Here's why Stanley "Tookie" Williams should die. Read particularly pages two through six. His case has become a cause célèbre among the Hollywood crowd, and the Left-wing in general, who insist that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison because he's written childrens' books while in jail over the last twenty-five years.
Their rationale is a slap in the face to Williams' victims. If Williams has actually morphed into a human being during the last two decades and deserves clemency from his sentence of death, why punish him at all? Why not set him free to run Head Start programs or something? It doesn't matter what sort of person he's become in prison (In the event, Mr. Williams' prison experience is rather mixed, see pp.40-42), he killed four people and laughed and bragged about it. It's nice that he writes books for kids nowadays, but that's not such a rare talent that we need to preserve the life of Tookie Williams to insure that it gets done.
The point of putting someone as savage as Mr. Williams to death is to make a statement affirming the value of innocent life. Someone who capriciously and hatefully (he claimed to want to kill white people) takes the life of another has perpetrated one of the worst crimes that can be committed and should be made to suffer the severest punishment. To let him live is to announce to the world that no matter what he did to his victims, the life of Tookie Williams is more precious to us than are the lives of the people he murdered. To refuse to execute a man as bestial as Williams is not unlike refusing to assess a rapist anything more than a fine. By failing to make the punishment commensurate to the crime we tacitly admit that the crime of rape is not important enough to apply any really serious sanction against the assailant. Likewise, to shrink from executing Williams is to acknowledge that the crime of murder is not serious enough to require that the killer forfeit his own life in retribution.
No matter what his other virtues might be, and we doubt there are many, citizens, including the families of his victims, should not have to see their tax dollars spent to maintain the life of a man who has willfully and cruelly wrecked their lives. To let Mr. Williams live out a normal span of days just because he now writes anti-gang books would be a complete miscarriage of justice.
