las meditaciones de victoria

The Criminal Injustice System

On Tuesday morning Amy Goodman interviewed Harold C. Wilson, a death row inmate exonerated after spending seventeen years behind bars.  I listened as I made the drive to Northern California where I spend Christmas with my family.  Before Tuesday I had never heard of Harold C. Wilson.  He is the 122^nd death row inmate to be exonerated in this country. 

As I made my way up Highway101, I took in all the development that has occurred in the last seventeen years.  Los Angeles and Santa Barbara have become one big megalopolis of interconnectedness.  It’s hard to tell where Los Angeles ends and Thousand Oaks begins.  Thousand Oaks seamlessly falls into Oxnard and Oxnard and Ventura appear to be separated only by a strawberry patch. What’s left of La Conchita is just around the bend, and a couple of surf spots away and you are in Montecito.  You blink once in Montecito and Santa Barbara begins.  In the last seventeen years as California has grown I have been busy exhausting my freedom on car trips up and down the state, across the country, and south of the border while Harold C. Wilson has spent twenty-three hours a day in a cell.

How did Harold C. Wilson become the victim of this heinous crime?  Could this happen to me?  My chances of falling victim to the former Pennsylvania District Attorney and his practice of racially discriminatory jury selection are nil.  If such a travesty were to occur I know that one of the two attorneys in my family and my access to friends and money would provide me with the sort of legal representation that would exonerate me.  For one thing I can’t imagine available DNA evidence being withheld in my trial.  It was the DNA evidence that was finally made available to a jury in an appeal on the 15^th of November that led to Wilson's acquittal.

As I moved north of Santa Barbara through the growing towns of Santa Maria (a town barely on the map seventeen years ago) and Paso Robles (now complete with vineyards and housing developments where only pastures, rolling hills, and oak trees used to be) I had time to reflect on 1989.  In 1989 I was a sophomore in high school.  I went to my first Rolling Stones concert.  Mikhail Gorbachev was named president and Salmon Rushdie was charged with blasphemy against Islam and sentenced to death by the Ayatollah.  As I drove up the coast I pictured images from that year – the lone protestor in Tiananmen Square, the Bay Bridge collapsing in the San Francisco Earthquake and East and West Germans climbing over the Berlin Wall.  There were no cell phones and the musicians in the band I saw last night were seven years old. 

This morning I drove south down Highway One to meet some friends for breakfast. At Hurricane Point I saw a California Condor out my passenger window.  This mammoth bird, with a wingspan of nine feet, was sitting on a guardrail unfazed by the white fog that forced me to drive 20 miles per hour.  In 1989, when Harold C. Wilson was sentenced to death, there were no California Condors in the wild.  All of the twenty-seven California Condors left in the world lived in cages at two zoos in Southern California.

What caused California to decide to make it a priority to free these birds by reintroducing them back into the wild?  Although I used to find it ironic that our State bird was extinct, their loss didn’t seem to have any impact on me or on the environment around me.  I wondered this morning if perhaps, like Californians and the Condor, we have reached a point where whether or not the criminal justice system affects us personally, we as citizens will recognize that liberty and justice must be for all.  Is it pipe dream to hope we can make freedom a priority and turn the present injustice system into a justice system regardless of race or class?  

Harold C. Wilson can be reached at haroldcwilson@gmail.com. 

Arnold… Are you for real?

          You know that anxiety nightmare, the one where you go to school and discover you have no clothes on?  Well, Tuesday morning I woke up with a similar anxiety – the State of California had just executed a man and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor.  I closed my eyes and told myself that I’m a thirty-one year old woman and that body-builders are not governors and to go back to sleep so I could wake up to reality.  Unfortunately, the reality is that here in one of the most liberal states in the union I am stark naked, and have no where to hide. 

          In his Denial of Clemency Arnold stated that the mix of individuals listed in the dedication of Stanley "Tookie" Williams' book Life in Prison was ‘curious.’  He then went on to single out George Jackson as evidence that there has been no honest redemption on Williams’ behalf.  (The other ‘curious’ individuals included some of my personal favorites: Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal.)  Schwarzenegger repeatedly returned to William’s lack of atonement for the four murders he was convicted of as evidence that he had not redeemed himself. Unfortunately, Williams’ case for clemency wasn’t about atonement or making amends for murders; it was about redemption, or changing his life from that of a gangbanger to a youth advocate.  And I am not just talking semantics.  Williams maintained his innocence of those murders since he was incarcerated.  His redemption or reformation was evident in the work he did while in prison by making a contribution to changing the behavior of young people.  I am left wondering if Arnold understands the difference between these two words. 

          Now those who know me know that my childhood wasn’t exactly status quo nineteen seventies – I grew up in a progressive household on somewhat of a Disneyland hillside where long-haired hippies sang Johnny Cash songs on the front porch all summer long, drinking beer and looking out into the endless and bountiful Pacific Ocean. Like many people in the 1970’s we had a copy of George Jackson’s book on our shelf. My illusion was that the progressive thinking of civil rights activists of the 1970’s had become status quo.  Citing George Jackson as evidence that Stanley “Tookie” Williams had not redeemed himself is an embarrassment to the civil rights movement, to rational thinking, and to every tax paying Californian who by default participated in Stanley “Tookie” Williams execution. 

          What George Jackson represented for Stanley "Tookie" Williams I cannot say; but to use his name, along with the names of Mandela, Davis, Peltier and so on as evidence of Williams continued commitment to violence, should strike us all as outrageous. 

Weltschmerzen and the Meaningful Life

I first saw a definition for Weltschmerz in the vocabulary review of a Dummy book on the GRE.  I bought the book six years ago when I first considered transitioning from teaching to journalism. Reflecting on yesterday I realize I was filled with Weltschmerzen; and with the exception of a tutoring session in the afternoon, I mulled over, and experienced this emotion from my couch and my red leather desk chair pretty much all day.  My two dogs were not at all pleased. As a result of my mood they too were forced into self-centered nothingness from their two Costco versions of my comfy couch and chair – furniture perfect for slipping into Weltschmerzen, especially with the blinds drawn, the heat turned up, and the weather outside cold enough to qualify as ‘wintry.’ 

Weltschmerz means literally welt world + schmerz pain.  Filled with world pain I began my morning in conversation with one of the several voices that occasionally resides in my head (thank God there were no Air Marshals around.)  We went back and forth about my plans (I’m planning – bad sign!)  When I tried to come up with acceptable reasons for sitting in my living room instead of in front of a classroom of students at nine am on a weekday, all I heard back was: You are trying to do what?  What do you mean, meaningful? Speak up? Participate? Challenge leaders? Make a difference?  Pretty soon I was off the couch and surfing the net for a teaching position with an immediate opening.  I quickly found a part time gig at LA City College and began to calm down.  Stanley will die, the death penalty will live, the nation will continue to turn it’s back on our brothers and sisters in New Orleans who continue to live the racist nightmare that is Hurricane Katrina, the war lies that brought us to Iraq will continue to go unaccounted for, the neediest will suffer, prisoners will be tortured, and I will teach English part time at Los Angeles City College.  Phew!

I recently pilfered a copy of Franny and Zooey from my parent’s garage and found the word again, this time in context (along with several other words from my Dummy book). Franny, like me, couldn’t get off the couch.  Bessie was beside herself and she sent Zooey to snap Franny out of it.  Exhausted by a futile effort to quell her collegiate need to understand both the Jesus Prayer and life, Zooey let loose on her, telling her it’s meaning was not “to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make your nasty Weltschmerzen go away and never come back.” 

So today I’m off the couch! I will continue to imagine and participate and hopefully make a difference.  My hope, dear friends, is that you will to. And despite yesterday’s Weltschmerzen I did catch a 1969 interview with Pete Seeger on KPFK and will leave you with his message: History gets made when people come to the same conclusion from many different directions.

Clemency for Tookie? You Decide

I cannot write with any certainty that Stanley “Tookie” Williams is innocent in the murders that he was convicted of in 1979.  Number one, I’m not a lawyer, and like the rest of us, I wasn’t there.  In February of 1979 I was in the first grade learning how to read.  That was also the year Greenpeace visited my classroom and sitting in a circle on Ms. Kodoni’s institutional green shag carpet we listened to underwater recordings of whales communicating.  Regarding Tookie’s innocence, I’m just an ordinary web surfer without even a Lexis-Nexis account.  But, when I take the information I do have and compare it to the realities of our justice system - a system filled with repugnant injustices continuing since slavery and corrupted by racism in the forms of disproportionate death sentences for black defendants, discrimination, bias and a grossly disproportionate group of white prosecutors - I'll leave the probability to you as to the potential fairness of Tookie's trial. 

I am clear about why I believe Stanley “Tookie” Williams is of more value to me and to rest of society alive than dead.  On several radio and television talk shows, as well as newspaper editorials, and broadcast news reports, Tookie’s death has become a high profile debate on capital punishment.  What is indisputable, on both sides, is the list of Tookie’s achievements in the years he has been incarcerated.  He has written ten books urging youths to stay away from gangs, he writes a monthly newsletter for kids, he has a website that is used along with his books in gang-and-violence prevention programs such as Neighborhood House of North Richmond, he wrote a memoir, “Blue Rage, Black Redemption” which was adapted into a TV movie starring Jamie Foxx, and most significantly he has been nominated for several Nobel Peace Prizes.  The Swiss Parliament doesn’t mess around with those nominations.  He received them because someone outside the United States noticed the positive example he set for a group too often ignored and sacrificed in this country – at-risk young people!

So from the comfort of our living rooms, from the cafés, bars, beaches that we frequent, and from the institutions that employ us daily, we have the luxury to decide whether or not we believe Stanley “Tookie” Williams should live or die.  For me, the testimonial that sealed the deal was in Tookie’s Mailbox on his website.  This letter came from a twenty year old Iowan boy.  He wrote:

The other day I sat down after I watched your movie Redemption and thought about all the things that I’ve done in my life and counted how many years that I should be in prison.  Every day between the age of 18 and 20 I risked getting 25 to life for the things I was doing.  I counted the years I should be doing for the other things I did and in six months time I racked up well over 300 years doing the minimum time for each crime I committed.  Only through the grace of my higher power whom I choose to call God that didn’t happen.  As well as no longer living a life of crime or violence I am also a recovering addict.  I will have 8 months clean on June 15 – that is 8 months without the use of any mood changing chemicals.  Before I watched the movie I was making plans to start living my old life again.  I wanted all the money and girls and respect (or fear) of others – but after I watched the movie and started to do some research on you, I found that we are not all that different.  I realized that I was going down that same road in a hurry.  You helped me see that.  They only way I can think to close this letter is to try to express my gratitude for the way you touched my life.  It is with the utmost respect and gratitude that I say thank you. 

I got the chills when I read that letter because, guilty or innocent, through Tookie’s service to youth he is of service to all of us.  The chances that any of us will fall victim to an act of crime and violence committed by this 20 year old Iowan boy has decreased significantly.  I thank Tookie for that and for that reason I am clear that he is of more value to me alive than he is dead.