Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
We hereby nominate Howard Bashford for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Henceforth, we expect any media mention of Howard will refer to him as "Nobel Peace Prize nominee Howard Bashford."
That is the treatment accorded Stan "Tookie" Williams, the celebrated Los Angeles gangster who is scheduled to meet his executioners Dec. 13. We feel that Howard, who over the years has done as much as Williams to foster peace and understanding (and never murdered anybody) deserves the same respect.
Now, the Nobel Committee doesn't let just anybody submit nominations. It frequently is noted, for example, that Williams first was nominated by a member of the Swiss Parliament.
The Nobel folks say the right to nominate is "based on the principle of competence and universality" and "shall be enjoyed by ... members of national assemblies and governments of states; members of international courts; university rectors, professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology ..."
Well, let's stop right there. The specifications already have included enough jackleg ethicists and intellectuals to people every American refuge for the criminally insane.
The latest Williams nomination was made by a group of pedagogues headed by a philosophy professor whose writings are regularly published by that friend of American justice, the Socialist Workers Party.
This worthy has the audacity to argue that California is hustling Williams to the death chamber with unseemly haste. And never mind that the killer has been on Death Row for over a quarter of a century, during which period his victims have remained dead.
On the basis of this assertion alone, we, the Sainthood for Howard Committee, feel we exceed the minimum standards for nominators. Thus, even if he doesn't win, Howard must evermore be known as a Nobel nominee.
As for Williams, his champions are arguing for gubernatorial clemency based on the following assertions:
- The founder of the brutal Crips gang in Los Angeles is a changed man who is sorry about his criminal past (though he has yet to admit the shotgun executions of his four defenseless victims in 1979.)
- He has written nine books intended to discourage children from joining gangs. (Well, he co-authored them with the woman he calls his "editor," Barbara Cottman Becnel.)
- Executing him "would be like executing Louis Pasteur or Florence Nightingale." (This is not a joke but an actual sentence from a sample clemency plea on the Web.)
- "At a conservative estimate, Stan has probably saved hundreds of lives over the past few years" with his anti-gang message. (Meanwhile, the Crips have rolled on, ruining, "at a conservative estimate," hundreds of lives.)
Williams' website says "his life has become a challenge to one of the basic assumptions of our barbaric death-penalty system – namely, that those on death rows around the country are the worst of the worst, incapable of making a positive contribution to society and utterly irredeemable.
"For that reason his right-wing critics are incapable of recognizing that his transformation is for real ..."
Forgetting that punishment, not redemption, is the purpose of our penal system, let us examine these advocates' underlying premise: It is that Williams is too valuable to kill because he has so much to offer society. His murders of a quarter century past, it seems, fade to insignificance in light of the good works of which he is capable.
We should ask, however: What good might have been accomplished by the convenience store clerk he shot twice in the back with his 12-gauge shotgun? We'll never know.
What good might have been accomplished by the Chinese immigrant family – mother, father and daughter – in the 26 years since Williams gunned them down in their small, Los Angeles motel? We'll never know.
The implication of the arguments for clemency is that Williams' life, over the years he has fought to retain it, has become more valuable than the lives he terminated. One needn't be a "right-winger" to recognize the fallacy of this cold-blooded equation, and to see that William's transformation, real or counterfeit, does not mitigate his crimes.
Will his execution Dec. 13 be just? Certainly it will not. Justice would have demanded an earlier end, leaving redemption in God's hands.
(Postscript: Because Stan Williams is black, his advocates have raised the spectre of racism, saying his prosecutor excluded blacks from Williams' jury and made "racially coded" remarks, comparing Williams to a jungle beast. They also cite statistics that show black murderers are more likely to be put to death than white murderers.
No. 1: The prosecutor may have been a racist, but Williams got a fair trial, as demonstrated by his loss of appeal after appeal. Further, given the savagery of the murders, the predator metaphor seems apt.
No. 2: The unfairness demonstrated by the execution statistics is not that black murderers are more likely to be terminated; it is that white murderers are more likely to evade a just penalty.)