The Last of Tookie

Stayed up much later than I should have last night to catch the press conference of the platoon of reporters and “reporters” who had witnessed the Tookie Williams execution. I started out listening on KCBS, the Bay Area’s “all news” AM radio outlet, but the way they broke in and out of the press conference for ads and traffic reports was absurd. So I went out and turned on CNN, which carried the whole conference live as part of its overnight (in the United States) national news show.

A couple of thorough writeups both of the execution — from Adam Housley of Fox News — and of the press conference — from a California blogger called Ordinary Everyday Christian — appeared much earlier today. I include Housley’s despite its term-report tone and his laughable statement during the press conference that he believed Williams was trying to intimidate the media contingent during the proceedings. (It was interesting to hear the San Quentin warden’s reaction when he was asked about this later: He dismissed the suggestion, saying something like, “If you’re not familiar with prison there are lots of things that are intimidating.”)

Just one note on the vaunted “we give both sides” neutrality our news establishment likes to pat itself on the back for: The coverage of the Williams execution was a great example of how firmly and absolutely the media assumes the judgments of officialdom represent all they need to know to be certain of the truth.

In the Williams case, a court found him guilty and he lost appeal after appeal on a variety of grounds; throughout, Williams maintained he was innocent (OK, as “The Shawshank Redemption” noted, the rarest man in prison is one who admits guilt). One of the big strikes against Williams — the biggest, if you read Schwarzenegger’s clemency decision — was that he showed no remorse for the killings for which he was convicted. Williams responded that he couldn’t express remorse for crimes he didn’t commit.

How did reporters resolve this paradox? Just the way the governor did, by observing that the case had been tried and litigated to a fare-thee-well and the question of guilt had been resolved. Stories would typically mention Williams’s claim of innocence; most would omit any discussion, however brief, of what the claim was based on. Stories would invariably mention that Williams hadn’t apologized for the murders; most would add statements from victims’ families, police or prosecutors that the failure to own up showed Williams’s “redemption” as an anti-gang crusader was phony. The net impression was that Williams was an unregenerate killer.

And you know, maybe he was. But I wouldn’t be convinced by the press accounts of the crimes that sent him to death row in the first place. For all the attention the case has gotten, I don’t recall any systematic effort to go back and look at how Williams was convicted, much less focus on aspects of the prosecution that would raise an issue on “Law & Order” if not in the real world. Just one example: The principal witness against Williams in the murder of 7-Eleven clerk Albert Owens was a career violent felon granted immunity to testify; he alone claimed to have witnessed the shooting; he later returned to his native Canada, killed a man during a robbery, then lied about it under oath before confessing.

That by itself proves nothing about Tookie Williams’s guilt or innocence. But it’s enough to shake my certainty about what I really know about a case that has been for the most part written, delivered, read, and received in the most cursory shorthand.

‘The Highest Attribute of Man’

In — what? — 20 minutes or so, we’ll put another convict to death at San Quentin (and yes, I’m against the death penalty for all the reasons opponents usually give). The case and our governor’s refusal to really consider clemency, much less grant it, made me think about Clarence Darrow’s hours-long summation in the 1924 Nathan Leopold-Richard Loeb case in Chicago. Darrow’s clients had pleaded guilty to killing a 14-year-old boy for no other reason than that they wanted to commit “the perfect crime” and conduct an “experiment in sensation.” The only issue for the judge to decide was whether the killers would be hanged or sentenced to life in prison. Darrow concluded:

Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows. In doing it you will make it harder for unborn children. You may save them and make it easier for every child that sometime may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

I feel that I should apologize for the length of time I have taken. This case may not be as important as I think it is, and I am sure I do not need to tell this court, or to tell my friends that I would fight just as hard for the poor as for the rich. If I should succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that for the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these poor boys have trod—that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all.

So I be written in the Book of Love,

I do not care about that Book above.

Erase my name or write it as you will,

So I be written in the Book of Love.

What a quaint sentiment, viewed from an age in which our only real public faith seems to be in what we might achieve by force and coercion. (Leopold and Loeb got life sentences (plus 99 years each for kidnapping their victim). Later, Loeb was killed in prison; Leopold was eventually paroled.)