Dec 13, 07:06 PM
Tookie Williams executed
Are we barbarians? What have we possibly gained by this?
Stanley Tookie Wiliams, a condemned gangster whose execution drew more national and international attention than any here in decades, was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 12:35 this morning at San Quentin State Prison.
Mr. Williams, 51, a co-founder and leader of the Crips gang of Los Angeles who was convicted of the brutal murders of four people in 1979 amid an avalanche of gang violence there, had become, to his supporters, an icon of jailhouse redemption and a powerful critic from his cell on death row and through his writings of the perils and misguided allure of the gang life on the nation’s urban streets.
[...]
Among the 39 witnesses – including journalists, victims’ relatives, Mr. Williams’s lawyers and supporters and prison officials – several of the journalists who said they had witnessed other executions described the lethal injection procedure as unusually long, as a nurse struggled to insert a needle in Mr. Williams’s muscular left arm for about 12 minutes. Mr. Williams, who was strapped to what looked like a tilted-back dental chair inside the sea-foam green death chamber, appeared frustrated, witnesses, including the prison warden, said.
Several times he lifted his head from the gurney to look up at his supporters, some of who were blowing kisses, and he was mouthing “I love you,” the witnesses said.
The prison warden, Steve Ornoski, said the execution was not unusually drawn out, although he did say he noticed that Mr. Williams, who appeared to be trying to help his executioners during the process, seemed exasperated.
“It depends on the person’s veins and whether they are readily accessible,” Mr. Ornoski said. “And also it’s a high pressure assignment for someone that’s in front of so many people.”
I would never discount the crime of any murderer. I would never play lightly with a vicitim’s and our society’s right to justice. But a nation that takes life for no reason but revenge is barbaric. We need to be bigger than this.
Update:
A writer for the LA Times who witnessed the execution has these eloquent words.
Nothing I saw made me feel any differently about Williams, the Crip co-founder whose legacy is terrorized neighborhoods and a chorus of weeping mothers.
His anti-violence books and speeches were too little, too late, and the methodologizing [sic.] of him was as unconvincing as the Nobel nominations.
But his execution was a macabre spectacle in a nation that preaches godly virtue to the world while resisting a global march away from the Medieval practice of capital punishment.
I would have had no problem leaving Williams locked up with his regrets and haunted by his deeds for the rest of his natural life.
I watched a man die today, killed by the state of California with institutional resolve, and wondered what we gained.
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— Opinionated Voice Dec 13, 08:03 PM #
— Mark Dec 13, 08:18 PM #