>>Khalid Muhammhed was a spokesperson for The Honourable Louis
Farrakhan, a US born demogogue the both of them. <<
Which I think is unfair to Farrakhan because it ought to be pointed out that Michael's quote was from the 1993 speech which was the cause of Muhammad being sacked as a spokesman and (allegedly; there is some disagreement about whether he resigned) thrown out of the Nation of Islam. The implication from the cut & paste is that KM was acting in his official capacity and reporting the views of LF which isn't supportable.
On the general issue of the Stanley Williams execution, I think it's revealing that he was constantly referred to as "Tookie". I really can't think of many other defendants in criminal trials who are routinely referred to by their nicknames ("O.J" Simpson is the only other one that comes to mind) and this is what confirms to me that the guy almost certainly didn't get a fair shake.
But on the other hand, I think it's strange to analyse the execution in a manner that doesn't recognise that he was, in fact, a gangster. He was a career criminal and more importantly, a gang member. That doesn't mean that it's OK to execute him, but it does mean that if we're going to talk about what's going on, then we ought to recognise that there are three conflicting sets of values at work in this case; our own (most of us anyway) liberal morality under which executions are wrong because society doesn't have the right to kill people, the opposite view that society does have the right (for deterrence or retribution) to kill people, and the third set of ethical standards; those of the gangsters. Stanley Williams lived his life under a theory of the relationship between the individual and the state (and indeed of the moral significance of death) which really doesn't have many points of contact with ours.
Williams, in the end, made the decision to die rather than inform on his former comrades (maybe he would still have been executed even if he had grassed, but he chose not to find out). Whatever else he had done in the way of rehabilitation, he was still clearly making decisions based on a code of ethics which is no more comprehensible to us on this list than that of the Homeric Greeks. I think that possibly the most sinister aspect of the debate over the execution (and here I am being intentionally Foucauldian and provocative; of course the most important thing is the state murder of a human being) is that it is entirely about the liberal/conservative "was it right/was it wrong of Arnold" argument. The actual moral perspective on the situation of the man involved has been erased far more completely than his physical body.
I don't think I've expressed this at all well; I now see the problem Judith Butler has.
best dd
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