Dartblog

There were two lives ended. One I was a part of; he was a man I knew. The other I knew nothing of, save for the judgment made against him by the people of California. But the first man has, for me, put a fine point on the life—or, more precisely, the death—of the second.

Successive courts of appeal, the governor, the United States Supreme Court, and the president, have denied Stanley Williams his request for clemency. He will be executed at 3:01 A.M. EST on the morning of Tuesday, December 13 2005 in accordance with part 190.01 of the California Penal Code by lethal injection. He is fifty-one years old. His life was spent, by his own choosing, amid the streets’ grime and graft. In his statement of decision denying to stay the execution, Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar retells the stories of Williams’ flesh-rinding crimes. The purpose of the graffito is, presumably, to respond in kind to activists’ sirens. They’ve raised such specters as mercy. The response to is highlight his unmercifulness. They’ve declared that he’s repentant. The response is to wonder why the confession goes unsigned. They’ve pointed to his children’s books. The response, appropriately, is to guffaw at the notion that lean authorship forgives crime and lightens punishment.

There is no ablution in Williams’ jailhouse deeds: given his freedom, he let blood and he constructed a propagating organization that would ensure the continuance of murder and street war. The circumstances surrounding Williams’ legal quest for a bantam sentence do little to raise Justice’s balance against the lives he has stolen. The facts say that Tookie Williams, killer of father, of mother, and of daughter, deserves to die. He ought to die. He must die, according to the law. He will die. Jeralyn Merritt, activist exemplar, writes to Governor Schwarzeneggar, “You hold a human life in your hand. We’ve seen enough killing. Please choose life for Tookie,” but she forgets that the life of “Tookie” is bankrupt. It is dry, made drier by the innocent people he killed. He was a hardened thug-by-trade who destroyed a peaceful family. Jeralyn’s teary pleadings are ignored by most of America because she fails to ackowledge that, while an eye for an eye may leave the whole world blind, Tookie Williams’ eyes contributed nothing to humanity’s vision.

Jeff Harrell says that after a death “there’s this agonizing feeling of irrevocability that passes over you. Nothing anybody can do, anywhere, can ever reverse what just happened.” And he is right: death is no gossamer pain. It’s deep and leaden. Sodium pentathol will make Williams feel it, and, these days, the glow and buzz of Blackberries will make the crowd, which even now stands athwart the prison, feel it. It is a harsh punishment. But Stanley Williams’ crimes were harsher.

The conflict as I have tended to view it lies not in an undue severity of punishment nor in the preventative efficacy of altruism. At its core the issue is the place of government among men.

An old friend died late last week. He wasn’t old in the sense that I’d known him for a remarkably long period of time—I myself haven’t been around long enough to have any old friends of that type. But he was old, sixty-one, and young, and certainly a friend. I am going to his funeral tomorrow, which is why I won’t be writing for awhile after this.

Doug was an attorney and a judge, and in his thirty-six years as a member of the New Jersey bar every rung in between. He wasn’t a big shot by any means or, at least, he wouldn’t say so. He was a Jersey guy who occasionally encountered greatness: he is responsible for the downfall of mobsters and murderers. He kept the town in which I grew up out of trouble. He dealt with multinational insurance corporations and wrinkled old ladies. He made certain to go down the shore every year.

In the practice of law, Doug was a harsh man, but his voice—no matter how gutteral and loud—was always informed by sympathy. He could have been giving a girl a speeding ticket or putting a wise guy in his place: he oozed effect but sacrificed no measure of compassion. Doug spent a good portion of his time representing government. Though he sat higher than most, he never projected downward. He couldn’t: government exists of men, not above men.

I worked with him in my last two years of high school and in a consulting capacity thereafter. A fortnight into my first year of college, he e-mailed:

You will do fine. We should be liberal at 18 and conservative at 45. If you are conservative at 18, there could be something wrong. However, remember intelligence must always be tempered with experience and the 2 equal Wisdom. Wisdom takes a long time to develop, so always keep an open mind and listen to all sides. Don’t be afraid to change your mind—that shows Wisdom. Keep up good work.

There was often talk of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. Doug and I rather often agreed on the issues of the day and the ideas of the moment. But the fractures came when it was government imposing itself on individuals. He railed thunderously against the New York Police Department’s institution of random bag searches in the aftermath of the London bombings. He said it was a dark path. I said it was a necessary evil. It is in the wake of his even moral keel, and in answer to his advice, that I am writing this short piece.

It is left to the lonely idealogue the frigid binary of, ‘This man was good; let him live. This man was not; let him die.’ If there is one thing I learned from Doug (besides “write no woman”) it was that no amount of Soma pills, no number of human rights commissions, no gender bending will ever shake out what is solid and preset in our brains. To rage at such a fiend as Williams is a preset. But the law does not consider rage. It considers justice—justice insofar as it can be exacted by a government no higher than a man. The best practitioners of law, as Doug was, are self-limiting. It may feel just, and it may be a deterrent, and it may satiate carnal desires (something which, heaven knows, we allow legislation to address in other venues) but can any government destroy one of its own citizens outside the realm of intergovernmental warfare? Government exists to provide collective security for a people against the collective offense of another people. Succeeding, it remains only to maintain peace.

Those who advocate the abolition of the death penalty tend to be those who advocate supreme governmental intrusions in other aspects of civil society. Their arguments, therefore, have involved melodrama, relativism, and statistics. They should be honest. Capital punishment is meat, medium-rare. It satisfies our human desires. We know it is fair, we know when it must be used. It is only natural to kill murderers.

But there is a foul: man has not yet imagined a construction that has the right to take life. To look at Stanley Williams and the crimes he committed, and to realize that no one but God is justified in ending his life is a disappointment. But it is the self-restraint that leads to good and just law; law that does not rise above the entities who commit it to paper. I have no idea what Doug, my friend, might think of this particular case. But in it as in all things, he’d be certain to tell me not to be afraid to change my mind. For that, and for decent, honest, compassionate jurists like him, I am thankful.