Dec. 14 USA: Tookie is dead. Time to dump the duct tape. Whew! I have waited for 24 years to feel this safe. I lost a neighbor in the rubble of Sept. 11, 2001. I crossed my fingers as my teenage daughter starting driving. I held my breath as reckless drivers sped down my suburban street, oblivious to my 7-year-old playing with her friends. I struggled to stay calm through each of the warnings about the dangers of a high-fat diet. And I waited for society to do something, anything, to make me less anxious, less impotent, less a victim of mysterious forces I could not control. When they suggested duct tape, I bought duct tape. When Brinks had a special introductory offer for its monthly alarm system, I happily paid the tab. But nothing seemed to work. The horrors mounted with relentless ferocity: global warming, failing schools, international terrorism, the scourge of HIV/AIDS, a looming Avian flu pandemic, drive-by shootings, poverty and hunger in an urban neighborhood just 20 minutes from my suburban fortress. There were days when this college professor felt like Charles Bronson in waiting, holding back just this far from an uncontrolled outburst of protective vengeance. Now, it seems the impossible has occurred. After all these years, I can sleep easy, unlock my windows, and wish my family a nice day with a fairly reliable sense that we will all sit around the dinner table unscathed. Our national jitters are over. The machinery of social control is up and running. I will finally have peace, or at least a few moments of it, knowing that my family and I are safe. Stanley "Tookie" Williams is dead. I am safe. We are all safe. Unbolt the doors and turn off the alarms. Society got off its duff. Just when I thought the world was spiraling out of control, Just when I thought we were condemned to live with an almost limitless supply of evil, hope for the future has presented itself in the execution of Stanley Williams. Who can I thank for this new-found sense of inner peace? The California penal code that enabled his death sentence? The appellate courts that upheld the sentence? Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who terminated my torment of fear and worry by not caving to humanitarian pressure? They can all take a share of responsibility for ridding the country, perhaps the world, of its most lethal and pervasive threat. They have earned my gratitude. I think tonight when everyone is asleep, I'll sneak down to the basement and throw away the duct tape and all those useless flashlights. I'll e-mail Brinks to turn off the service. I might even let my daughter know that it'd be OK if she drank a couple of beers before driving home from her next social outing. After all, Stanley is dead. We are safe at last, safe at last, safe at last. Don't you all feel safe at last? (source: Chicago Tribune - Steven M. Gorelick, professor of media studies and journalism at Hunter College of the City University of New York) ******************* Capital punishment is a crime against society The state of California killed more than 1 man yesterday when it executed Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the Crips, a violent street gang. The Williams who was put to death by lethal injection is not the same angry street tough convicted of brutally killing four people 26 years ago. In the opinion of people who knew him, other than those who were actively seeking his death out of an antiquated notion of justice, Williams was rehabilitated. He had devoted his life to ending gang violence, a scourge that has ripped through urban America and cities elsewhere where young disenfranchised boys and men find family and meaning in groups based around turf and crime. In an interview 2 weeks before his death with a New York Times reporter, Williams talked about what a horrible, wretched person he once was. Then he said: "People forget that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched." >From prison, Williams reached out to young people by co-authoring a series of children's books that warn of the evils of gangs and the gangster way of life. How much good those books have done was a point of contention between the prosecution and the defense, but the police and gang leaders give Williams credit for helping to bring about truces between rivals. Thousands of letters and e-mails from children credited his books and the movie made about his life with turning them away from violence. By killing Williams, California put an end to its famous convict's good works. Because he's dead, it's likely that one or more young people who might have embraced his message will instead die on a street corner over an insult or a few dollars or for wearing the wrong color scarf. Despite a recommendation for clemency from a panel of three federal judges who cited Williams's anti-gang efforts, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to convert his sentence to life in prison without parole or even to grant a 60-day reprieve to allow his lawyers to introduce new evidence. Schwarzenegger's words were Olympian and chilling. "Is Williams's redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise," wrote the governor whose most famous role as an actor was that of The Terminator. Like many convicts, Williams claimed to be innocent. No court found his denials convincing, but the system does make mistakes. It appears from Schwarzenegger's statement that Williams died not because he did the crimes but because he refused to admit his guilt. Integrity and his faith, Williams said, would not allow him to confess to a crime he did not commit, even if doing so might save his life. "Without an apology and atonement . . . there can be no redemption," Schwarzenegger wrote. He's wrong. Real redemption is not accomplished with words but with deeds, as Sister Helen Prejean argues. She is the author of Dead Man Walking, a strong indictment of capital punishment. By Prejean's standard, Williams had not only redeemed himself but also led others to redemption. The death penalty is always wrong. It cheapens life and cheapens society. Every modern nation save the United States and South Africa has banned it. The death penalty is also counterproductive. The best protection against violence does not come from laws or the police. Rather it comes with the creation of a culture that makes murder taboo. America will never turn away from its glorification of violence and create such a culture as long as the state, in the name of justice, kills people. (source: Editorial, The Concord (N.H.) Monitor) ************ Executing the possibly innocent In an exclusive interview with investigative reporter Jasmyne Cannick and myself, Stanley "Tookie" Williams vehemently denied that he committed the four murders for which he was sentenced to death row. Though he did not say it, the presumption is that, if the state killed him, it would have killed an innocent man. There was no smoking gun proof that he was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt - but the case against him was based on scant physical evidence, the testimony of crime prone jailhouse informants, and his fearsome reputation as street thug, doper and the co-founder of the notorious Crips gang. The tenuous evidence was shaky enough that two California Supreme Court justices, a handful of dissenting judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and his new legal team demanded a second look at his conviction. But Mr. Williams is hardly the 1st case in which doubts have been raised whether a possibly innocent person has been executed. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a scattering of federal appeals judges have voiced those doubts about whether some innocent persons have been executed since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. A team of university researchers has fingered more than 2 dozen cases in which men have been executed that may have been innocent. In every case, there have been deeply troubling similarities. The Innocence Project has noted that overzealous and untruthful prosecutors have suppressed, fabricated and destroyed evidence, employed lying jailhouse snitches and untruthful witnesses. Many of the cases have been riddled with racial bias. The condemned killer was Black or Latino and their alleged victim was White. When defense attorneys appeal these tainted convictions, the courts almost always dismiss their appeals on the grounds that the prosecutor committed "harmless errors" that didnt affect the outcome of the case. The Texas execution of Ruben Cantu in 1993 for a murder he allegedly committed as a teen was a near textbook example of how a possibly innocent man can be executed. The case had all the slipshod legal ingredientsa jailhouse informants testimony, a dubious witness, a threadbare defense and sloppy police investigation. It took a decade to get the truth out, but Mr. Cantu was declared probably innocent when the surviving victim recanted his identification and an inmate involved in the killing signed a confession that Mr. Cantu did not commit the crime. In Mr. Cantus case, and the cases of the other possibly innocent condemned men executed, state and federal appeals courts routinely rejected their appeals. But some judges publicly and privately expressed doubts, not about the actual innocence of the men, but whether prosecutors and courts followed proper legal procedures and the defendants got a fair trial. Their doubts were not enough for them to overturn their convictions or stay their executions. In every doubtful case, prosecutors hotly denied that any of the men executed were innocent. Despite the questionable executions, no prosecutor or government official has ever officially said that an innocent prisoner has been executed. But some officials and judges have strongly hinted and warned that it could happen. In 1997, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee praised the system of legal checks and balances in place to insure that the rights of condemned killers are fully protected, but admitted that there was no ironclad guarantee that an innocent person could not be put to death. In 2000, Boston federal appeals court Judge Mark Wolf, in a case involving a Massachusetts man charged with multiple murders, sent a shock wave through the federal judiciary when he flatly said that there was strong evidence that some innocent persons may have been executed. He did not name the names of those who he thought may been innocent, but pointed to the dozens of men that have been freed from death row based on DNA tests, the recanting of damning testimony by witness and jailhouse informants, and other evidence. The Justice Department stuck to its guns and insisted that it went strictly by the legal book to insure the fair and consistent application of the death penalty, and there were no slip-ups in that an innocent man could or had been executed, at least by the feds. The refusal of government officials and prosecutors to at least admit the possibility that an innocent person could be executed in the United States stands in stark contrast to Britain, Russia and other countries that have owned up to the execution of innocents. The frank admission by other countries that innocents have been legally killed, and the frank denial by prosecutors in the U.S. that innocents could or have been executed here will have no bearing on Williams fate. Although Schwarzenegger refused clemency, and Tookie has been executed, it will not alter the official record that he did the crimes, and that courts and prosecutors fully followed all legal and constitutional procedures. But the doubt about his innocence or guilt will linger on. It has for the two dozen others that have been executed that were possibly innocent. (source: The FinalCall - Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst) TENNESSEE: Sheriff wonders if execution will happen As the state Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for the execution of a Shelbyville woman's confessed killer, Bedford County's sheriff asks if it will ever happen. "If he gets executed, he gets exactly what he deserves," Sheriff Clay Parker said Thursday afternoon of Gregory Thompson, 43, who's scheduled to die Feb. 7 for the murder of Brenda Blanton Lane. "But will it happen? Who knows?" Thompson and his girlfriend abducted Blanton to get a car so they could drive to Marietta, Ga. They drove from a shopping center parking lot across the street from the police station and stopped in Coffee County where Blanton was stabbed with a rusty knife. "I was a deputy at the time, working here," Parker said. "I helped do some things" connected with the 1985 murder investigation. Legal sparring over Thompson's case took on a new dimension after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state could set a new execution date. New information on his sanity was presented with clams that he's not competent to be executed. The state says Tennessee only requires that the condemned know that they're to be executed and why. The state Supreme Court yesterday sided with the state Attorney General's office. Parker is a student at the Nashville School of Law and noted such legal sparring "always happens" in death penalty cases. "There are appeals from here to there and that's why prosecutors might let someone plead to a case," Parker said. He mentioned no specific case, however District Attorney Mike McCown had placed all three options to Jason Christopher Underwood, 23, who's charged with the Oct. 24, 2004, stabbing deaths of Anthony Baltimore and Rebecca Ray, both 19, in their home. Death, life with no chance of parole and life in jail with some chance of parole were the options McCown listed for prosecutors' request to a jury in Underwood case. On July 28, Assistant District Attorney Ann Filer filed notice that life in prison without chance of parole is the maximum sentence the state will ask from a jury in Underwood case. He's in jail on $2 million bond. "It costs a tremendous amount of money to prosecute a death penalty case," Parker said. "Transcripts cost $30,000 to $50,000." It's "astronomical," Parker said, noting "judicial economy" may result from a sentence of life without the chance of parole. "And then it stops and it's not in the courts for the next 20 years," Parker said. New Year's Day 2006 will be the 21st anniversary of Lane's murder. "A lot of people don't understand why a prosecutor might not go for the death penalty," the sheriff said. "It takes forever to execute someone -- 20-30 years of litigation. "Is it worth saying 'We're going to give you the death penalty, but you're really going to die of old age in prison,'" Parker asked. "I know how the system works and know that there's always someone filing last minute papers. "There needs to be an end, but the practical effect is that nobody knows. "If a jury of his peers decided he deserves to die, who am I to argue? "He's certainly deserving of his fate," the sheriff said. "Maybe it will happen. Who knows? But I know there is always some group willing to file an appeal." (source: Shelbyville Times-Gazette)
