Has Founder of Crips Earned Right to Live?

Day and night, a cadre of the condemned -- 3,500 men and 54 women -- await their fate in U.S. prisons on death row.

But the life of a single convict scheduled to die by lethal injection at California’s San Quentin prison Dec. 13 -- Stanley Tookie Williams -- has reignited a passionate debate among people of faith over accountability and punishment, forgiveness and redemption.

“There’s a grass-roots buzz about it. There are a lot of people talking about it because of who he was here in Los Angeles,” said Bishop Kenneth C. Ulmer of Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, a large, predominantly African American congregation.

Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist clerics and scholars said this week that the Williams case was fraught with ethical and moral implications.

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.

Williams, 51, co-founded the Crips street gang. He was convicted of the brutal gun murders of four people in 1979 during two Los Angeles robberies.

But after nearly 25 years behind bars, Williams has become for many an icon of redemption. He has written 10 children’s books imploring youths to stay out of gangs. He has helped mediate gang treaties. His life became the subject of a made-for-television movie, “Redemption,” starring actor Jamie Foxx.

Williams continues to profess his innocence.

The cover story in last week’s Los Angeles Jewish Journal carried the headline, “Should Tookie Die?” Across the state, placard-carrying demonstrators, including interfaith groups, have implored Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency -- in this case life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Challenging that stance, California law enforcement officials are calling on Schwarzenegger to allow the execution. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley decried Williams as a “cold-blooded killer.”

Proponents of the death penalty say that Williams’ efforts at mending his life, while laudable, cannot overcome the debt owed for taking lives.

“Principally, from a conservative biblical approach, if you shed man’s blood, by man your blood should be shed,” said Kevin Lewis, assistant professor of theology and law at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada.

Lewis said that if the governor granted clemency, society would be, under the concept of retributive justice, bearing the consequences of the crime itself. He doesn’t think it should be allowed in this case.

Even if Williams’ attempts at rehabilitation are genuine, “they would still not outweigh four intentional murders,” Lewis argued.

Lewis’ views are at odds with the positions of many American religious leaders, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the heads of mainline Protestant churches and a number of Jewish and Islamic scholars.

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.

In weighing decisions of life and death, the notion of repentance figures prominently in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Repentance is more than saying “sorry.” It is radically turning from old and harmful ways.

That is a problem in Williams’ case. Earlier this week, Williams refused to apologize for murders he said he did not commit.

That, said Rabbi Elliott Dorff, professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism, is vexing. To be restored, he said, one has to admit to something wrong. “The fact that he denies he is guilty frankly is a problem from the point of view of trying to apply the [Jewish] laws of t’shuvah” -- restoration or turning from wrong to right -- “to this case,” Dorff said.

Nonetheless, Dorff said Williams’ good acts since he was imprisoned would be reason to substitute life imprisonment for death.

Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance and a member of an interfaith coalition to spare Williams’ life, spoke of the Jewish tradition of nekudah tovah -- a point of pure goodness.

“Everyone is created in the image of God and thus endowed with a divine spark. That divine spark is unique and renders each human being inestimably precious. It also provides the opportunity for people to make t’shuvah, to redeem themselves, to turn away from wrongdoing and to do good,” he said.

“No one said they shouldn’t be held accountable and shouldn’t pay the price,” he said. Life imprisonment would fill that requirement.

“Even if he is guilty of the crime ... given what he’s done for the last quarter-century in redeeming his life and trying to repair the society that he so damaged, don’t we as Jews need to recognize that he is a living and breathing example of the power of t’shuvah? Do we really want to kill this person who every day does good in the world?”

It is a view shared by Fathi Osman, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation in Los Angeles.

If it can be proved that Williams has changed and repented, Osman said, the punishment should not only be reduced but eliminated.

In addition, if the families of the victims were to forgive, Islamic law would be against an execution, said Osman, who personally opposes the death penalty.

In this case, however, family members devastated by the murders continue to call for Williams’ death. What then?

“Their wish is not definite,” Osman said. “If there are signs and evidence that the person has repented, nobody can punish him, even the judge himself. Repentance means complete forgiveness.”

Moreover, Osman said that any possibility that an innocent man had been convicted would be enough to stop an execution under Islamic law.

The Venerable Wimalasara, a Buddhist monk who follows the Theravada or southern school of Buddhism, said his tradition opposes the death penalty.

“We don’t accept that penalty actually because we cannot do harm to any kind of being. This is our major principle. In the lay and monk community we observe principles, and the first is not to harm anybody or any being,” he said. Imprisonment is punishment enough, he said.

Beyond theology, there are streetwise reasons for allowing Williams to live, Bishop Ulmer said. To gang members, Tookie Williams is a hero, Ulmer said.

“If he’s going to be a hero, let him be a hero as one who turned himself around,” Ulmer said.

If Williams is executed, Ulmer said, gang members would ask why they should change at all. “Why turn? Maybe it’s better for me to spend the rest of my life running than it is to stop, slow down, and turn around,” Ulmer said.