Reply #32: Following in his past footsteps.

[Sapphire Blue]

"if they are or might be following in his murderous footsteps, then they belong in prison." ???

Is this the message that they need to hear? That there is no hope for change, no hope for redemption... only a future in prison?!?!


Please read...

Stanley "Tookie" Williams: Redemption or Revenge?

Who knew that so many Huffington Post readers would be so thirsty for the blood of death row-inmate Stanley “Tookie” Williams? In my first post on the subject last week I had wanted to avoid the larger issue of the barbaric inanity of the death penalty to try to reach across the aisle to even the usually pro-death penalty people.

If Mr. Williams is granted clemency by Governor Schwarzenegger he will merely keep doing what he has been doing for the past two decades behind bars: trying to convince others not to follow in his footsteps. I tried to argue that as a symbol of redemption he better serves the public good alive than dead.

For example, in the first four months of January of last year thirty-two Bloods and Crips in Newark, New Jersey, had been murdered in their senseless, ongoing feud. On April 11th, Easter Sunday, Redemption, the made-for-TV movie on Mr. Williams’ life starring Jamie Foxx, aired on the F/X channel. Some Crips and Bloods saw the show, immediately went online to Mr. Williams’ website and downloaded his “peace protocol.” By May the details were ironed out, a truce was signed and former Crip Kevin Tate and Blood Lawrence McKinnis now head an extremely non-criminal organization called, “S(aving). O(ur). S(elves).”

<snip>

And if you’re a Christian, you obviously must be against capital punishment, because Jesus Christ couldn’t be more explicit in his condemnation of killing. WWJD? He sure as hell wouldn’t flip the switch.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trey-ellis/stanley-tookie-williams_b_1913.html

Another article...

Dead man talking
INTERVIEW BY STEVE BOGGAN
November 24, 2005
Tookie Williams faces the death penalty on December 13 for murder, a case that has divided America

(excerpt)

Williams is due to be executed by lethal injection on December 13. As co-founder of the Crips, America’s most notorious gang, and murderer of four innocent people, you might expect his passing to go unopposed, save for the usual objections of the anti-death penalty lobby. But you would be wrong.

His execution is causing more than the usual amount of debate in the US, more dissent, more soul-searching. Because the violent, narcissistic thug who was placed behind bars amid much rejoicing 24 years ago is not the same man who will have chemicals pumped into his veins in three weeks’ time. The Stanley Williams who faces death has undergone a dramatic change in personality, a rehabilitation that has seen him develop into an influential writer on the receiving end of five Nobel Peace Prize nominations and four for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

<snip>

“I look back now and what I see is a pattern of self-hate — not just in me, but among all the people I associated with,” he says. “When you grow up fed with a constant diet of stereotypes about criminal black people, on TV, in movies and the media, you slowly begin to believe it. You hate those stereotypes and you hate what you become. And what it leads to is most destructive — violence against other black people who are also filled with self-loathing. It becomes self-perpetuating.”

<snip>

“They propagate rehabilitation and reform but when it comes down to it they destroy it by any means necessary. By being alive I can save the lives of people involved in gangs — but who are those people? They are mostly poor black people and if I am killed what message does it send? “It tells people in prison that it isn’t worth trying to change and it tells the young black people in gangs that their lives are not worth saving.”

Continued @ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1885637_1,00.html