Tookie’s Reformed Himself, So Everything Is Okay Now.

J.J. Jackson* | December 1, 2005

Larry B. Stammer, of the Los Angeles Times asks, “Has Founder of Crips Earned Right to Live?”

Maybe Tookie could have asked that to the four people he murdered first.

None of us have a “right” to live. It is a gift from God. With that said, people do not have a right to take God’s gift away from us, either.

Back to the article though:

How does a society weigh the lives of the four murder victims against the life of a convicted murderer who is said to have genuinely reformed? How are accountability and forgiveness balanced? Even within religions, believers may disagree.

Well, it’s nice to see that Tookie has reformed. Can his reformation bring back the lives of those he killed? I am not buying for one second that Tookie is innocent in these crimes, but that is another argument.

Tookie is responsible for those murders and needs to be held accountable. I am not sure that the death penalty is necessarily the way to go.

Let me change gears for a second here and explain my position. I am a practicing Catholic. As such, I find myself struggling with the issue of the death penalty. Many people, such as Catholics try to say that it is not a deterrent. That is a false statement. While the death penalty may not stop other people from comitting the same crimes, it will stop the offender in question from comitting that crime, or any other crime, in the future.

Nonetheless, I do wish to respect everyone’s life from conception to natural death. However, if there is a death penalty imposed on people, at least those people did something that warranted they be put to death. That does not hold true for people who have yet to be born, yet their mothers kill them at an alarming rate!

Back to the issue at hand and the article:

Last week, for example, U.S. Catholic bishops strongly reaffirmed their church’s opposition to the death penalty. ” ? It is time for our nation to abandon the illusion that we can protect life by taking life,” the bishops said. They listed four reasons: Capital punishment violates respect for human life and dignity. State executions “in our names diminishes all of us.” As it is applied, capital punishment is “deeply flawed and can be irreversibly wrong” and is biased by race, region and the quality of attorneys. Society can be protected by other means, such as life imprisonment without parole.

Again, here is where I find myself butting heads sometimes with the leaders of my faith. It is not an “illusion that we can protect life by taking life.” That is what many refer to as self-defense. Secondly, as I stated before, when the person who receives the death penalty is actually dead, that is one less person out there killing more people.

What really offends me, however, is that the U.S. Catholic Bishops dared to bring race into this argument.

If the Bishops are trying to say that more blacks are executed more than whites, why is it that 58% of those executed were white and only 34% were black? If the Bishops wish to have an intelligent conversation on this issue, let’s leave race out of it, okay?

So, where does this leave Tookie? We can all sit here and talk about this, but there is a life at stake here.

Should Tookie be granted clemency and giving a life sentence without parole? Frankly, I am not sure I can answer that question and I think Governor Schwarzenegger is in a really tight spot on this.

As I stated before, if Tookie had not taken the lives of those four people, he would not be in this predicament in the first place! He chose to murder those people, regardless of his reasoning. He had no right to take away their lives, and now he dare ask for our mercy?

It is not for me to forgive Tookie as he did not take away my life, nor the lives of anyone close to me. Maybe we can ask any surviving members of the victims’ family and see what they feel. If they are okay with it, maybe Governor Schwarzenegger can grant clemency.

I would not grant clemency, though, because of the political pressure of such intellectual icons like Snoop Dogg, a fellow Crip himself.

My prayers go out to the victims’ families. My prayers also go out to Governor Schwarzenegger, who is going to really have to look over all of this before making a final decision.

I hope that Mr. Schwarzenegger will not cave to any political pressure from either side of the aisle. A man’s life is at stake, but this same man is responsible for the death of four innocent people.

Contributor's website: http://www.libertyreborn.com

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