Terminator In Deed

by Naomi Foner

My brother died in June. Taken by cancer. Too young. Full of hope and possibility.

Last night another cancer killed a man about the same age. The paraphernalia familiar. IVs and gurneys. Lethal drugs dripping into his veins. Ending a life that had found redemption. But this time the cancer was on the outside.

Racism killed Tookie Williams.

I don't know enough about his case to argue the fine points, but I do know that Charlie Manson is still incarcerated in a California prison. One man is white, the other Black. I do know that Williams grew up in black ghetto where gang violence was a response to screaming inequity and lack of possibility.
So we punish the victim. We repeat the act that we condemn him for and congratulate ourselves on closure and righteousness.

Our governator feels he is able to decide the moral and legal culpability of a human life. What if the lack of remorse he cited in his refusal to grant clemency is really based on innocence? Has he no self doubt? Would that make him a girlie man? Or a human being? So many cases on death row in Illinois were found to be faulty that the governor there emptied the holding cells, aware of his inability to make such judgments.

And what of the death penalty itself. It is not a deterrent. Only a perverse sick spectacle.

We are one of the few nations left on earth who still conduct executions. Who continue to put to death people who have actually been reformed and changed by their time in prison. No one benefits from an inhuman practice that institutionalizes the very crime it is supposed to be punishing. It makes us all killers.

How different in the end is our governor from Tookie Williams? Yesterday he committed murder and by his own report he feels no remorse.