Reply #24: I Never Argued You had to support Williams To Support Clemency

[DistressedAmerican]

In fact that was the very point of my post. I do not support Tookie. I do however support clemency. I never said a word about him being freed either. I do not even know where you are getting that. I said quite clearly above that we were talking about commuting his sentence to life (as we should).

What about 20 years of appeals and court action is a RUSH to you? Setting a date twenty years and all possible appeals later is not rush to anything. If they set the date in 5 years from now (25 after the conviction) and met that date, would you say at year 4.9 from now that we were rushing into something? How about another 10, 20, 30 years?

As to reform? Is it possible? Yes. Sadly, when you have taken a life (or 4) those people never get to find out who they would have been 20 years after the incident. That was taken from them. So, your personal growth behind bars does not overly impress me.

You assert that lives can be saved by keeping him alive. I am not so sure of that. Do you really think killers are picking up a copy of his book? If they did, do you really think it would change their lives? Possibly. But, I would think pretty unlikely.

Like I have said, there are good reasons to oppose the death penalty in ALL cases. The death penalty is DRACONIAN AND WRONG. Opposing it on those grounds impresses me far more than on the grounds that someone has "changed" while awaiting execution. I'm sure that a lot of folks regret doing things they are being punished for. Does that mean we should not punish them as prescribed at sentencing? Should we reduce sentences for all convicted felons that express regret? What if they all agreed to talk to kids about not becoming carjackers, bank robbers, rapists or whatever?

Seems to me that making them regret what they did is the goal of prison.