In Pictures: Vigil for Stan "Tookie" Williams RIP

Hundreds of people waited outside California's San Quentin prison for the execution of ex-gang leader Stanley "Tookie" Williams.



Emotions were high as campaigners for and against the death penalty held their vigil.



Ex-gang members were among those who pleaded with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency.



Pro-death penalty campaigners argued Williams, convicted of four murders 24 years ago, should die by lethal injection because of his lack of remorse.



Mr Schwarzenegger said Williams' insistence he was innocent and refusal to apologise or atone meant the death penalty was the only option.



Journalists who witnessed the lethal injection said the mood in the execution chamber was sombre. Supporters of Williams and relatives of his victims watched him die.


And so we move on to the next media event in the Society of the Spectacle. Unwilling to examine the profound violence that IS the very nature of the system that incarcerates us all we shall flounder for answers as to why the most destitute resort to these acts of violence. We will lose ourselves in the latest Big Event while the war Over There in those Bandustans rages on and we will seek comfort in our thin gruel of 'easy chair' analysis.

And what difference does it make to those who live in the Hamptons or in The Hills that there are children in the streets that are born into prison, that will live their whole lives in prison? None. It makes no difference to those who claim the higher ground. They will turn away and point to the exceptions that "made it out" so as to validate their supremacy in a world of gross inequity. Will you too turn away?

doesn't it look like this man just jumped out of his car, hastily grabbed a box from the back seat, and wrote, albeit poorly on the box. Who are these people that will actually hold up a sign advocating killing a person? And if the man in picture #4 is a protester, could he not have put more effort into his sign, like actually getting the d in on bastard.

:shrug:

the bastar!

Entrance to the San Quentin prison, at 7:30 pm showing the area where Williams was executed by injections at 12:01am Tuesday.
(Robert Durell / LAT)

Theory of Surveillance: The PANOPTICON

The PANOPTICON was proposed as a model prison by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a Utilitarian philosopher and theorist of British legal reform.

The Panopticon ("all-seeing") functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know when he was being surveilled -- mental uncertainty that in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of discipline.

French philosopher Michel Foucault described the implications of 'Panopticism' in his 1975 work Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison --

"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."

http://cartome.org/panopticon1.htm

It is good for us to see them.

Anti-death penalty protesters' numbers grow as the night goes on at San Quentin.
(Mark Boster / LAT)

And is the death penalty what "we" want the world to see of US? What if the answer is 'Yes". Perhaps it is so that they will understand that we mean business like the authoritarian society that we are.

And I exclude myself and others like you when I say "we" in that latter case.

Peace

how the world views America.

San Quentin's Death
Row East Block



Anti-death penalty protesters (from left) Margaret Veach, Odavia Hernandez and Maya Goode rally near the front gates to San Quentin.
(Mark Boster / LAT)



Protesters at San Quentin State Prison show their support for Williams early today. (AP)



A crowd gathered outside the prison reacts to the news of Williams' death.



A protester holds a candle after news of the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams.
(Mark Boster / LAT)

We become the very thing we despise by maintaining this barbaric practice. Our system needs to address the mistakes made in the past and admit innocent people have been convicted. The governor had made his mind up before the announcement was made yesterday.

Thanks for sharing the pics (I hope the pro-death group is satisfied)


Amy Goodman has a special today on Democracy Now.

http://www.democracynow.org/

Anti-death penalty protesters from left, Jake Matheny, Nicole Salois and Nelson Ackerman sit down in front of the gates to San Quentin while awaiting word on Tookie's fate.
(Mark Boster / LAT)

Anti-death penalty protesters sit down in front of the gates of San Quentin.
(Mark Boster / LAT)

Being state sanctioned changes nothing.



Keith’s Barbeque Central

Protesters of the death penalty stage a candlelight vigil outside the home of Governor Swarzenegger's Brentwood home after he didn't grant clemency for Williams. Jim Reid is on right with a sign.
(Lori Shepler / LAT)



From there on it was a nail-biting vigil for everyone outside staring in, with no way to know which chemicals were being administered, since the plungers sending them into the intravenous tubes are pressed by unseen hands behind the chamber walls. Williams's chest heaved several times as he lay with his eyes closed, but somewhere in the 15 minutes from 12:20 a.m. to 12:35 a.m. the executioners filled his veins with pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing, and then potassium chloride to stop his heart.

<snip>

I know from talking to many others who have shared that chamber with me before that when months or even years have gone by, there will be no real closure or peace after what we saw Tuesday morning. Williams will not be alive for the supporters who wanted to save him, and the people he was convicted of killing will still leave huge empty spaces in the hearts of their loved ones.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/13/MNGCKG79QJ16.DTL

I don't like tributes to murderers, complain about the DP if you want. But don't give tribute to anyone who did what this guy did.

Albert Owens


Tsai-Shai Yang


Ye-Chen Lin

I do not claim to have an inside track on Mr. Williams life/death or celebrate either in an idolatrous or iconic manner. Nor do I revel in his murder by the State as many in the vindictive camp do.

People cared enough to stand up for a life. I guess I'm not so omnipotent as to think I can judge.