"tookie" Williams, your thoughts

in keeping with the holiday spirit... the media and hollywood have inundated the public with convicted multiple murder and co-founder of the "crips" stanley "tookie" williams cry for clemency ... tonight at midnight he is scheduled for execution.
what do you think?

Whether or not he has repented of his crimes, he still has to pay for what he did. For someone to stand over a dying man and make of fun of his cries for help is just beyond my ability to comprehend. His victims' families deserve a sense of closure. Their loved ones are dead, their lives ended coldly and cruelly by him. For him to still be alive while the victims are not is a slap in the face. Good for him that he was able to turn his life around and make something out of it worth remembering, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he still needs to pay for what he did. Life in prison is not punishment, it is reward.

Good topic Dundee...

He was found by a jury to be guilty of the crimes he says he is innocent of...let him fry! If he was innocent then we wouldn't be waiting for the governator to grant clemency. What really irks me about the whole capital punishment thing is the fact that criminals such as Tookie sit waiting for 20 years (or more) for the needle. That's 20 years worth of taxpayer money wasted in BS legal arguments, housing, food etc. There needs to be a way to speed up the process a bit.

I've heard that the death penalty was brought back in most parts of the US as a deterrent for crime. How much of a deterrent is it for free room and board and no taxes due for 20 years? Ya the downside is you don't get to collect your retirement income but still. The criminals spend too much time waiting for their punishment to be carried out.

I don't understand how writing a few children's books makes up for brutally killing four people and earns you nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize!!!

I'm not opposed to the death penalty in principle; as any perusal of the newspapers will demonstrate, there are people out there desperately in need of killing who'll make the world a slightly better place the moment they stop breathing. My problem is with it's application. In a society where one man with virtually unlimited resources can afford to mount a lavish defense like O.J. Simpson, while another with no resources gets an overworked burnt-out "meet 'em n' plead 'em" somnolent Public Defender who couldn't vindicate Mother Teresa, I don't see how anyone can argue that this represents de facto equal protection under the law; regardless of intent, in practice the rich are clearly more equal than others. If the death penalty in it's application doesn't meet the standard of the equal protection clause of the US Constitution, the inescapable prima facie conclusion is that within the context of it's current application it is in effect unconstitutional.

I posted the following reply in my own thread titled "He changed his life" in the Polotics Live Online forum.


The execution has been carried out. A murderer has received just punishment. Any family members of the slain at his hands can now rest knowing that their fallen loved ones are not gone while their killer lives. That said....it is my firmly held belief that if Tookie did indeed acknowledged the God of creation, and did indeed accept the saving message of Jesus' death on the cross, that the same blood shed by Jesus to save me has also save Tookie. That now, although he has suffered death at the hands of man, his debt is paid in full, and his soul will forever remain with his God and his savior. As the apostle Paul said "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord."

strangest thing although i thought he had it coming...
i spent a good deal of time last night praying for his soul....

I think this is a very important point you made, Emmet.
I second that. No matter if I'm for or against death penalty...these are my thoughts and "objections", too.

I firmly agree that if he accepted the message of Christ's death that he will be saved, however, I also firmly believe that part of that acceptance is repentance.

What has Williams done to show that he is truely repentant of what he did? He has never even acknowledged that he is guilty of the crime.

I can't help but wonder if there'd have been an equivalent amount of hand-wringing over his redemption if instead of Christ, he'd embraced Allah, Buddha, Krishna, or Diana.

Is there hand-wringing going on here? I hadn't notice any, but the forked-tongue keeps a waggin.

As usual, between the two of us I'm apparently the only one that actually reads the newspapers, and as usual you respond with an infantile ad hominem attack.

There is no reason that any sane person would think you to be referring to newspapers when you post your snotty comment on the heels of other posts mentioning Christ and Tookie's soul. Perhaps you need a break.

HEY!!!

dont make me put you both in time out.....

if you guys keep it up they will move my post to politics live.......
i dont want it to go there.... and no more flipin fingers....

emmet i had to look up ad hominem... if you think shamrocks statements were ad hominem then you would have to agree that your statements
were appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason... also.

and remember
no matter what you say somebody will take it the wrong way.....

have a nice day...

As near as I can gather from multiple news sources, (including AP: i.e, "newspapers"), there were three predominant arguments in favor of clemency;
1) the death penalty is wrong (barbaric, arbitrary, etc)
2) Williams is innocent,
3) Williams is "reformed"; particularly, a born-again Christian.

I addressed a post on this topic to argument #1.
Argument #2 I ignored as profoundly unlikely. Williams was found guilty and lost all appeals.
Argument #3 was addressed by posts by several people, including one by SCShamrock, supported by Biblical citations, none of whom were ridiculed or insulted as a result. As his professed faith in Christ was considered at issue by both his supporters and several here who still wanted him executed regardless of religious conversion, I fail to see how questioning whether or not a death-row conversion to something other than Christianity would result in the same "inundation by the media" is either appealing to "emotions rather than to reason", or how SCShamrock's sneering and explicitly calling me a liar and stupid can in any way be described as anything else but a personal attack entirely independent of the topic at hand.
If he has anything intelligent to say, then by all means he should try to do so. However, if the most substantive contribution he can make to a conversation is juvenile insults, then he should crawl back under his rock with the rest of the brown shirts, white hoods, and drooling dimwits and stop trying to pollute the rest of this site into the same toxic neo-Fascist cesspool that they've made of the 'Politics' forum.