Bye, Bye, Tookie

Tookie Williams died this morning and I say God bless and good riddance. He died an unrepentant murderer who refused to let go of that arrogant street criminal attitude of denial that all inmates possess as they watch their lives disappear in prison. Denial is a way to live with their crimes and it keeps them a victim of the system, the man, and the world. It allows them to leave prison and feel justified to commit more crimes.

For someone supposedly “reformed” he clung doggedly to the notion that he was innocent, framed, a victim of the white man’s persecution. Anyone who has ever done something wrong knows that the first step of making an amends is to admit that you made a mistake. Repentance means saying that you were wrong, and asking for forgiveness. Those are all things Tookie has refused to do even to the bitter end.

Tookie, and all murderers like him, deserve their punishment. I believe that there is one act that a person can commit that deserves the ultimate price and that is premeditated murder. We live in a society that has rules and covenants, those in writing and those that we keep with each other. They all are meant to keep us safe and to keep our society from falling into anarchy. To me the most sacred of them is the one that forbids the taking of another human life.

One person does not have the right to end the life of someone else, period. No one, outisde of a courtroom, has the right to decide when someone else’s life should end. Tookie not only took that right for himself four times but he did it in the most humiliating way he could. We will never know how many times Tookie Williams took his shotgun and robbed a business. But we do know that four times he took that shotgun and put it against someone and shot them dead.

He shot Albert Owens as he lay on the ground in the back of 7-Eleven. Albert died for about 100 bucks. Yen-I-Yang and his family died for a bit more. All snuffed out by a man with no respect for human life; a man, Tookie Williams, who consciously broke the covenant that we share with each other; an agreement more important than any other.

I know all about the circular logic that says if you condone the death penalty you condone state supported murder, which is no different than what Tookie Williams did. But I disagree with that thinking. We all bind together and create a society that is given the job of making laws and enforcing them. The understood caveat is that we will all abide by those laws and we will all do what’s best for our society.

When someone breaks those laws they are punished. We all know when we are breaking the law. Many people make a conscious decision to break the law, to disregard the agreement that we all live under. In the case of first-degree murder they break the most sacred covenant that we have. In my mind when you do that, you forfeit all rights that are afforded a person in our society. Tookie took another person’s life and because of it, he forfeited his own. It’s not like no one told him what was coming if he took that shotgun and with a complete disregard pulled the trigger.

If Tookie had dropped to his knees and asked for forgiveness then maybe I could have believed that he had been reformed. But he was an opportunist, a street-wise gangster who knew what it takes to save his ass. He did all that and more. He wrote his books and gave his speeches. Don’t end up like me he said; don’t make the mistakes that I made. He asked for the one thing he refused to give, mercy.

His work was good but it didn’t make up for the four lives he shot out. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to make him deserving of clemency but instead became a showman, dancing for the bright lights. Only with honest repentence can he ever be truly rehabilitated. In the end, to me, by refusing to admit his mistake and asking for forgiveness he didn’t distance himself from the same attitudes and anger that helped to create his world in the first place. By claiming his innocence he kept himself chained to it and it dragged him to his death.