A Yom Kippur Reflection on the Death Penalty
Jonah also refuses to accept the role that God intends for him: to be an agent of positive change, a force for t’shuvah. This is what God expected of Jonah, and it is what Judaism expects of us. Yes, that we refrain from evil and do good, but also that we help others do so as well. Gandhi said that we must be the change we seek in the world. This too is our obligation.
So what does it mean to feel a sense of obligation to all people, and to be a force for t’shuvah in the world?
I want to tell you, briefly, the story of Stan “Tookie” Williams. For the past 24 years, Williams, who is 51 years old, has lived on death row in San Quentin Prison near San Francisco. Williams grew up in South-Central Los Angeles. As broken a community as you can find in this country. In 1971, at the age of 17, he co-founded the Crips, which quickly became the city’s, and then the Nation’s, most notorious street gang. In 1979 Williams was charged with four murders, crimes he says he didn’t commit. Two years later, he was convicted and sent to San Quentin. Serious questions about the testimony and evidence that convicted him remain. And Williams alleges that his trial was unfairly moved from LA to Torrance, where all African-Americans in the jury pool were dismissed and the case was heard by an all-white jury.
But even if Williams is, as he claims, innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted, let’s be clear: he was, at the time of his arrest, a dangerous criminal who had done more than his share of bad things.
But this is where Williams’ story gets really interesting. In prison, Williams began to rehabilitate himself. He publicly left the Crips. He then apologized for creating the gang and perpetrating, in his words, “black on black genocide.”
This was no ordinary prison conversion. Williams devoted himself to fighting gangs. He spoke out. He wrote nine award-winning children’s books to steer kids away from gang-banging, which he describes as “banging on your own people.” He began meeting with young people from at-risk communities to tell them to stay away from gangs, and to describe for them the horrors of prison. He also started the Internet Project for Street Peace, which encourages gangs to stop fighting each other. He created a “Protocol for Peace,” a model agreement to end gang feuds, and last year, the Cryps and the Bloods in Newark, NJ signed it, ushering in a truce that has remained in effect ever since.
This work led a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to state, in 2002, that Williams’ anti-gang initiatives made him a strong candidate for clemency from the governor. This sentiment was supported by the Deputy Mayor of Newark, who, in a letter supporting clemency, cited a dramatic reduction in gang-related crime in his city following the signing of what is referred to as “Tookie’s Protocol for Peace.”
Since 2001 Stan “Tookie” Williams has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature four times. And his was too good a story not to be made into a TV movie: last year, Jamie Foxx played Williams in Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story. Williams’ serves as an inspiration for a generation of vulnerable young people in our inner-cities, kids who are listening to him when he tells them not to throw away their lives like he did.
The results of Williams’ transformation in prison – of his repentance his t’shuvah – and the restitution he is making to the society that he damaged – are tangible. His work has, quite literally, changed lives and saved lives. Stan William’s today is not the person he was at 17. He is a living example of the power and potential of t’shuvah.
But not for long.
Two days ago, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear final death penalty appeals from three prisoners in California. That’s the end of the line for a capital defendant. Yesterday, the three were given execution dates in December, January and February. Stan Tookie Williams was one of those appellants. He is set to die on December 13. Two months from today.
You may disagree with me about the death penalty, and that’s fine. I believe that the capital punishment system in our State and in our country is so broken as to be beyond repair. And I think the issues Williams’ case raises reflect this.
I could cite for you the example of Illinois, where a Republican Governor, a conservative Christian, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, ordered a halt to executions in his state after journalism students at Northwestern discovered that more people on Illinois’s death row were innocent of the crimes for which they’d been sentenced to death than the number of people Illinois had executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the seventies.
I could tell you how the State of Georgia recently apologized for what it now acknowledges was the execution of an innocent person. I could tell you how the Supreme Court, as far back as 1987, acknowledged what we all know – that if you are poor or a person of color you are far more likely to get the death penalty than you are if you are white or a person of means. I could tell you that California’s system of justice is as overburdened and flawed any other state, and that if we begin in December a Texas-style run of executions we, too, will risk killing innocent people. We, too, will create dual systems of capital justice: one for the poor and blacks and Latinos, and one for the rest of us.