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RedditThere is undeniable hypocrisy in California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who built his fame by feeding adolescent fantasies of killing, denying clemency to a former Crips leader who counseled teenagers against gang violence.
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The Race to Replace Arnold: Running on Empty
Marc Cooper: The limp grassroots response to Democratic gubernatorial candidates reveals that the plummeting popularity of one party doesn't automatically translate into support for the other.
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Two Prisoners Named Williams
Dan Berger: The lives and deaths of two prisoners intersected this week--Stanley Tookie Williams and Richard Williams, flawed men whose political perspectives and pursuit of personal redemption were inspired by a radical social consciousness.
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Bringing Down the Bully
Robert Scheer: The lesson of the defeat in California of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's referendum revolution is this: The American people will not forever be fooled. The negative message of the Republican right has lost its power to terrorize voters.
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Is the Terminator in Free-Fall?
Marc Cooper: Once seen as the vehicle of hope and reform, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looks increasingly like an oil-burning jalopy of politics-as-usual.
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Stumbling Schwarzenegger
Marc Cooper: The California governor's campaign to pass a series of ballot initiatives is off to a rocky start.
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How Great Is the Gubernator
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Christopher Dodd
Bruce Shapiro: Strongest on human rights and civil liberties.
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Supremely Bad Decisions
Bruce Shapiro: With gleeful judicial activism, the Roberts Court swings right and sides with the interests of power.
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Virg. Tech: Only Connect
Bruce Shapiro: The Virginia Tech shootings should prompt us to rethink our approach toward guns, the media and mental health.
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Story Lines at Virginia Tech
Bruce Shapiro: The desire to impose a narrative on chaotic events leaves the meaning of the Virginia Tech shootings up for grabs.
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The Saddam Spectacle
Bruce Shapiro: A videotaped hanging does not bring justice to Saddam's victims, living or dead.
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Questioning Capital Punishment
Bruce Shapiro: As doubts grow about the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injection, California, Florida and Maryland have shut down executions. America's flight from the death penalty continues.
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Rule of Noose
Bruce Shapiro: Justice and reconciliation for the victims of Saddam Hussein will not be found at the end of a hangman's rope.
Like Karla Faye Tucker of Texas, whose plea for clemency in 1998 was famously mocked by then-Governor George W. Bush, Tookie Williams forced public debate over the notion of personal redemption. In denying clemency Schwarzenegger insisted that Williams's many years of antigang mediation and writing could not signify redemption in the absence of admission of guilt--and Tookie Williams always insisted he was innocent of the four killings for which he was convicted.
One inevitably wonders if Schwarzenegger would really have ruled the other way if Williams had uttered a last-minute confession. The recent history of death row cases reveals that guilt--even with confession--is a profoundly error-prone finding, and thus a poor guide to mercy. Clemency, in any event, is not in law contingent upon either innocence or admission of guilt; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governors routinely set aside death sentences at a far higher rate than they do today.
In the past decade, exoneration of more than 120 innocent death row inmates has generated a widening unease with capital punishment. The executions of Williams and Boyd--a celebrated African-American and reformed gang leader in California and a little-known, white Vietnam veteran in North Carolina who insisted, with substantial reason, that combat trauma contributed to his violent record--together move the debate to a new question: whether the finality of execution is ever a just measure of the twists and turns of an offender's life, or whether it is time to abandon a penalty that has outlived any purpose except blood vengeance.
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