It Came To Pass

"Redemption means you can't bring the person murdered back, but you can choose how to live afterward". Statement byMurder Victims Families for Reconciliation.

SF Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan gives "Black Power" salute at execution of Tookie Williams (NOT)

Oscar Wilde on Capitol Punishment :
"As one reads history, one is sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have commited, but by the punishment that the good have inflicted: and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habtual employment of punishment, than it is by the occassional occurence of crime."
Oscar Wilde submitted by Susan Hayward
It had been building all week. Heavy police presence, neighbors worried about having their cars towed, huge media outlet trucks with satellite dishes up and down the road.
Arnold said he would review Stanley "Tookie" Williams case and decide if clemency was warranted.
That gave everyone hope, just that clemency was even being considered.
Gray Davis never did that.
I offer my parking space to KPFA Radio as usual, then get anxious that the new people in the building will object. I realize this is not rational as KPFA's van will take up no more room than my own car but I worry nonetheless that someone in the neighborhood will find something wrong with this and rat me out to the landlady who will ask me not to do it again.
As far as I know nothing like that happened.
The wap-wap-wap of helicopters above has awakened me every morning for the last few days. It goes on throughout the day. Last time I heard this sound I was in Belfast Northern Ireland and realize that there are people who have become innurred to this sound as it it ever present. Like the people who live in South Central or Compton. I feel resentment at the media outlet trucks from CNN, ABC, CBS, KRON4 and others as they invade my street and create a media circus out of this event. Then again, the world should know and they have the bucks to do it; I just wish it weren't idiots like Keven Fagin from the Chronicle who describes Barbara Becnel as "bushy haired" and Tookie as "defiant". I'm sure Kevin would go to his death like a real man.
I'm cleaning my room in the morning and I hear a knock on my door.
It's Eric, the freckle faced guy who provided security for SnoopDog, the guy who looks like a member of the Fruit of Islam but probably isn't. He's accompanying Barbara Becnel, the woman who co wrote the anti gang children's books with Tookie. She is now inside the prison and he wants to park in my space until she comes out, a few hours he says.
He seems hopeful. He tells me that new exculpatory evidence has emerged from the jailhouse snitch on whose testimony Tookie was convicted (no physical evidence was ever tied to Tookie). I think he says that the snitch has recanted but I'm not sure. I'm too anxious and I haven't been following the case that closely. Can't deal.
It's cold and overcast, and it's clear everyone around is anxious and depressed.
Jesse Jackson and the Save Tookie people are marching from the City to here, across the Golden Gate Bridge, hundreds of them. My friend Lucienne, 70 years old (or so), is among them. God I love her.
My neighbor comes home from the store and says "Clemency denied". She heard it on the radio. I feel a streak of rage go through me, then despair-who the hell is this fucking Nazi from Austria who invited Kurt Valdheim to his wedding to play God? Herr Boobengrabber? Why did he let the whole world agonize over this, with the usual mental masturbation ("the longer it takes the more favorable the decision is likely to be...") engaged in by everyone who has no better information than the Starbucks clerk? Turns out he was rewriting his "clemency denied" speech, NOT "agonizing" over the decision in his hands like the media lapdogs say.
I put the tea on and before long people come trickling into the house after the sun goes down. The usuals from Death Penalty Focus, young, fresh faced and outraged.
Then Joan Baez comes in to get warm. She's brought her own veggie chips in a baggie. Asks if I want any. She asks if there is someplace she can be alone, undisturbed for a few minutes before going back out to the gates and singing.
I show her to my bedroom and was thankful I'd remembered to vacuum the cat hair off the bedspread earlier.
This is how she prepares to sing. I've heard of others that do this too; a kind of meditation.
While she does this a young black woman whose name I've forgotten comes in for tea and use of the loo. She has a pit bull on a leash named Spanky. She sits at the kitchen table and tries at least to talk with myself, a woman from DPF and one of the Board members from that organization. I can never remember their names!
They essentially ignore her, I can feel the cultural rift. Oceans and eons of time sit between this woman and the others at the table. They talk about the statistics of the Death Penalty, it's intellectual ramifications. This gal is not here for this reason; it's real to her. Lance, the Executive Director is a warm, nice guy who puts people at ease immediately with his demeanor. A real mensch.
I try to make the African American woman feel comfortable, chat her up but the moment of death is approaching and I can feel myself dissasociating, going out into the ozone mentally. It's difficult for me to reconcile this tableau in my kitchen as hundreds of people mill about outside in the cold. I hear later it's actually thousands.
In walks a HUGE man with a paisley scarf around his neck. It's a familiar face; one I feel comforted by.
Jesse Jackson tells all of us in the house that Tookie is "at peace"with the inevitable, that he is "strong". He hugs me and someone takes a picture of us.
Meanwhile 2 older black women from the Sonoma County ACLU can no longer brave the cold and need to sit. They come into the bedroom after Joan leaves it to go sing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" down at the gates.
I watch TV with these 2 women. We smoke cigarettes and I hope it's not bothering anyone else. We chat and I feel more comfortable sitting on my bed with these 2 women than I do sitting at the table. I leave the DPF people to their own devices in the kitchen.
Theresa next door comes in and she sits with us in the bedroom while I teach one of the women how to use the remote.
I feel now that the death of Tookie Williams is inexorably approaching and I can't bring myself to go down to the gates, just a few yards away and hear anymore speeches about it.
I don't want to see that gate ever again.
The big cast iron dutch oven containing the vegetable soup I made is now empty, with everyone helping themselves throughout the evening. Wish I'd made more.
I feel empty. I lie down on my bed a few minutes before midnight while the 2 woman are still there and fall asleep. I hear Mike Farrell from M*A*S*H and DPF in the kitchen but I don't get up to greet him. I'm not sure why. He's got plenty of company and he knows where the bathroom and the tea is.
All I feel I can do is give my house with it's central heating, my tea and vegetable soup to the folks who fight this state sponsored murder, the ones who have more strength for the fight than I do. A warm, safe haven in this macabre milieu; I can't do any more. I can't even be present.
I fall asleep and don't hear the announcement that Tookie is dead, that Barbara and 2 others who witnessed the execution gave the Black Power salute during the murder. I don't hear the details, the description of the inordinate amount of time it took for the Dept. of Corrections tech to find a vein in Tookies' arm in which to administer the poison, I don't hear that Tookie lifted his head up during it to ask them if they were "doing it right" after almost 20 minutes of poking him.
I don't hear Barbara and the 2 others yell as they come out of the prison "They killed an innocent man!".
I awaken to hear drumming across the street at the beach. I wish it were louder; I wish the whole godamned world could hear that a man was just killed, that our B movie Kindergarten cop actor Governor denied "clemency" because Stanley Tookie Williams didn't "apologize", didn't express "remorse" for a murder not committed by him.
I want my neighbors and the world disturbed by this and disturbed to the bone.
Guilty or innocent, we should be ashamed of ourselves for killing anyone.
I get up and go to the bathroom, the house is empty. I find a note written me by Joan. It says:
"Meg!! Thank you so much! And it was a good evening. They said Tookie was happy. Yours, Joan Baez"
From Duncan 12/14/2005
This just in from Duncan, another one of my Peace Center Board Members whom I love almost as much as Lucienne (if that's possible!):
Meg,
Thankyou for your account and the blog. I went down there around 10:30 after parking at Dominican and attending the earlier non denominational service/meditation . It helped to have the readings from Martin Luther King resonate through my head before going down to the circus. As I was riding down it occurred to me that of course you would be down there, you live there:but I didn't have your phone number with me (I must put it in my cell phone for times like these-there will be unfortunately, many more, soon)
and I didn't know which house was yours. I did see someone who I thought might be you standing on a porch but by then it was really packed and I just stood there with the folks I came with holding candles, listening to the stage on KPFA on my radio headset .Otherwise speakers were inaudible and the helicopter seemed intentionally designated to make it so.Of course ,.all executions are wrong and there is the problem of ascribing more moral illegitimacy to one execution over another based on perceived innocence and redemptive life behind bars of one such as StanleyTookieWilliams who I fully believe will be posthumously proven innocent after his murder by the state of California.(Oh, yeah, next , an old blind diabetic guy with a bad heart in a wheelchair! How much is the state going to spend to insure his official demise?) I naively thought however that this execution would seem too obviously stupid and medieval and that the "moral " stature of the important persons who publicly urged clemency and hope and good works of Tookie would hold sway anyway. After all,. Tookie wasn't going anywhere.But I keep missing the point .Their goal really is to have the brutality and the medieval acts trump humanity at every turn, in Iraq,in New Orleans, in our prisons, in the emiseration of the most desperately needy, infirm or just plain kids who want to get an education.
We have a Governor whose persona has gone from body building , to an avenging gladiatorial terminator in the movies.He embodies a strange narcissism. And of course , he has been a groping misogynist all along.And he doesn't have to change at all! He now finds the so called fictional roles he has played dovetail nicely with preferred political paradigm embodied by Bush and Co and the hyper-rightward shift and Christian Jihaad.-Biblical revenge.No Mercy.Fuck Compassion.He has in this act of murdering Tookie, embraced the path he believes (and is also advised ) will be expedient for political advancement in the future. You know, stick with the winners.Thanks Meg for in an earlier email ,reminding me also that, in fact, the Democratic hopefuls for Gov. are also pro death penalty and for political expediency , and would probably have no qualms about bringing back public stoning if they thought it would get them elected also .What is going through the head of Lockyear?They all may not get it that the death penalty besides being wrong (which they don't believe)could at least prove too great an embaraassment eventually.So, I dont know where this leaves us except we must keep our spirits and our belief systems from being ground down.
Thanks for opening your house as a much needed support center for all those people. I am sure it helped a lot.Talk with you soon.

Duncan