Former gang leader Tookie Williams was executed this morning over the course of thirty-four "frustrating" minutes ("Hello, San Quentin? Hi, this is the Eighth Amendment. Yeah. Yeah, we've got some concerns.").

Now, I don't like the death penalty, so I'm obviously pretty biased, but it seems that even if I wasn't morally opposed to capital punishment, it wouldn't be a very good choice in this particular case. See here:¹

We use the death penalty to (A) punish, (B) comfort, and (C) deter.

(A) is surely met. We wanted to punish Tookie Williams, and we punished Tookie Williams. Whether or not that punishment is just is irrelevent for determining whether or not the death penalty served to punish. It did.

(B) is probably met, as well. The family of the victims was happy with the decision to allow the execution, and as they're the only people that the death penalty is really meant (on legal grounds, I believe, though certainly not public policy ones) to comfort, I suppose that is sufficient.

But then you get to (C). And (C) is a mess. (A) applies to the malfeasor; (B) applies to the malfeasee²; (C) applies to everyone else. The application of the death penalty in a given case is not meant to deter the wrongdoer from further wrongdoing; the judicial system trusts that he'll be plenty deterred by the life-in-prison that he'll be awarded if the death penalty is denied. Instead, the application of capital punishment is meant to deter future criminals from wrongdoing, and in light of that, the death penalty - as applies to Tookie Williams - is asinine.

To put it crassly, which is the more valuable commodity?

1. A former gang leader who very publicly encourages young people to avoid gangs, or

2. A former gang leader who is dead.

It reminds me of a quote from an episode of West Wing (from the days when it was great):

Leo: And you think ratcheting up the body count's gonna act as a deterrant?
Bartlet: You're damn right I-
Leo: Then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrant for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process.

Honestly, what's the deterrent effect here? By and large, the people who join gangs are not people with a lot of other opportunites. At best, Williams's execution makes Joe Tough hesitate slightly before making a decision that he's going to make anyway; at worst, it creates a perverse incentive for those on death row not to bother with the effort of reforming themselves (or at least publicly preaching a reformation message to others), since it won't lead to any tangible benefit.

I know Tookie Williams wasn't going to save the world. But he would have saved more kids as an anti-gang advocate than he'll save as a death penalty statistic. The California judicial system has made a unfortunate mistake.
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1 - And note that this is written entirely without research, and entirely within thirty minutes, so I wouldn't vouch for it as anything other than an illustration of my own personal reasoning.
2 - Not a word.