Death Penalty: Pros and Cons

Let me set the scene for you. Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the co-founder of the most notorious gangs in LA, accused of killing 4 persons in an armed robbery, is on death row. His case is about to be reopened (now supposedly a changed man after years in solitary confinement) and his only way to escape execution...clemency from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The evidence presented on his trial itself, collected from precarious and untrustworthy sources. Tookie never confessed to the killings, (but did confess to a violent past). The main evidence in his conviction, informants (themselves on serious charges of felony) stating that he had confessed to them.

The perfect case study for the national debate of Capital Punishment

". . . What a state of society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own
defense than the hangman, and which proclaims . . . its own brutality as eternal law? . .
. [I] s there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that
breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals
to make room only for the supply of new ones?" - Karl Marx, 1853

The death penalty is applied in the US only in cases such as Tookie's. But Tookie´s case like others to which the death penalty is applied other features other than the monstrosity of the crime committed. Racism, Uncertainty, Discrimination on the basis of economic status. Deterrence (is it serving its purpose??). Racism, according to Stats 42 % of death row inmates are African Americans. But the conviction doesn’t depend so much on the race of the perpetrators than on the race of the victim. A study, conducted by Glenn Pierce of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Michael Radelet, sociology professor at the University of Colorado, found that people who kill whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to die than those who kill Latinos and three times more likely to get death sentences than those who kill African Americans

Lets compare that to the case of Tookie Williams.