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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (263718)	12/7/2005 4:32:04 PM
From: paret	Respond to of 1572366

MISPLACED SYMPATHY FOR KILLERS By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Wednesday, December 7, 2005 boston.com / Stanley "Tookie" Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California's San Quentin prison next Tuesday. His death will occur nearly 27 years after he brutally murdered Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk in Whittier, Calif., and three members of the Yang family -- Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin -- at the Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles. Unlike the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were horrific: He shot each of them at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused him. "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," Williams bragged after killing Albert Owens. According to the district attorney's summary of the evidence, "Williams then made gurgling or growling noises and laughed hysterically about Owens's death." As cofounder of the deadly Crips street gang in 1971, Williams's criminal legacy goes well beyond the four murders for which he was convicted. The gang violence he unleashed 34 years ago has destroyed thousands of lives and left countless other victims scarred by rape, assault, and armed robbery. Though he now claims to have reformed and has written books with an antigang message, he has never admitted his guilt or expressed any remorse for the slaughter of Albert Owens and the Yang family. If his supposed contrition amounts to anything more than lip service, he has yet to prove it. Williams adamantly refuses to be debriefed by police about the Crips and their operations or to provide any information that could help bring other killers to justice. In fact, officials at San Quentin have said he continues to orchestrate gang activity from behind bars. Incredibly, this thug is the object of the left's latest craze. For many anti-death penalty fundamentalists, it is not enough to oppose the execution of a savage killer -- the killer must be extolled as a noble soul whose death would be a loss for humanity. Thus Hollywood has honored Williams with a made-for-TV movie. The media have weighed in with sympathetic stories. A slew of celebrities, including such moral giants as Tom Hayden and Snoop Dogg, are clamoring for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and spare Williams's life. And all but forgotten amid this orgy of adulation are the victims Williams so cruelly murdered nearly three decades ago. What is it that makes victims so easy to forget? When Kenneth Boyd was executed in North Carolina last week, it was reported everywhere that he was the 1,000th murderer to be put to death since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976. But how many stories devoted more than a passing mention to the two people Boyd sent to early graves -- his estranged wife, Julie Curry Boyd, and her father, Thomas Curry? Why doesn't the media's round-number fetish extend to the victims of homicide as well as the perpetrators? If the 1,000th execution made headlines, why didn't the 1,000th murder? Or the 10,000th? Or the 100,000th? Actually there have been close to 600,000 homicides in the United States since 1976, and the total climbs by roughly 15,000 each year. Where is the uproar over those round numbers? Where are the protests, the petitions, the Hollywood rallies aimed at stopping those deaths? I understand that some people think capital punishment is wrong as a matter of principle. What I cannot understand is how anyone can be more outraged by the lawful execution each year of a few dozen murderers than by the annual slaughter of thousands of victims at the hands of such murderers. Opponents of capital punishment make much of the theoretical possibility that an innocent defendant might be killed. What they never acknowledge is that the abolition of capital punishment guarantees that innocent victims will die. That isn't only because executing murderers has a powerful deterrent effect, as a number of recent studies confirm. It is also because prison bars can't keep some killers from killing again. In its latest roundup of death penalty statistics, "Capital Punishment, 2004," the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that at least 101 murderers now on death row were already in prison when they murdered their victims; at least 44 others were prison escapees. Lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key may sound appealing. But some murderers will always escape and murder again. Others will kill in prison. Ultimately, the case for putting murderers like Williams and Boyd to death isn't just a practical one, strong though the practical arguments are. It is also a moral one. When the state executes a murderer, it is making a statement about the demands of justice and the sanctity of human life -- a statement as old as Genesis, and as essential as ever.

To: steve harris who wrote (263718)	12/7/2005 5:05:23 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572366

"kerry stuck his foot in his mouth. If you want to waste time "nuancing" it, knock yourself out..." Nuancing? Nonsense. 1 entry found for nuance. nuance n : a subtle difference in meaning or opinion or attitude; "without understanding the finer nuances you can't enjoy the humor"; "don't argue about shades of meaning" [syn: nicety, shade, subtlety, refinement] It is nuancing to attempt to claim that Kerry called our troops terrorists. Actually, it borders on seriously distorting, but... Kerry is right. We know that our troops do these sort of things, in addition to a lot of others. Iraqis should be policing themselves, not have our troops provide policing functions. We are rounding on year 3 since "Mission Accomplished".

To: steve harris who wrote (263718)	12/7/2005 5:18:09 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572366

kerry stuck his foot in his mouth. If you want to waste time "nuancing" it, knock yourself out... And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women Would you not be terrorized if say the Mexican Army invaded your home in the middle of the nite, brandishing weapons?

To: steve harris who wrote (263718)	12/9/2005 4:40:05 AM
From: paret	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572366

Tell that to the O.J. jury. _____________________________________________________- Stanley Tookie Williams – America’s ‘strange fruit’ San Francisco Bay View ^ \| 12/08/2005 \| Donna J. Warren Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” Neither does America. Why do they want Stanley Tookie Williams executed? Is it because he was convicted of murdering four people? Intrinsically racist White Americans lynch “strange fruit” like Stan Williams in American courts of law all the time. In these kangaroo courts, Black people, innocent or guilty, are convicted and sentenced to death. Tookie, Black and from the ghetto, was predictably found guilty by a jury that was not “of his peers” – one Latino, one Filipino and 10 whites. This mostly white jury is of the same breed of people who, with local, state and federal governments, instituted Jim Crow laws denying freedom to newly emancipated Blacks. If American courts ever attempt to be fair, no Black person would ever stand trial in front of 12 non-Black Americans. White serial killers are not sentenced to death. Capital punishment is a Black penalty. Was Tookie’s jury incensed that the victims were Albert Owens, Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Ye Chen Lin? Maybe Albert Owens, but America has no problem with the deaths of Asians. If so, America would show remorse over killing 2,000,000 Vietnamese in the Vietnam War and dropping the A-bomb on hundreds of thousands at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. CNN recently took a poll – unscientific but a poll all the same. Sixty-five percent of the respondents said Tookie must die. Not surprising! Bloodthirsty America sanctions murder when people of color are involved – look at the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead with no remorse by America. Killing people of color has never been a problem for America. It’s how America became America. Murdering Tookie and ensuring ghetto Blacks continue to fall into the pit of gang life is America. America cannot let Tookie live, for to do so means America cares about the young people who are driven into the gang life, and we know by empirical evidence that that is not so. Empirical evidence is everywhere, festering in the form of slums and tenements unfit for human habitation, schools – rat infested and infused with dirty toilets, nonexistent health care. Katrina, where Black babies floated in putrid waters, and thousands of people are still unaccounted for! America needs the illusion of gang life to maintain the whole shebang of the prison industrial complex – prisons, judges, police, lawyers, counselors etc. It’s big business, and it meets America’s goals to deny democracy and freedom to former slaves, the indigenous and poor whites. They say Tookie’s not remorseful for the killings. Tookie says he’s innocent. What kind of fool is remorseful for killings he didn’t do? San Quentin spokesman Vernell Crittendon wants Williams to inform on his old friends. Informing on gang members would “rip my dignity out of my chest,” Tookie says. I agree. Snitching is not only “undignified” but anathema to the truth. Only a liar admits remorse for something he did not do; only unprincipled cowards like Crittendon snitch. Crittendon says he suspects Williams is orchestrating gangland crimes from his cell. But there’s no proof. The prison industry will say anything to execute a Black man. Stanley Tookie Williams, nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize and the subject of the movie “Redemption,” has an amazing intellect and a voice so strong that he has done what governments fail to do: make a difference in the lives of children left to squalor in the ghettos of America – without healthcare, a decent education or even parents to raise them. America, vicious, bloodthirsty and racist, keeps the status quo of prisons, punishment and inhumanity on the backs of those she fails the most. Schwarzenegger could easily grant clemency for Tookie. The American courts could easily grant a new trial – one that isn’t judged by 10 whites, one Latino and one Filipino. In August 2004, a committee of prison officials commended Tookie for his positive steps in the past 10 years. Yet “corrections” made on their website – mysteriously removed one day later – alleged that Tookie “firmly entrenched himself as the leader of the Crips at San Quentin, wielding power as his lieutenants and other minions were dispatched to carry out his objectives.” Daniel Vasquez, warden at San Quentin from 1983 to 1993, said those remarks were “like corrections trying to drum up business for death row.” We pretend to warn children about the dangers of gang life, but if Tookie is put to death, our pretensions will be exposed for the lies they really are. The emperor is wearing no clothes. If Tookie dies, we lose a voice who can speak to our children in ways we never could. If Tookie dies, our children lose! Donna Jo Warren is a native of South Central Los Angeles and a former Green Party candidate for lieutenant governor of California