4th
New life in death penalty debate
The Columbia Chronicle - link
Originally published: December 12, 2005
In 1981, Stanley Tookie Williams was convicted of murdering four people during two robberies in California and was sentenced to death in San Quentin State Prison. Since then, Williams, a co-founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles in 1971, has maintained his innocence. He is scheduled to be executed Dec. 13, and now pleas for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Williams clemency have come from civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as celebrities like Jamie Foxx and Snoop Dogg.
But the level of debate surrounding Williams’ impending execution has been amplified by the recent milestone in Raleigh, N.C., on Dec. 2. Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th person put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty nearly 30 years ago. And nearly three decades later, the debate surrounding capital punishment is no less passionate on either side.
Just last month, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle suggested that in August 1993, the state of Texas may have executed an innocent man when teenage offender Ruben Cantu was put to death.
Like Williams, Cantu maintained his innocence until the very end, and Cantu’s long-silent co-defendant signed a sworn affidavit saying he allowed his friend to be falsely accused. The lone eyewitness in the case told the Houston Chronicle that he felt pressured to identify the then-17-year-old Cantu as the man who shot him at least nine times and fatally shot another victim in November 1984. Juan Moreno recanted and told the Houston Chronicle that Cantu was not the criminal. “It was a case of an innocent person being killed,” Moreno said.
One of the strongest arguments for capital punishment is the belief that killing convicted criminals is preferable to the possibility that they will return to society. But that belief hinges on the certainty that the people being sentenced to death are, in fact, guilty of the crime for which they had been convicted.
All too often in recent years, an eagerness on the part of law enforcement officials to bring closure to a case has resulted in incarcerating an innocent party. And, as in the case of Cantu, mistakes revealed too late are impossible to correct.
But since the U.S. Supreme Court brought back the death penalty in 1976, more of the American public has expressed a hesitant attitude toward rushing to the eye-for-an-eye style of justice. Americans would prefer to see convicted murderers put to death rather than return to civilian life; but support for the death penalty is not as fervent when compared to life without parole.
Additionally, many studies have indicated that it actually costs taxpayers more money—more than $1 million per case—for the process of sending somebody to death than it does to incarcerate them for life.
But what remains disturbing about the continued tradition of executions is the racial divide in the United States it contributes to. Though blacks and whites have been victims of murders in nearly equal numbers, since 1977 more than 80 percent of the people executed were convicted of murdering white victims.
In January 2003, Russell Feingold, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, told Congress, “We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment.”
The case for Williams is another high-profile story in a long and bitter debate. But the moral grounds on which the entire argument has always teetered overshadow our commitment to a judicial system that needs to begin asking tougher questions instead of simply seeking quick answers.
