The Stanley Tookie Williams case sparked a national debate about whether rehabilitation has any place in death penalty cases. The question with Williams was whether a death row murderer should be granted clemency – and so allowed to live – because of steps he took to redeem himself while awaiting execution. It’s a discussion worth continuing even now that Williams is gone, executed last week after several clemency petitions were rejected.
Williams, a co-founder of the notorious Crips street gang, was convicted of four murders and was perhaps godfather to others. In a prison twist, he wrote books discouraging young people from getting into gangs and crusaded against the violent culture he helped create.
Williams posed a perplexing dilemma for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has preached prisoner rehabilitation and was being tugged hard to apply it to Williams. In rejecting the clemency plea, the governor noted the disconnect between Williams’ petition for clemency and his failure to admit guilt or express remorse.
Had Schwarzenegger spared Williams, it would have been a rare event. In 1998, former Texas Gov. George W. Bush refused the petition of confessed killer Karla Faye Tucker, who had undergone a death row conversion and became a model prisoner. Altogether, there have been about 1,000 petitions for clemency since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated in the United States. Sixty-seven were granted (excluding the mass clemency granted by Illinois Gov. George Ryan to 167 death-row inmates before leaving office in 2003) for a variety of reasons – an inmate’s mental instability, new evidence, uncertainty about the prisoner’s guilt. Character reform has rarely figured in the outcome. Former Virginia Gov. George Allen says he took a prisoner off death row in 1997 due to character reform, and in 1962, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner commuted the sentence of Paul Crump, convicted of killing a security guard, to life without parole because Crump had been rehabilitated.
The debate over clemency is an old one and it will not stop with Williams’ execution. In 1833, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall described clemency as an “act of grace.” In 1927, Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “When granted, it is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed.”
We can imagine circumstances where the public welfare could weigh in favor of clemency. If Williams had been spared to bear personal witness to the scourge of gang violence, he might very well have saved some teenage gang candidates and their potential victims from the murder and mayhem he brought to Los Angeles. Williams forfeited that chance by withholding any remorse for his crimes. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption,” Schwarzenegger said.
For prosecutors and victims’ families, the question will always be what kind of message does clemency send to future criminals – write a book or two, publicly reject your life of crime and all is forgiven? Williams was convicted of murdering four people in 1979, professing his innocence all the while. After going to prison in 1981, he continued to lead the Crips for several years until he was thrown into solitary confinement and became a changed man who wrote eight books rejecting gang violence.
Capital punishment will continue to be debated, as it should be, given the more than 120 inmates released from death row because they were wrongfully convicted.
The next controversy could come as early as Jan. 17, when Clarence Ray Allen is scheduled to die in California. Allen was convicted for commissioning the murders of three people while he was behind bars. He is legally blind and confined to a wheelchair. A clemency campaign is already starting over the question of whether a person who is old and infirm should be put to death.
