Tookie Williams III

Columnist Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News has weighed in on the Williams case. Williams, who maintains his innocence despite repeated instances of appellate courts finding him guilty of killing four people in 1979, is scheduled to die by lethal injection later this month. Many civil rights groups and Hollywood types are rallying around the cause and are asking California Gov. Arnold Schwargenegger to revoke the death penalty for Williams.

While I am against capital punishment, I am also against governments saying that the law really isn't the law if you seem like a good guy after all. I am also against people using race as a get out of jail free card.

An excerpt from Crouch's column:

Williams, who was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering four people in 1979, has the dubious honor of being one of the founders of the vicious street gang, the Crips.

Still, Williams is being held up as an example of redemption because he has supposedly turned his life around. He has written children's books that speak out against gang violence. But the actor and writer Joseph Phillips discovered that the highest selling children's book written by Williams has sold only 330 copies. Not exactly a universal audience. The murderer has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. But almost anyone can nominate you. That does not prove universal acknowledgment of importance.

What does all of this mean? Little. When we see the NAACP, Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover and that paragon of public morality, Snoop Dogg, calling for Williams to receive clemency, one is sure that they have bought into the big con that has as its foundation the interconnectedness of the death penalty and race. The two elements have become so interwoven that some assume that if a black man is on Death Row it has something to do with bias and an unrepresentative jury pool. One of the men crying for Williams to get clemency cites the fact that he was tried by an all-white jury, none of whom were his peers. Does that mean that Williams should have had a jury of ruthless gang leaders? Williams, like all criminals, is a lawbreaker first and has an ethnic identity second.

And rest assured that as soon as OJ Simpson finds the real killers, the Road Hammer will be the first to bring you that story.