Why Many Blacks Oppose Tookie's Clemency

[MrSlayer]

"The small crowd of clergy, community activists and death penalty opponents that gathered in front of the Los Angeles courthouse recently was no different than other groups that for weeks have kept up the drum beat for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency.

There was one very loud exception. A young African-American man shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer and should die. He was not an agitator or a crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate."

<snip>

"The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black verses white racial divide issue, and with good reason. Whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims than whites.

The Justice Department's annual crime victim surveys have consistently found that blacks are nearly twice as likely to be victims of murder than whites. The leading cause of death among young black males under age 24 is homicide. In nearly all cases, other blacks will kill them."

<snip>

"Tookie certainly no longer fits the label of the violent predator. He has tireless worked to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence-prone youths. But many blacks have lost friends and loved ones to those gun-toting youths. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them.

It's unfair to blame one man for the sins of some in the youth generation. But when the body count rises, people look to place blame on someone, and Williams is that someone. It's only a short step from there for them to loudly say that Tookie must die."

<end>
Full article: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/29116/

I don't know if the black community will riot in favor of Tookie or celebrate his demise. Personally, I think everyone will just go about their business.

[RagingInMiami]

1. I seriously doubt they will "riot in favor of Tookie"

[MrSlayer]

3. So do I but people are putting it out there as a threat.

A "Free Tookie or we'll burn our neighborhoods down again" type of thing.

[nosmokes]

11. really? who? i haven't heard it. and i'd be sascinated to

hear someone actually threatening to burn down their hood if wiliams didn't get clemency.

[MrSlayer]

12. Check any of the million "Tookie" threads.

I've seen it quite a few times. Shall I dig up specific examples?

[nosmokes]

13. if you don't mind n/t

[Selatius]

2. Maybe if so many revolutionary leaders weren't assassinated...

then the situation in America's poorest neighborhoods would not be so damn fucking bad that they are today. Our great and fearless politicians today like to champion our accomplishments with respect to things such as the end of Jim Crow segregation...

But nobody was allowed to truly finish the emancipation of the poor with a little dose of economic desegregation. When you don't invest in these communities, you end up with dead communities with high crime rates, high poverty, and high rates of homicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, and a whole witch's brew of societal problems.

[KamaAina]

4. But "black-on-black crime" seldom results in the death penalty.

Studies have shown that the chief racial determinant in the application of the death penalty is not the race of the killer but of the victim. In other words, the penalty for taking a black life is life imprisonment, but the penalty for taking a white life is death. Makes a mockery of justice, don't you think?

Reason #87 to consign the death penalty to the ash heap of history.

[PDJane]

6. The main reason to get rid of the death penalty

is that it is a totally uncivilized action. Period. No excuses.

All the rest of the debate is just window dressing.

This is one of those things that civilized people don't do.

[BJW]

16. This is the situation in Cory Mayes case in MS

plus that the police really screwed up:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5558444&mesg_id=5558444

[MissWaverly]

5. I hope you make it the greatest page

this should be required reading here at DU

Miss Waverly

[MrSlayer]

8. This is one of those ugly truths no one likes to hear.

You'll notice it's getting very little attention from the "Save Tookie" crowd. And after I read all their stuff too. Oh Well.

[MissWaverly]

9. I am not saying that someday we may not need a death penalty

When we have a stable society, where our prison population is not rapidly expanding and is barely controllable with current budget resources, where rehabilitation is more than just
a word. Right now in many ways living in a metro area is much like the days of the Old
West, I feel like I am living on the "frontier" here. Real civilization, peace and justice
may come but it is still far away in the distance. I feel that the death penalty is the last stop, a last resort for brutality. They want to eliminate the death penalty, move back
to the cities in droves, provide a better tax base and break the cycle. Establish after school programs and summer school programs that will take kids off the street and prevent
them being funneled into the "hood" cycle.

[Yollam]

7. I'm sure they won't riot for Tookie.

They know the difference between a thug and a true civil rights martyr.

[Deja Q]

10. Tookie is BLACK?!

Sorry to sound stupid; but for the longest while I didn't know a thing about the case.

Then I saw how he treated his victims. Not a nice guy. Didn't note the skin color of the victims either, nor would I care. Murder is murder.

From this post, I think it's safe to say he's no honkey.

I suspect there will be riots. And regardless of what I think, and I've already said what I do think, I will admit there are understandable reasons behind the urge to riot...

At any rate, I can only observe and conjecture.

[MrSlayer]

14. Why does no one in the "Tookie" camp want to address this?

All I'm saying is give it a fair read and comment on it.

[nosmokes]

15. why didn't you answer the question about who was

threatening to riot and burn the neighborhood if williams didn't get clemency? i would like you tto cite something a bit more specific than 'the millions of tookie threads out there' since you're tossing the allegation about, because i haven't heard a bit of that. i haven't heard anyone making stanley out to be a hero, simpl a man that has done his best to redeem himself, and is now keeping kids from a life on the streets and is serving a useful purpose in doing so. by executing him we as a society gain nothing, but we do send a message that we still don't value life.

[MrSlayer]

17. Here you go.

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2005/11/23/america-turns-blue/?p=1506

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/06/02/news-krikorian.php

That's just two of several reports. The threat is out there.

Now some people have said it here as well. I just have to sift through the threads to find them. I don't know why you wouldn't believe me about this.

Edit: here is a link to one of the places it has been mentioned on here.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5559459&mesg_id=5559952

[nosmokes]

24. both articles cite the same source who simply states

a vague word on the street notion of what might happen.

as for the larger question of the DP, if you'll look at the stats you'll see it's not so much the race of the perpetrator as the race of the victim that determines whether the DP is sought in sentencing. at any rate, there's no guarantee that we will never put an innocent person to death, and that should be plenty reason enough to ban the heinous practice.

[Generic Other]

18. Do you speak for black America? The people of color at DU that I know

have come out against the execution as well as at the continual harping of the "fry 'em" crowd.

[MrSlayer]

19. I don't. The guy who wrote the article might.

The point is that it's nonsense to believe that all black people think the DP is racist and wrong. That seems to be a popular belief around here but is simply not true. Many black people want Tookie dead for the damage he has caused their community, damage that extends to this day.

[ultraist]

20. The DP is not racist in and of itself

Who believes that? It's applied in a racist manner. That is a fact backed up by statistics.

The DP is wrong as another poster further up the thread noted, it's not something civilized people should do.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/newsanddev.php?scid=23

7l% of whites favor the DP
44% of Blacks favor the DP

There are substantial differences between whites and blacks in their support for capital punishment. The data show that 71% of whites support the death penalty, compared with only 44% of blacks. This stark difference may be the result of the ongoing debate about the overrepresentation of blacks on death rows across the country. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that there were 3,374 prisoners on death row in 2003, of which 1,418 were black and 1,878 were white. Blacks represent 42% of the inmates on death row, but only 12% of the nation's population.

[MrSlayer]

21. In the article I posted the guy says it's 50-50 in the black community.

But that's beside the point really. The ratio of people on death row compared to population doesn't necessarily mean that the application of capital punishment is racist. It says to me that we have a real problem with high crime rates in poverty stricken areas and that a greater majority of minorities live in those conditions so you end up with a higher percentage of them in prison and on death row. Society in general is racist for keeping that cycle of poverty in the minority communities alive without offering a real solution. We as a nation surely have a long way to go to reach equality.

[ultraist]

22. Sorry, but the DP is applied in a racist manner

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=45&did=539

The results of two new studies which underscore the continuing injustice of racism in the application of the death penalty are being released through this report. The first study documents the infectious presence of racism in the death penalty, and demonstrates that this problem has not slackened with time, nor is it restricted to a single region of the country. The other study identifies one of the potential causes for this continuing crisis: those who are making the critical death penalty decisions in this country are almost exclusively white.

From the days of slavery in which black people were considered property, through the years of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Unfortunately, the days of racial bias in the death penalty are not a remnant of the past.

Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia which reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes.

A second study by Professor Jeffrey Pokorak and researchers at St. Mary's University Law School in Texas provides part of the explanation for why the application of the death penalty remains racially skewed. Their study found that the key decision makers in death cases around the country are almost exclusively white men. Of the chief District Attorneys in counties using the death penalty in the United States, nearly 98% are white and only 1% are African-American.

These new empirical studies underscore a persistent pattern of racial disparities which has appeared throughout the country over the past twenty years. Examinations of the relationship between race and the death penalty, with varying levels of thoroughness and sophistication, have now been conducted in every major death penalty state. In 96% of these reviews, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or both. The gravity of the close connection between race and the death penalty is shown when compared to studies in other fields. Race is more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking affects the likelihood of dying from heart disease. The latter evidence has produced enormous changes in law and societal practice, while racism in the death penalty has been largely ignored.

[MrSlayer]

23. So basically more white people who should die get life than black people.

I will agree with that. You see it most often among teenagers. Kyle, who sets up a mousetrap/shotgun shell booby trap in Mrs. Feeny's mailbox is troubled and disturbed but bright and fixable while Psycho Mike the Seven Deuce Blood is a dangerous unredeemable murderer and should get the chair. True.