Justice for Tookie
There is a lot of internet comment tonight by people opposed to capital punishment about vengeance vs. justice. Their idea seems to be that you can take justice, understood as proportionality (no other definition is suggested by anyone), re-label it pejoratively as ‘vengeance,’ and then claim that it can't be justice. But that's incoherent. Justice isn’t limited to punishment, it also applies to rewards. Would anyone call equal-pay-for-equal-work an example of vengeance? As an alternative term for justice, try ‘equity’ and then see how the argument proceeds.
The idea that anti-gang lectures and children's books (even assuming Tookie actually wrote them) somehow redeem him makes no more sense. That’s easy enough to see if you come at it from the other end: Ask yourself how many children’s books someone would have to write, and how many anti-gang lectures someone would have to deliver, before he had earned enough “credits” to be allowed to murder four innocent people and avoid the needle. The answer, of course, is that there is no such number.
The talk about redemption makes me think of the old James Cagney movie where he plays a cocky, flashy criminal much admired by the kids in his slum neighborhood. He finally ends up going to the chair (for killing a cop, I think), but he's a genuinely tough guy fully able to spit in the executioner's eye as he gets strapped in
The neighborhood kids are all looking forward to seeing how their hero will show the cops and judges what a stand up guy looks like by going to the chair unbowed and with a sneer on his face. But at the last minute Cagney is made to recognize the destructiveness of his influence, that he is the very last person those kids need for a role model. So he puts on an act for the reporters witnessing the execution, bawling like a baby, weeping and pleading for his life in a shocking spectacle of abject, gutless, sniveling fear. When that shameful exit is described in the papers, the kids who idolized him lose all respect for someone now revealed as a phony and a coward. On their behalf, he irrevocably destroyed his own reputation and heroic image
If Tookie would do something like that tonight, it could be worth a trainload of anti-gang books and lectures. That really might be a redemptive act
Byron
The idea that anti-gang lectures and children's books (even assuming Tookie actually wrote them) somehow redeem him makes no more sense. That’s easy enough to see if you come at it from the other end: Ask yourself how many children’s books someone would have to write, and how many anti-gang lectures someone would have to deliver, before he had earned enough “credits” to be allowed to murder four innocent people and avoid the needle. The answer, of course, is that there is no such number.
The talk about redemption makes me think of the old James Cagney movie where he plays a cocky, flashy criminal much admired by the kids in his slum neighborhood. He finally ends up going to the chair (for killing a cop, I think), but he's a genuinely tough guy fully able to spit in the executioner's eye as he gets strapped in
The neighborhood kids are all looking forward to seeing how their hero will show the cops and judges what a stand up guy looks like by going to the chair unbowed and with a sneer on his face. But at the last minute Cagney is made to recognize the destructiveness of his influence, that he is the very last person those kids need for a role model. So he puts on an act for the reporters witnessing the execution, bawling like a baby, weeping and pleading for his life in a shocking spectacle of abject, gutless, sniveling fear. When that shameful exit is described in the papers, the kids who idolized him lose all respect for someone now revealed as a phony and a coward. On their behalf, he irrevocably destroyed his own reputation and heroic image
If Tookie would do something like that tonight, it could be worth a trainload of anti-gang books and lectures. That really might be a redemptive act
Byron
posted by Byron | Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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