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Jewish World Review
Dec. 8, 2005
/ 7 Kislev, 5766
Misplaced sympathy for killers
By
Jeff Jacoby
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Stanley "Tookie" Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California's San Quentin prison next Tuesday.
His death will occur nearly 27 years after he brutally murdered Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk in Whittier, Calif.,
and three members of the Yang family — Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin — at the
Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles.
Unlike the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were horrific: He shot each of them
at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused
him. "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," Williams bragged after killing Albert Owens.
According to the district attorney's summary of the evidence, "Williams then made gurgling or growling noises and
laughed hysterically about Owens's death."
As cofounder of the deadly Crips street gang in 1971, Williams's criminal legacy goes well beyond the four murders
for which he was convicted. The gang violence he unleashed 34 years ago has destroyed thousands of lives and left
countless other victims scarred by rape, assault, and armed robbery. Though he now claims to have reformed and
has written books with an antigang message, he has never admitted his guilt or expressed any remorse for the
slaughter of Albert Owens and the Yang family. If his supposed contrition amounts to anything more than lip service,
he has yet to prove it. Williams adamantly refuses to be debriefed by police about the Crips and their operations or
to provide any information that could help bring other killers to justice. In fact, officials at San Quentin have said he
continues to orchestrate gang activity from behind bars.
Incredibly, this thug is the object of the left's latest craze. For many anti-death penalty fundamentalists, it is not
enough to oppose the execution of a savage killer — the killer must be extolled as a noble soul whose death would
be a loss for humanity. Thus Hollywood has honored Williams with a made-for-TV movie. The media have weighed in
with sympathetic stories. A slew of celebrities, including such moral giants as Tom Hayden and Snoop Dogg, are
clamoring for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and spare Williams's life. And all but forgotten
amid this orgy of adulation are the victims Williams so cruelly murdered nearly three decades ago.
What is it that makes victims so easy to forget? When Kenneth Boyd was executed in North Carolina last week, it
was reported everywhere that he was the 1,000th murderer to be put to death since the resumption of capital
punishment in 1976. But how many stories devoted more than a passing mention to the two people Boyd sent to
early graves — his estranged wife, Julie Curry Boyd, and her father, Thomas Curry? Why doesn't the media's
round-number fetish extend to the victims of homicide as well as the perpetrators? If the 1,000th execution made
headlines, why didn't the 1,000th murder? Or the 10,000th? Or the 100,000th?
Actually there have been close to 600,000 homicides in the United States since 1976, and the total climbs by roughly
15,000 each year. Where is the uproar over those round numbers? Where are the protests, the petitions, the
Hollywood rallies aimed at stopping those deaths? I understand that some people think capital punishment is wrong
as a matter of principle. What I cannot understand is how anyone can be more outraged by the lawful execution each
year of a few dozen murderers than by the annual slaughter of thousands of victims at the hands of such murderers.
Opponents of capital punishment make much of the theoretical possibility that an innocent defendant might be killed.
What they never acknowledge is that the abolition of capital punishment guarantees that innocent victims will die.
That isn't only because executing murderers has a powerful deterrent effect, as a number of recent studies confirm.
It is also because prison bars can't keep some killers from killing again.
In its latest roundup of death penalty statistics, "Capital Punishment, 2004," the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics
notes that at least 101 murderers now on death row were already in prison when they murdered their victims; at
least 44 others were prison escapees. Lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key may sound appealing. But some
murderers will always escape and murder again. Others will kill in prison.
Ultimately, the case for putting murderers like Williams and Boyd to death isn't just a practical one, strong though
the practical arguments are. It is also a moral one. When the state executes a murderer, it is making a statement
about the demands of justice and the sanctity of human life — a statement as old as Genesis, and as essential as ever.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here.
Jeff Jacoby Archives
© 2005, Boston Globe
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