Redemption

As a longtime proponent of capital punishment, I find myself a tad conflicted these days, not that that's a new feeling. The execution of Stanley Williams this week was a grim reminder of that conflict.

If there is a subject about which one is to be conflicted, pro or con, I can think of worse ones than this. And the recent exonerations of death row inmates have certainly mitigated my feelings about the most permanent of sentences, in procedure anyway, if not in principle. Regardless, even when faced with an undeniable monster like, say, John Wayne Gacy, I see no upside to the traditional sanctimonious moralizing, almost gleeful in its eagerness to get on with it. I simply never saw the point in warehousing a piece of shit like John Wayne Gacy. I do not see why taxpayers should subsidize creepy clown paintings and masturbatory correspondence with the legion of ghouls that wrote to him.

But whatever Stanley Williams was, he was not John Wayne Gacy. I do not buy into the boutique Nobel Peace Prize nominations (indeed, I'm sure some yahoo nominates George W. Bush every year, too) for Williams. It's nice that he made the effort to do books and speaking engagements to alert the kids about the dangers of gangs. I submit that people do not join gangs for the fun and excitement of it; I assume that they have merely run out of viable alternatives in a largely indifferent, job-free environment. And Williams did himself no favors by refusing to provide vital inside information in helping law enforcement break the gangs. (Not that it would have done as much good as The Man thinks it would have; the very nature of the organization of these enterprises, as with insurgent/terrorist cells, makes the effect not unlike that of hitting mercury with a hammer.)

People who are honest about their support for the death penalty will readily acknowledge that there is a large component of revenge inherent in the meting of punishment. This is not necessarily such an awful thing, except one gets the feeling that the people who crow the loudest for revenge are the least psychologically equipped to handle it when it's actually carried out. Case in point: the wife of one of Williams' victims had publicly proclaimed her willingness to accept that Williams had made an honest effort to change the course of his life, that while he knew he could not repay the debt he had incurred, he would do the best he could and hope for God's grace when his time came. Fair enough, though I find it passing curious that in the age of letting (no, encouraging) the families of victims natter and rant throughout the penalty phase, that this particular opinion didn't seem to count as much. The stepmother of this same victim, however, took the exact opposite tack, and insisted that only Williams' death could set everything aright.

The key here is that the wife had already made her peace long ago, and whether Williams' sentence had gotten commuted or not, she would have dealt with things. The stepmother, on the other hand, had invested herself quite heavily into the demise of Williams, and thus not only could not be sated any other way, but would be apt to find herself somewhat emotionally bereft once getting what she wished for so fervently.

The thing about being a death penalty proponent is to understand that, whatever its revenge-based motives, it is something that must be undertaken with a bit of sang-froid. Emotional hotheadedness does no one any good; this is an undertaking of serious, solemn gravity. There are human imperfections, and inexplicably some people in law enforcement have proven to be so craven as to either fudge lab results or use high-profile cases as political stepping stones. There should be serious accountability for those things as well.

What the execution of Stanley Williams really has me thinking about, though, is how little we think about what purpose we want our prisons to serve. Especially in California, which has an enormous (and growing) prison system. We have given up on even the pretense of rehabilitation; we have decided that they're all animals and simply must be warehoused. The problem with that is that eventually their time is done and they get unleashed on the public once again, now stupider and meaner (which may describe the public as well, now that I think of it).

Being a godless amoral hedonistic sybarite, I sometimes find myself wondering if Christians believe more in the God of spiteful retribution, or the Jesus who always offered the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Obviously it varies from person to person, maybe even day to day and situation to situation, but in the aggregate, people seem to be content with the smiting, and then going through the rituals and totems of affirming their godliness to one another, if not themselves.

One perfect case is none other than former Texas governor George W. Bush, who once famously mocked Karla Faye Tucker shortly before her execution, much to the horror of none other than Tucker Carlson, who was probably wearing his bow tie and nothing else when interviewing the brilliant, charismatic governor. Whatever one's sentiments about an eye for an eye or whatnot, that is simply unchristian behavior, pure and simple. It's despicable. But it's a fine glimpse into the mind of an unreconstructed troglodyte.

I think Arnold Schwarzenegger missed a real opportunity, by passing up the commutation of Williams' sentence. Politically, it is seen as the astute move to make. But the GOP's fortunes are on the wane, W's dead-cat bounce of last week notwithstanding, and the California GOP is so desperate they're trying to draft Mel Gibson. Arnold could have followed the instincts of his "Austrian brain", shown the ability to be reflective, and given the finger to a party that is looking for a way to kick him to the curb anyway. The problem is that he still he thinks he can be president. He (and the rest of us) would be better off if he just made another crappy movie, this time about him being president.

One thing death penalty opponents bring up as rationale is that it's wrong to allow the state so much power over life and death. I think it is strange to insist on shutting this particular door so long after the horse had fled the barn. The state and federal governments already exert impossible amounts of influence, direct and indirect, on our lives and the quality thereof. Percentage point diddlers make the difference between living in a house and living in a cardboard box for a lot of people, every time they fuck with the interest rates to "fight inflation". Congress fucks the middle class every time it throws another tax cut to a useless, unproductive sack of shit like Paris Hilton. This isn't all that much different, not in terms of the irresponsible exercise of raw power.

Another DP opponent trope I want to hit before closing this out, just as food for thought, is this -- it is often said that a life sentence is just as effective a way to protect the public. Sounds reasonable, except it's not the guarantee they think it is. The very next inmate scheduled to be executed at San Quentin next month, Clarence Ray Allen, debunks exactly that notion.

Allen, who ran a security company in Fresno, was linked by prosecutors to a series of armed robberies in the Central Valley. He was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murder in 1974 of his son's girlfriend. From behind bars at Folsom Prison, prosecutors said, he masterminded the murders in 1980 of three witnesses from his previous trial and conspired to kill four other witnesses.

A parolee, Billy Ray Hamilton, was convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out the three murders with a sawed-off shotgun.

The tone of the article actually revolves around the fact that Allen is 76 years old, blind, diabetic, and mostly invalid, and near death anyway. I couldn't possibly care less, nor do I care about his attorneys' assertion that Allen had a heart attack because the prison guards refused to give him his medication. I don't get off on it, like some, but I don't fucking care, either. Three more innocent people died after this cocksucker got his life sentence.

I do not have a one-size-fits-all answer here; I merely suggest that it's a more complex subject than either side wishes to acknowledge. For every Stanley Williams that reaches for redemption, there's a Clarence Ray Allen, a Richard Ramirez, a Richard Allen Davis. If you've ever directly known someone who's been viciously and senselessly murdered, you know it's not so cut-and-dried.