There is a 51-year-old man who is sitting on death row in the San Quentin death house counting the days until he is executed by lethal injection on Dec. 13. His name is Stanley “Tookie” Williams and he has become a lighting rod for the on-going debate in the United States regarding capital punishment.
Williams is one of the founders of an infamous gang, well known on the streets of California as the Crips. He was found guilty of four murders and sent to San Quentin in 1981. During the past 24 years, he has written a series of children’s books directed at keeping them out of gangs. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times in the past five years.
Yet, he is not so very different than the other 3,400 inmates awaiting execution in the United States. Unless his sentence is commuted to life in prison by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Williams, like the others, will die. It is just a question of when.
The United States has a long and checkered history in relationship to executions. In the late 1960s there was even a 10-year moratorium against capital punishment and during that time, no one was executed. Then in 1972 the US Supreme Court overturned most state death penalty laws and the individual states scrambled to enact new ones. Thirty-five states put death penalty laws on the books. The result is that 1,000 executions have been carried out by lethal injection since 1976, with the state of Texas in the lead having conducted 355 executions during that time period.
The argument rages between social conservative elements that claim the death penalty deters violent crime and sometimes even non-violent crime, to the more liberal opponents who see the entire act as barbaric and unnecessary. They argue that with scientific improvements such as DNA analysis, innocent prisoners now have a real opportunity to be freed.
They have a valid point in this argument because since 1973, 122 people in 25 states have been freed. Another contention is the fact that many countries have completely outlawed capital punishment. Amnesty International says that in 2004 ninety-seven percent of all executions were performed in just four countries, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United States. They cite 3,400 executions in China, 159 in Iran, 64 in Vietnam and 59 in the US. While these executions are usually tied to violent crime, in Asia capital punishment is widely used for drug related crimes. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and almost all of Europe and Latin America have abolished the death penalty.
So, what about the deterrence theory, the underpinning argument for capital punishment? This theory, along with a number of other statistics is surprising. There is a misconception that both the victims of murder and the perpetrators are black males. Although less than 2 percent of murders are committed by women, the fact is that in recent studies it was found that half of the victims of murder were white and half were black. It also found that in over 80 percent of the death penalty cases the victims were white. This gives some credence to the contention that murdering a white person is more likely to result in a death penalty sentence then murdering a black American.
As for the deterrence factor, an FBI report from 2002 showed that the murder rate in the Southern United States increased by 2.1 percent while the murder rate in the Northeastern United States decreased by almost 5 percent. The Southern region accounts for 82 percent of all executions and the Northeast region accounts for less than 1 percent. The state of Texas posted a 7.6 percent increase in homicides and at the same time they had three times the number of executions in comparison to other states. So much for the theory of deterrence.
The question is why do 35 states in the United States believe it is necessary to execute human beings? The Williams case is an important example of demanding justice that is based upon the ancient idea of, “an eye for an eye.”
Yet, the United States claims to be a highly developed and civilized society, while still employing a measure of punishment that results in the loss of life. A life that may still have purpose such as in the case of Williams, a purpose that no judge or jury can foresee.
