERRENCE: Even death-penalty advocates agree that re-instituting it has had no effect whatsoever on lowering homicide rates. Most all murders are impulsive acts of violence by people very often under the influence of drugs. If you are a law-abiding citizen with a nice job with reasonable prospects for advancement you can say to yourself, “Gee, I better not murder that annoying neighbor of mine because I might be caught and put to death.” However what if you are in your late teens and early twenties and have no plans for your future because you have already buried several of your best friends and close relatives? You might feel that the odds are you will either be killed by a rival or the police before you reach thirty. The normal societal rules lose their hold on you. We’ve tried being only harsh and it has not worked, now we have to be smarter in steering thugs away from a life of crime.
So if killing criminals doesn’t deter other criminals and actually costs more than letting them rot in a cage stamping license plates, then why do it? Does it do anything to bring back to life a victim?
And if you’re a Christian, you obviously must be against capital punishment, because Jesus Christ couldn’t be more explicit in his condemnation of killing. WWJD? He sure as hell wouldn’t flip the switch.