Now that Tookie Williams is dead, the Loony Left can now preoccupy itself with some other embarassing cause, like how we were cheated in Ohio last time (screw Diebold, Smythe...what about Mumia ?!?). Opponents of the death penalty spend years slowly building a consensus, against an overwhelming initial tide of public opinion, against the barbarity, calling into question our ability to guard against the execution of the innocent, its disproportionate application against minorities and the poor, the correlation between quality of legal representation and the imposition of the death penalty, and thereby gradually creating a remarkeable shift in public attitudes against capital punishment. And then Tookie comes along, and the efforts of so many are dashed, perhaps for a generation.

The clemency decision wasn't a hard call for the Governator. Whether the kiddie books were a p.r. stunt to avoid the needle (like his apparently bogus claim that he was a "co-founder" of the Crips), or a sincere effort to warn others about the gang lifestyle, it has nothing to do with whether he should have received clemency. The people who were loudest in calling for clemency were never going to vote for Ziffel anyway. The fact that the late Mr. Williams may have mellowed during his sixth decade on this planet wasn't going to change any minds among the rest of the public, who don't forget the fate of his victims quite as easily.

Williams needed to atone for the murders he committed, and he needed to show remorse for his life as a mob boss by breaking the code of omerta. He didn't, and up to 'til his final breath continued to raise "guilty man" defenses to his own crimes, such as jury composition and jailhouse snitches. Those are important defenses, mind you, and any self-respecting progressive must continue to demand that any accused be accorded due process, a fair trial, a non-prejudiced jury, and all the other accoutrements of a modern justice system. And whether the white jury was biased in favor of executing a black multiple murderer should be considered a relevant issue on appeal, even if we assume the defendant was guilty. But very few people are going to the barricades on the issue of whether an African-American mobster should receive clemency because he got convicted for the wrong murders.

What was important, at the very end, was not whether his trial was perfect, or the witnesses against him of sterling character, but whether he killed four people. He refused, in the face of overwhelming evidence, to acknowledge that guilt, so the question of whether his recent acts were real or P.R. was never reached. So, in the end, he died, like the tens of thousands of others whose lives have been graced by their association with the Crips.