Wojtek Sokolowski
You are barking at a wrong tree. As I said on this forum numerous times, I am against the death penalty on the grounds of its irreversibility of the conviction if made in error. But I also think that selecting this case as a rallying platform against death penalty was either totally dumb, or an attempt to discredit bona fide attempts to delegalize death penalty - or most likely an effort to gain popularity by a bunch of third rate celebrities and mountebanks posing as artistes. How else would you exaplain the fact that the 1,000th execution of Mr Boyd http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4490842.stm went virtually unnoticed, but this case of a popular "gangsta" became a media circus? It is that bunch of mountebanks and wannabe aristes that find it cool being associated with tough thugs. Fucking clowns!
^^^^^ CB: No doubt some racism in the perspective behind Wojtek's implication that somehow the Mr. Boyd he refers us to is a less heinous figure for killing his wife and her father than the (Black) "gangsta" for allegedly killing four people.
I say "allegedly" because it says at the website that Boyd didn't deny doing the killings, but Williams did deny doing the killings. Also, evidently, the only evidence linking Williams to the killing was a match with a gun he owned, completely circumstantial and , of course, owning a gun doesn't mean one used it on the specific occasion.
Probably some racism in Wojtek's outburst that Williams was an "obviously guilty gangbanger", too. You may be watching too many gangbanger movies. Maybe Wojtek means something like "well if he didn't kill these people, he killed somebody in his life or had somebody killed, so he deserves it. We know all those gangbangers have killed somebody. Afterall, why else would there be a "bang" in their name ? "
Seems to me that killing your wife is more treacherous than killing strangers, if we are going to get into lesser evilism analysis, so it is not clear that the Boyd case would be a better rallying platform than the Williams case. And then Williams had done an enormous amount of anti-gang work during his rehabilitation. Wojtek seems to ignore that Williams' supporters emphasized his ANTI-gangsta work, not his gangsta life.
Anyway, not too many on death row are likely to have been convicted of some murder that is not heinous, so Wojtek is sending us on a bit of a wild goose chase to look for a pretty death row pinup figure. I guess there is the case Max linked to ("Cory Si") with police breaking into the wrong house in a raid and getting shot as intruders with the house owner nonetheless convicted and on death row; leave it to them ole time southerners to come up with the doozie. But of course if most death row cases had sympathetic executionees, the cause would be won rather quickly.
Then a lot of the people in the Williams case may not have been involved to end the death penalty , but to save this particular person because of the level of his rehabilitation.
Actually, this is one of the better projects that Hollywood star types work on. It is their other stuff for which they should be labelled montebanks. I wish movie stars would spend all of their free time doing progressive political work like this.