A cogent argument as to why even a scumbag like Tookie Williams should receive clemency, by Marc Cooper. Advocates for the soon-to-be-late former crime lord are forced to make absurd pleas for mercy, based on such things as the racial composition of his jury (which failed to move that bastion of reaction, the 9th Circuit, when it considered the issue), his "nomination" for various Nobel Prizes (a distinction which the Crips Don shares with Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, among others), and his authoring a series of anti-gang books for children, while ignoring such things as his refusal to "violate" omerta by cooperating with authorities in the investigation of other crimes (including, presumably, the four murders that have put him in this predicament). Cooper just cuts to the chase: that the death penalty is a hold-over barbarism from a different time and place, one which is inconsistent with a great nation, and which is imposed arbitrarily based on factors, such as race and poverty, that we as a people should be overcoming.

To me, the best way to look at the debate over whether he should die is the observation that both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan are also guests of the California penal system, and neither will ever have to seek clemency to avoid the needle.