Urging clemency as the clock ticks

IMAGINE this: You’re in a doctor’s office. He’s just told you you’re going to die. But he’s not sure when. Maybe Tuesday, maybe not. Maybe Monday. Or Thursday. Maybe you’ll live for years. It all depends. He’ll determine when.

The fear of dying would become far more agonizing than death itself, an easing into darkness, an almost gentle farewell to a life that wasn’t all that great to begin with. But it was still a life.

The uncertainty is what the 236 prisoners on California’s death row are enduring today, now, as you and I walk about, shop, work, see a movie or relax at home after a martini and a pork chop. The system is torturing them.

Of course, we haven’t murdered anyone. We haven’t sent another human being screaming into eternity while we pumped him full of bullets or cut his throat or beat him into pulp. We’ve just gone about our business, controlling our hatreds, damping our furies, reining in our tendencies.

In the ensuing weeks and months, we will once more be called upon to weigh the differences between us and them as the condemned line up outside the death-room door of San Quentin prison, waiting their turns to die.

Among those calling upon us to consider the societal burden of killing is actor Mike Farrell. You’ve seen him on the television series “MASH” and probably dozens of other shows.

You might have also seen and read about him being vilified, shouted at, cursed, threatened and condemned by audiences that can become as angry at him as they are at the possibility that a condemned man might avoid being killed.

Farrell is an advocate for life. He’s been that way about as long as Stanley “Tookie” Willams has been on San Quentin’s death row for killing four people. And now their lives are converging at an intersection that is once more witnessing a collision of passions over the existence of capital punishment in America.

Williams, co-founder of the notorious Crips street gang, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Dec. 13. His case is probably the most celebrated since death row author Caryl Chessman, L.A.’s so-called Red-Light Bandit, was executed 45 years ago under California’s Little Lindbergh Law.

Williams is an author too, with 10 books to his credit that warn kids to stay out of gangs. He’s been praised by President Bush and was the subject of a television movie last year called “Redemption.” He says he didn’t murder the people he’s accused of killing. And he says that during his 24 years on death row, he’s found a new calling.

Farrell, as president of Death Penalty Focus, has been at the forefront of a quest to end legal executions, confronting with composure those whose emotions often reach the high pitch of a scream. Some have had family members killed by the men whose lives Farrell is attempting to save.

“It isn’t a war of our moral positions,” he said the other day in a telephone conversation. He was in Fayetteville, Ark., preparing for the role of Clarence Darrow in “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial,” a play based on the 1925 trial of John Scopes, wherein Darwin and God went head to head.

“Our debate is about the system. The death penalty is inconsistent with the values of what America is. Are you proud of having a system that’s unjust? How do you feel about only poor people getting the death penalty?”

He points to the three men lined up for lethal injection as typical victims of the law’s uneven application: Tookie Williams, African American. Clarence Ray Allen, Native American. Michael Morales, Latino. All are minorities. All are doomed.

Farrell became politicized during the John F. Kennedy years and has campaigned for peace as hard as he has campaigned against capital punishment. Always it is the system he has opposed, one that sees impoverished prisoners go to their deaths, never those who can afford to hire the best lawyers.

Traumatized by divorce in the early 1980s, Farrell spent time in a halfway house that introduced him to alcoholics, drug addicts and prisoners seeking rehabilitation. He became a part of it while pursuing emotional reconciliation and went on to lead groups that visited prisons. He calls it “one of the most important experiences of my life.”

Membership in other like-minded organizations followed, and so did more visits to prisons and more efforts to help those about to be freed. He discovered the humanity in the felons he met and flaws in a system that allowed often-innocent people to be put to death. And he has learned to deal with the issue of how he’d feel about a killer if his own daughter were a victim: “I would want to strangle him with my bare hands -- but I want society to be better than that.”

It isn’t a question of personal morality but a discussion of the death-house culture. He isn’t for allowing killers to go free, he says. Let them spend the rest of their lives behind bars without possibility of parole, but don’t taint the morality of a society by killing them.

I’ve watched and listened to Farrell over the years. He’s a soft-spoken man with an almost diffident manner, and his presentations are without histrionics or self-aggrandizement. This is no celebrity with a momentary cause but a man willing to put himself before the mob for what he believes. That’s rare on any level.

And the fact that he also views humanity with hope may be the rarest belief of all.

Al Martinez’s column appears Monday and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.