12 December 05

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

There are more prisoners on death row in California—specifically, in San Quentin, just down the freeway from here—than in any other state. Tookie Williams is scheduled to be executed in three-and-a-half hours, Schwarzenegger having rejected his appeal for clemency.

Granting clemency wouldn’t have meant overturning Williams’ verdict, or letting him go free, or anything like that: it would simply have sent him to a different prison to serve out a life sentence.

Apart from the terrible chance that this man may not have committed the crimes of which he’s accused—and remember, he wasn’t accused of co-founding the Crips, he was accused of murdering four people—I just have to wonder what good executing him will do. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t make anybody safer. It has cost the California taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars to have kept him for 25 years in a maximum security prison designed to hold one-third of its current capacity. The average length of time a death-row inmate has to wait for a lawyer is fifteen years. AVERAGE. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like.

I despair of this, of a culture that can read of this upcoming execution over cornflakes and think nothing of it. It’s a bad night.

Posted by at 08:45 PM in Politics | Link |
  1. Thank you, Pica… I’m very disturbed by this; I had a terrible night knowing that, during my sleep, the State of California was committing a murder. The third death row inmate denied clemency by this governor, the 1001th prisoner executed in the United States since the 70s when the death penalty was reinstated in this country, and then here we are in Iraq murdering 10s-of-1000s of innocents for what??? State-sanctioned murder is wrong—be it in the death row chamber or on the battlefield. And what is the big debate taking up the mainstream news these days? The “War Against Christmas”!!!!!
    — virginia    13. December 2005, 05:56    Link
  2. I am many miles away from all of this but have been keeping a vigil nonetheless. If the people of California had decided not to re-enact the death penalty—or their elected officials who answer to them—this would not have happend. We, the electorate, need to question much more closely those who are running for office. This barbaric, state-sanctioned murder must stop. Tookie was no boy scout, but his murder is a crime.
    — Susan Chaffee    13. December 2005, 18:07    Link
  3. Thank you for writing about this, Pica. We have much the same take on this, as you saw from my post on it, probably.

    I have been very disturbed by this … beyond words. Living within view of San Quentin, I am also constantly aware of the bizarre juxtaposition of having the largest death row inmate population in a prison in the middle of one of the wealthiest counties in California.

    When I try to discuss this with people who live here, it turns out that they think nothing of it, as they are too preoccupied with other things…
    — maria    14. December 2005, 12:52    Link
  4. I’m mildly against the death penalty for a couple of reasons (though it seems to me less cruel than life-imprisonment), but I was greatly relieved when the serial murderer who had slowly tortured a dear friend of mine to death was executed.

    Now I don’t have to find the man and kill him myself, I thought.

    Whether I would have attempted such a thing, who knows, but an execution can bring a certain measure of relief to people going through almost unendurable suffering—the people who loved the people who were murdered.

    As I say, I’m against it, but calling execution murder is just silly, I think. The two actions are completely dissimilar in process, intent, and effect. You end up with a dead body at the end of each one, but that’s about all they have in common. Execution may be wrong, but it’s certainly not murder. It’s a ritual designed to help a wounded community heal. Long-term imprisonment, on the other hand, seems to me to be a ritual designed to ensure that no one ever heals. (One of the reasons I’m against the death penalty is that, as you note, it has in practice turned into a particularly nasty version of long-term imprisonment. If it’s not carried out quickly, better not to carry it out at all.)
    — dale    15. December 2005, 07:16    Link

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