Letter to the Governor

from the desk of
Michael O’McCarthy
opolitique [at] aol.com

Dear Governor:

This is both a political and a personal letter. We met years ago when I lived on Venice Beach so I know you to be a very personable and sensitive human being.Thus, my appeal for clemency for Stan "Tookie" Williams is based on a communication between two human beings as well as a political argument against the death penalty.

In regard to both I oppose the death penalty. I oppose granting the State the power or right to commit murder. No nation can be secure when the State can decide when, how or who is to die by its arm. The human emotion for revenge and for punishment as an act of vengeance is the driving force for the utilization of the death penalty. It is all too understandable. Too human.

The pain of that the survivors of victims experience; the impact on society as a whole when someone murders another is manifestly negative. That is as true for the individual who bludgeons our environment with such an individual or mass act, as it is when the State antiseptically eliminates the inmate in the death chamber.

But it is simply wrong to empower the arbitrary and bureaucratically incompetent organ of government to act as might a enraged citizen. You have said so throughout your political career regarding far less important matters. I ask that you apply that same criteria to the matter of life and death as you would taxes.

To empower the government with the right to kill one person for one reason, allows the government the right to determine who lives and who dies and for whatever reason. This arbitrariness is the method of dictators. It is antithetical to democracy.

I know more about the death penalty and the men and women who reside on death row than most.

In 1979 I was commissioned to do a study of death row inmates, those who were granted clemency and their sentences change to life without possibility and lived on the "yards" of various California prisons; those who made the transition to civil life and were no repeaters.

The end result was that the death penalty had not viable positive, deterrent impact either on the men studied or those predisposed to kill; or those who spontaneously committed homicides.

Further, to the best of my knowledge, I am the only ex-California prisoner to ever sit in the Green Room, in the chair used to execute Caryl Chessman and Barbara Graham, and walk out alive.

The irony of that is that I was charged with the exact crime for which Chessman was executed. I then served seven years in the worst of California prisons and jails in the 1960's.

During that period I rehabilitated myself and became an organizer of other prisoners and saw the remarkable change that education and communal empathy and identification can bring about among equals. I was eventually paroled and discharged. My contributions to this society and to humankind are varied and manifest. I believe for the better.

I also knew those black men - boys really who would become Crips and Bloods. I was best friends with members of the Black Panthers. Which raises the specter of poverty and racism that was pronounced in white American during that period. Southern California was more like Mississippi than its image as a progressive, post-war community. (Walter Mosley has documented that environment more so than anyone - as well as Ellroy in LA Confidential.)

There was a vacuum of leadership due to the decimation of the Panthers and the execution of alternative African American peer leaders: Medgar Evers - Malcolm X - Martin Luther King, not to mention the wholesale murder by the police (during COINTELPRO) of youth leaders in the Panthers. Eventually, the Panthers found themselves in violent confrontations with the police, far more often the product of police agent provocateurs and agents and irresponsible members than by calculated, criminal acts.

I will however remind you of Ron Karenga and his "black cultural" organization US, the police sponsored terrorist group founded at UCLA, that was directly responsible for the murder of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter the Black Panther involved in community organizing. This act in the late 1960's along with the police instigated raid on the Black Muslim Temple in South LA emphasized the hopeless of community programs developed by the Panthers and others in LA. The message to the youth of LA was simple: there was no hope - the police and white people enemies or criminals involved in the decimation of any progressive activities of black youth.

Into this void, in the ghettoes of Los Angeles and elsewhere, grew a youth generation without positive direction - victimized by generations of racism and familial disintegration that would become the environment in which the Crips and the Bloods would thrive.

I make no apologies for their acts. We are all responsible.

Now your are responsible. You either allow the state form of murder to take place for no greater social or human good, or you say no.

I ask that you say no and allow life to continue.

I respectfully request your consideration to this message. I know you are inundated, but I hope there is a perspective here that will provide your with a different vision of this life or death situation.

yours sincerely,
Michael O'McCarthy