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 It was while looking for background information on Stanley “Tookie“ Williams, the Californian death row inmate executed in December 2005, that I discovered what Karl Hammond (above) actually looked like, via the Texas Dept. of Corrections website. What a weird feeling! Until that moment the only thing I knew about his physical appearance was that he was black. You’ll not have heard of Karl Hammond, but I came in contact with him back in the late 980s when he was awaiting execution in Huntsville, Texas for the murder of an FBI secretary. For six years I wrote to Karl, as often as possible, and managed to send him regular $ 5 money orders (sometimes a bit of an effort, as I was unemployed) to allow him to buy the day-to-day things you and I take for granted (toothpaste, soap, coffee, stamps, etc). And Karl always wrote back. He wrote long letters, his handwriting impeccable, his language fused with Texan inmate jargon. He wroteabout his past life, about prison, about its dehumanising conditions, the callous and indifferent prison guards and the inmate fights they would initiate for their own amusement, the total lack of privacy, and his fears, but never about the crime that led him to death row. And I never asked about it. As far as I was concerned it was irrelevant. I was just totally against state sanctioned murder. Early in the morning of June 995, I received a phone call. It was from one of his supporters — I had spoken to her before and she had a beautiful telephone voice.She told me that minutes earlier Karl had been executed by lethal injection. I honestly did not know how to reply. I had contacted so many human rights bodies, lawyers, governors and the like in the US regarding his execution date that I was sure he would get a stay at the very least. I really felt as if I had let Karl down. Undoubtedly many people involved with Tookie Williams felt the same that cold December morning. Tookie’s case was a bit different from Karl‘s, not that this implies he should have had more of a right to live, but Tookie was something of a celebrity among death row inmates and the anti-death penalty campaign. He was a one-time leader of the notorious Crips street gang. Whilst in prison he had penned nine books warning children and teenagers about the dangers of joining street gangs. He’d been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times and also for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 993, he videotaped a message at San Quentin that was shown to 400 gang members, and he helped negotiate a truce between the rival Crips and Bloods gangs during the first-ever gang summit in Los Angeles. He had also written a “peace protocol” to help warring gangs work out their differences. He had undoubtedly prevented many a gang death and put many a would-be hood on the proverbial straight and narrow. Were this not enough to make Governor Schwarzenegger re-think executing him, there was the fact that Tookie had spent 4 years awaiting execution. Twenty four years! If his crimes had been committed in Britain or anywhere else in Europe, I’m sure he would have been eligible for parole after that spell behind bars. Doesn’t the Eighth Amendment to the US constitution refer to cruel and unusual punishment? Is 4 years in a prison cell, awaiting state execution, not cruel and bloody-well unusual? Sadly, in the USA, the death penalty issue can be a popular vote winner and it seems that the Terminator was looking to up his ratings by ignoring please for clemency. Certainly Schwarzenegger was in trouble in the opinion polls, more so having appointed a Democrat as his chief-of-staff, so this execution was just another act of political expediency. Yeah, a sick trick indeed — George (Dubya) Bush actually got where he is today by signing the death warrants for 5 Texas inmates, my old friend Karl Hammond included. Died in agony The case of Tookie Williams has resurfaced in recent weeks. For, like Angel Nieves Diaz, a Puerto Rican, executed on 3 December last year. It turns out that Williams also took a long time to die — thirty-five minutes — and in agony. With news spreading fast that Diaz’s was another bungled execution, Governor Jeb Bush, brother of Dubya, announced he was suspending capital punishment in Florida. That same day, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel put the brakes on the Californian state murder machine, insisting that death by lethal injection violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Maryland followed suit within a week and also shut down its execution chamber, not because state authorities recognised lethal injection is “cruel and unusual,” but ostensibly because the method of execution (lethal injection again) had never been the focus of investigation where the views of the wider public are considered. The Death Penalty Information Centre, reports that 007 began with 10 states putting executions on the back burner — 5 percent of states that sanction the death penalty — and in almost every case it is the lethal injection method that is the centre of debate. Diaz, like Williams, and many others before him, was supposed to die painlessly and quickly — or so the defenders of the lethal injection method believed, and as if this made state murder more acceptable.
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