FOCUS TU www.iraqoccupationfoer David Finkel We learned in early December, if nothing else, what a filthy little coward California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger really is.
Fresh from the voters' massive defeat on November 8 of his ballot initiatives -which would have gutted public education and teacher rights, further enriched the pharmaceutical industry at consumers' expense. empowered the right wing to rig electoral districts and imposed unconstuDona restacions on abortion rights for women under age 18 - Schwarzenegger had the opportunity to redeem his own generally worthless life.
The governor could have granted clemency Stan Tookie Williams, the former LA gang leader who spent the Dast cuarler CenLury California's Death Row for four brutal 1979 murders.
Williams had long expressed remorse for the carnage he felt responsible for perpetrating as a co-founder of the Crips street gang - but not for those four killings, that he did not commit and in which he was not involved at all.
Williams' conviction and death sentence was a fairly typical travesty of its kind -no physical evidence, incompetent defence council, rigged jury selection - based solely on testimony from jailhouse "informants" claiming that Williams had said he did it.
He was easy to convict because he was a gang leader and commanded no sympathy.
What was unusual about Tookie Williams was his selfconversion
prison, depicted in the movie "Redemption," to a campaigner agalnst violence as an author of children's books.
He became a leading figure speaking out against the selfdestructive brutality that pervades amencan socier - ut kind of mindless violence that Schwarzenegger became rich and famous by glorifying throughout his cinema career. Worthless coward: Schwarzenegger
Not only were there then at least two reasons tor clemenci in this particular case, but the tide has turned against the barbaric death penalty in the
More and more people understand that innocent people ARE falsely convicted and sentenced to die. Indeed, Mumia Abu-Jamal (whose death sentence was overturned last year by a federal judge, although Pennsylvania is seeking to restore it) has won the right in federal court to challenge his original conviction on grounds of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct at the 1982 trial.
In California itself, a legislative vote is pending on a death penalty moratorium in
Tookie Williams, of
course, could not
respond to this
cowardly, politicised
and race-baiting
smear, since he was
taken that night into
the execution chamber and
murdered by lethal
injection
But Schwarzenegger not only refused clemencv Tookie Williams. In his written denial, he cited Williams' dedication of book "proof" that Tookie's redemption was fraudulent.
The book's dedication to people like Mumia, Geronimo Pratt (imprisoned for over two decades for murder before his innocence was proven), Nelson Mandela, Assata Shakur (a refugee in Cuba trom our murderous justice system) and other political prisoners showed that Williams espoused violence!
Tookie Williams, of course, could not respond to this cowardly, politicised and racebaiting smear, since he was taken that night into the execution chamber and murdered by lethal injection - a botched job that took half an hour to complete.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has found his place in history alongside that other obscene object, George W. Bush, who even before he was installed in the White House was already America's number one serial killer having presided over the death-row assembly line in Texas.
Schwarzenegger murdered a man who was his superior in every Tookie Williams achieved redemption, Schwarzenegger never will • David Finkel is an editor of AGAINST THE CURRENT (www.solidarityus.org) in Detroit, Michigan.