I was watching the news last night, while my daughter sat at the computer, e-mailing friends.
It looks like the execution will go forward…
"Execution? They’re going to kill somebody?"
Her voice was amused — not by the prospect of execution, but by what she was certain was her own ignorance. She had just heard a word that she knew, but one relegated to old books, nothing to do with her world. She stared, waiting for me to explain what the word really meant, because obviously it couldn’t mean what she thought. It had a new meaning, right?
I hate trying to explain these things. Yes, we kill people. Some people think that when others commit horrible crimes, they have no right to live, and so the government kills them.
She wanted to know how. Or she asked, anyway. I could tell she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know. I think she was afraid I was going to tell her they were crucified, or placed on a mountaintop to be devoured by vultures. When one horror from your storybooks turns out to be true, why not all of them? Do we still drown witches? Are the caves full of dragons?
I didn’t have to tell her that this was wrong. Before I had a chance to start ranting about state-sponsored murder, I could see that one more piece of her trust in the world had fallen away. And I wondered if that was just my over-protected daughter, or it’s everyone’s first reaction. We think there’s some instinctive desire for vengeance that law and civilization help us overcome, but I wonder if there is not also an instinctive recoiling from vengeance, like the one I saw on my daughter’s face last night. A deep-seated understanding that if killing is wrong, killing a killer is also wrong. I don’t know, but I wonder if we have it all turned around. People don’t have to learn not to be vengeful; they have to bury their natural compassion.
Later in the evening, I heard Tucker Carlson complaining that the biggest problem with the death penalty was that the concept of the state antiseptically killing people was so horrible that it actually made you feel compassion for a monster like Stanley Williams. I was fascinated, watching him struggle with the compassion he admitted to feeling. He couldn’t handle it. He tried every which way to make it disappear. I remembered that it was Carlson who conducted one of the most disturbing interviews George Bush ever gave:
Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it. While driving back from the speech later that day. Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double-murderer who was executed in Texas last year In the weeks before this execution, Bush says Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.
Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like “What would you say to Governor Bush?”
“What was her answer?” I wonder.
“Please” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation “don’t kill me”.
I must look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking. “It’s tough stuff”, Bush says, suddenly somber, ‘but my job is to enforce the law.” As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights. (Talk Magazine, September 1999)
Carlson ended up arguing — although he seemed to be embarrassed to find himself saying this — that it would be better if the families of the victims could stab the murderer to death than have the state do so cleanly and efficiently. He didn’t believe what he was saying. He said himself that he might back down if called on that. The call for direct vengeance let him pose as a tough guy. Compassion is frightening. Safer to refashion yourself as a monster, even if — unlike Bush — you’re bright enough, and morally astute enough, to recognize that that’s what you’re doing.
I haven’t read much of what’s been written about Stanley Tookie Williams. Maybe, like Tucker Carlson, I was a little afraid of the compassion I knew would well up. I’m not afraid of seeing the humanity in someone capable of committing monstrous acts. I’m afraid of the feeling of helplessness that attends seeing that humanity, and not being able to do a thing to save it.
But I was also put off by the tone of the coverage. Two Sundays ago, the LA Times ran side by side op-eds.
He’s a murderer. He should die
Governor, let Tookie live
They both ran under a larger headline that set the tone: SHOULD WE KILL THIS CRIP?
I can’t even tell you that I hated the pro-killing piece and appreciated the pro-life one. I hated both. I hated the whole idea of the front page of the editorial section debating whether a man should live or die. Debate a school bond. Debate the justice of a war. Debate the death penalty, even. But for Christ’s sake, don’t ask people to sit in their comfortable rooms on a Sunday morning and turn thumbs up or thumbs down. Should he live or should he die? Jesus or Barabbas?
I believe in redemption. But do not ask me to judge another person’s redemption. I can’t do it. No one can, although some people think they can:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not just reject Stanley Tookie Williams’ request for clemency, he aggressively attacked the central element of the former gang leader’s case: Williams, he said, had never really reformed.
Over the last decade, Williams had become famous based on his account of how he went from a gang leader to an anti-gang crusader who had written books aimed at steering young people away from crime. That life story was at the heart of Williams’ request for clemency.
Schwarzenegger rejected it entirely, suggesting Williams’ redemption claim was " hollow."
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"Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption."
The idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, could judge someone’s atonement unworthy and unconvincing is not the most obscene part of this whole spectacle, but it is certainly one of the more grotesque elements.
Even Steve Lopez, one of the LA Times’ better columnists, who often writes movingly of poverty, crime, and race, and who witnessed Williams’ execution, and described it as a "macabre spectacle in a nation that preaches godly virtue to the world while resisting a global march away from the Medieval practice of capital punishment, " fights off belief in redemption:
Nothing I saw made me feel any differently about Williams, the Crip co-founder whose legacy is terrorized neighborhoods and a chorus of weeping mothers.
His anti-violence books and speeches were too little, too late, and the methodologizing of him was as unconvincing as the Nobel nominations.
I understand that. There are far more blatant examples of the horror of capital punishment. Cory Maye remains on death row for what was clearly an act of self-defense. Ruben Cantu, executed a decade ago in Texas, was almost surely innocent. But I have to disagree with Atrios that cases like Maye’s make better arguments against the death penalty than Williams’. You can nitpick around the margins of the death penalty by pointing out its injustice, its fundamental racism, but you end up focusing people’s attention on trying to make a profound wrong more right. In order to really understand why the death penalty is wrong, you need to be brave enough to look not just at innocents killed, but at the guilty, at the worst, most indefensible people on death row. The problem with Stanley Williams’ case is not that he committed such heinous crimes, but that it is far too easy to recognize the humanity that continued to dwell behind the monster, and began to emerge when it had the chance to do so. Randy Paul has a thought-provoking post up about another case where we learned that people capable of great evil can also be capable of great good. Most of the time whatever humanity is still in there is damn well hidden. As Richard Pryor said, "Thank God we got penitentiaries!" I think in many ways murderers like Stanley Williams and Karla Faye Tucker are far more threatening to people who believe in capital punishment than the kind of criminal who brandishes his supposedly irredeemable nature, or even than the wrongfully accused. It’s far easier to tell yourself that something isn’t done right than that it shouldn’t be done at all.
The Supreme Court gave us a brief respite from the death penalty, which ended with the execution of Gary Gilmore in 1977. I remember that execution very well because of something I’d never witnessed before — criminal groupies. Every single person I knew at the time who supported capital punishment also admired Gary Gilmore, because he said flat out that he was a monster and deserved to die. He was the first person executed after Furman v. Georgia temporarily wiped away all the states’ death penalty laws primarily because he refused to fight for his life. This is what you have to believe if you support capital punishment: Monsters are monsters and they know it. (If they seem not to, they must be faking us out, and we have to be tough and not be swayed.) People who loved capital punishment loved Gary Gilmore for supporting their myths. They despised Stanley Williams not, primarily, because of his crimes, but because his life challenged that myth.
I don’t know if the redemption is real or fake. I know there are many people who can’t face the prospect that it might be real, because realizing that the capacity for good and the capacity for evil dwell in the same body is too difficult to face. But to really challenge capital punishment, you have to force people to face it.