Orville W. Taylor "I'll be black!" Arnold Schwarznegger said something like that in one of his movies. Though he is Austrian-American and white, the 'schwartz' means black in German and 'negger' is self-explanatory. The difference between 'black' and 'back' is only one letter but I know that the now 'Governminator' of 'Commandofornia' has a dilemma that is giving him 'l'.
Swartznegger is faced with the decision to grant Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency and commute his death sentence to life. As mentioned in my column of November 6, 2005, Williams is a co-founder of the modern American Crips gangs, an organisation that would make the Jamaican Clansman and One Order gangs envious in terms of national membership.
Williams was sentenced to death in 1981 for the 1979 quadruple murder of a convenience store clerk and a family of Asians in two botched robberies that netted the grand total of US$220, then valued at Jamaican $250. Having exhausted all known avenues of appeal, he has now spent two and a half decades on death row. In a state where 68 per cent of the citizenry support the death penalty, an overwhelming 87 per cent of Californian republicans are pro-execution. A small group of Americans, including the family of the victims and the prosecutors, are crying out for blood (which incidentally is the name of the rival gang to the Crips). He is scheduled for execution on Tuesday.
maintained his innocence
Although the circumstantial evidence has been overwhelming, Williams has maintained his innocence. Furthermore, he has refused to provide information to the police on the operations of the gang that he co-founded. Doubtless, this act would be a mitigating factor in assisting his plea for clemency. However, everyone, including the audience watching TVJ two weeks ago in Tivoli Gardens, knows that 'snitches' or 'informers' are seen as the scum of the earth by black inner-city dwellers. Having become an almost cultic icon for two generations of marginalised youth and many American blacks, he would become a 'punk' in a hip hop/dancehall generation.
Even more significantly, Williams has apparently reformed and renounced gang violence and written several books, including a series educating children on its dangers. His writings and activism from death row have led to him being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times (perhaps one for each victim). He also received one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, having refused to admit guilt, which he shouldn't if he is innocent, he is like our own convicted rapist and phenomenal singing talent, Jah Cure, who sings and speaks about rehabilitation from his erstwhile way of life but not the specific crime for which he is incarcerated.
Nonetheless, unless Schwarznegger intervenes, Williams will die on December 13. Though it is the 13th, he will not be saying "Thank God It's Friday!" (T.G.I.F). Rather, he will gasp, "So Horrible It's Tuesday!"
Still, Williams' case is a clear reminder of inequality in international relations and standards. In 1993, the Jamaican case of Pratt v. Morgan, was determined by the United Kingdom-based Privy Council. Still reprehensibly used as a final court of appeal for 2.5 million ex-slaves after 43 years of independence, it held that having a convict on death row for more than five years constitutes "cruel and inhumane punishment." Thus, the long arms of the mostly black Jamaican judiciary became effectively 'chained' again. Simply put, if Tookie Williams were Jamaican and had spent so much time in appeal and on death row, we could not execute him.
By the way, isn't it interesting that the standard method of execution in Jamaica and the anglophone Caribbean is by hanging? After the horrific history of post-civil war lynchings in America, black Americans would be appalled to know that this is how we execute our own.
need for a Caribbean
Court of Justice
Nonetheless, the Tookie Williams affair returns me to the debate about the need for a Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). Despite the misgivings that the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party and various human rights groups have regarding its format, there can be no disagreement on its indispensability. We are committed to a Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) which looks like a quasi-European Union (EU). Yet, we do not seem to recognise that with the free movement of labour and a move towards citizenship in the Caribbean Community, there are going to be judicial issues that are not simply related to trade but to human rights and social protection.
As my senior colleague Neville Duncan remarked last week in a forum (and there were really 'four rums') on globalisation and labour, the CSME member states should realise that the EU could only evolve to its present successful form after it gave juridical oversight to an extra-national body in 1986. Still, there is resistance to our own indigenous sovereign court although we have brilliant jurists, including the one who selfishly blocked my path in the gas station last month. Isn't it ironic that as the 'goodly' trade unionist remarked in the same symposium, we yield sovereignty to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and now the World Trade Organisation, but we fail to understand the importance of having a body that determines our own destiny?
Maybe it is a case of parochial selfishness or political myopia or it could even be a case of an intellectual and national 'blackout.'
On a more sombre note, there are 'grave concerns' surrounding an emerging pattern in rural Jamaica involving the disturbing of the buried dead. Unsubstantiated allegations are that the practice is linked to the wave of Haitian 'immigrants.' Hopefully, this is not so because the culprits would be 'dead wrong' without a 'ghost' of a chance of escaping.
Dr. Orville Taylor is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
