Justice, Moral Indignation and a Man Named Tookie

Tookie Williams got the needle like I predicted. I have absolutely no feelings about the execution itself. Perhaps I should care more but I really don’t. As I’ve said before, I’m well aware that our justice system has flaws. For the most part, our prosecutors, whatever they might say about themselves, are after convictions, not the truth. It is through successful convictions they are promoted and rewarded. There is no tangible reward, save personal ones, for Truth. When one of these prosecutors is matched against an overworked public defender, he has the advantage in every way. The prosecutor can bring to bear the weight of the police department. By very virtue of his retention, the public defender will not be able to afford his own investigation. Our system of justice is adversarial by design. Our Founding Fathers thought tragically and thankfully so. By refusing to depend on the goodness of man, they provided the framework for the longest living democracy in the history of the world. A far cry from the motto of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) which ended with Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. That being said, Williams was granted far more judicial attention than most of his cohorts in the Crips. He was a true “cause celeb” like Mumia and Peltier. He spent over two decades on death row and had access to first class legal aid. For many, particularly the victims’ families I would guess, this was far too long of a wait. For myself, I’ve been to too many countries where the catch you on Wednesday and kill you on Friday and this way is much much better.

I don’t know if he was truly guilty or not. I wasn’t there and I didn’t see him pull the trigger. But I do know the very liberal 9th Circuit Court among others affirmed his guilt even with the admission of new evidence. I also think that his defense was diluted as well. His supporters could not make up their minds. To them he was a reformed killer and falsely accused at the same time. That’s a logical impossibility as both conditions are mutually exclusive. You cannot be a reformed killer without being a killer first. One is predicated on the other. And if you are a killer, then you weren’t falsely accused. How do you reform a falsely accused man who has spent half his life on death row? Why would you need to? This incoherency as promoted by his supporters did him no good. He would have been better served by consistency either by fully admitting his guilt and begging for leniency or defiantly maintain his innocence to the very end in hopes of shaking the legal foundations of the death penalty. But he tried to hedge and in doing so achieved nothing but creating a ruckus until the next “cause celeb.”

Lastly, I’d like to say that I’ve heard quite enough of the word “justice.” To me, it’s a word like “fair” which I’ve already expounded on. The only working definition of justice worth a damn is the Roman one. Justice is what we are able to compel. There is, inarguably, no cosmic arbiter of Justice as it exists in the material world. Whatever happens after, if anything, is far beyond the purview of man. Unfortunately, this word has become meaningless because it is used universally to bolster one’s position whatever it may be. Everybody wants justice. It’s just that my justice may not be your justice. Any attempt to find an empirical standard of justice that all parties can agree on is dependant on the subjects involved being rational. How often does that happen in death penalty cases? The families of Tookie’s victims feel as if they finally have their justice. His supporters vow to fight on until they get theirs. Which side is right? In terms of feelings, it doesn’t matter because in situations like this the side that loses will always fall back on righteous indignation, preferring to believe in an unlikely conspiracy rather than their error. My sympathies personally don’t lie with Tookie’s faction. I have no time for moral indignation particularly because I distrust it so much when I feel it. Erich Fromm wrote, “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.” That’s my bias, but in the tradition of the Founding Fathers, I choose to think tragically about Man as well.