WASHINGTON — Georgia: Don’t kill Alexander Williams.
If you’ve already done so, you might read the remainder of this column for your amusement. But if you haven’t: Don’t kill him.
No, I can’t tell you that the 33-year-old Williams, convicted of a 1986 rape and murder, has transformed his life, or that new DNA evidence casts doubt on his conviction. I can’t tell you he’d never hurt anyone else, or even that he’s found God.
Well, as to that last, he does say he’s found God — has conversations with God — and that God is Sigourney Weaver.
And that, in a way, makes my point. Williams, prosecution and defense agree, is a mental case, a schizophrenic — and was when he raped and killed Aleta Bunch. According to a coalition of death-penalty opponents who’ve come together to oppose this execution, Williams’ mental illness is so severe he has to be medicated just to get him sane enough to be executed.
Think about that. If an otherwise normal person deliberately altered his mental state — with crack or LSD, for instance — before committing a crime, it would make perfect sense to medicate him back to normal before trying and punishing him. But how much sense does it make to treat (forcibly) a defendant who was insane at the time of the offense, solely for the purpose of making him fit to be tried and executed? Isn’t that itself a little sick?
But there’s another reason Georgia shouldn’t kill Williams. He was not only mentally ill at the time of his brutal attack; he was also 17 years old. Georgia, I am told, has never executed anyone who was that young at the time of their crime under its current law.
It’s a worldwide trend. "The overwhelming majority of nations — even those that see the death penalty as appropriate punishment in other cases — prohibit the use of capital punishment against juvenile offenders who were under 18 at the time of the offense," says Vincent Schiraldi, head of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. The seven exceptions: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Pakistan — and the United States.
OK, so Williams is 33 now. But if you think you shouldn’t put 16- or 17-year-olds to death, even for awful crimes, is it reasonable to resolve the issue just by waiting for the convict to become an adult?
Leaving aside the arguments as to whether Williams was himself horribly abused as a child, or whether he was represented at his murder trial by racist or otherwise inadequate counsel, how can even a supporter of capital punishment press for the ultimate punishment against a mentally ill teen-ager? Perhaps by thinking of Williams the same way you think of a rabid dog who needs to be destroyed for our protection without regard to the source of his rabies. Please, Georgia, Alexander Williams is not a dog. Don’t treat him like one.
Let me be honest: If you go back and read what I’ve written about capital punishment, you’d be forgiven for deciding not to take moral advice from anyone whose position has been as wishy-washy as mine.
All I can say is that cases like that of Alexander Williams push me closer to clarity and consistency. For me, there have always been two death-penalty issues: whether it’s ever right for the government to take a life and, if so, whether it can ever be done fairly.
The first has been the source of my vascilation. Some crimes seem so heinous, so beyond the pale, that capital punishment starts to make sense. I mean, how much jail time would you give John Wayne Gacy or the terrorists behind the violence we now know as 9-11?
The Georgia case underscores the second issue: Fairness. The more I study capital punishment, the more I’m convinced it can never be fair. And I am by no means speaking only of racial fairness, though that looms as a serious concern. Killers of rich or famous victims, killers whose crimes become famous after the fact, killers whose victims are especially sympathetic figures (perhaps because of the way the stories are handled by the media) — all these are more likely to result in the death penalty. And ask yourself when was the last time you heard of a rich killer being executed.
Someone will argue that it will cost Georgia less to execute Williams than to house and feed him for the next 40 or 50 years. Maybe so. But that’s hardly a good reason to kill him.
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
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