Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Scene out side the gates at San Quentin State Prison where Stanley
Tookie Williams was executed shortly after midnight Monday.
There is something about the Williams case that is deeply troubling.

No, what is most disquieting for many people is the issue of
redemption, which he placed front and center, arguing in effect that
his salvation from sin and commitment to a life's work steering kids
away from gangland violence amounted to a persuasive reason for
clemency, or to put it more simply, for mercy.

Redemption is a question we all grapple with; it is one we may dwell on
particularly at the end of another year. You don't have to be religious
to believe that sin is a universal human condition; and you don't have
to be a Christian to be moved by the belief in Jesus Christ's sacrifice
for the redemption of mankind.

Yet Schwarzenegger, in his five-page explanation of his decision, made
short - almost sneering - shrift of Williams's plea for mercy on the
basis of redemption. He wrote: "Without an apology and atonement for
these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this
case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete
remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

I think, on the basis of repeated court findings and the volume of
evidence, that Williams committed those murders and I can't say why he
would not apologize for them directly. That secret he took to the
grave.

But to claim, as Schwarzenegger did, the nonexistence of redemption in
the face of Williams's repeated apologies for gangland violence and his
earnest attempts over many years to turn youths, especially poor young
black men, away from crime seems to me at once facile and grave.

Nowhere is it written that redemption is impossible without confession.
Mercy has more to do with an invocation of grace than a measurement of
facts. Clemency must reside more in the instincts of the heart than the
calculations of the mind.

"This is kind of the toughest thing you do when you're governor,"
Schwarzenegger said last month. Well, yes, governor: to take or spare a
human life is a terrible responsibility. The gravity of the call is
such that it surely demands humanity, including the shared knowledge of
sin and redemption, more than political calculation.

But mercy and clemency have gone out of fashion. They require personal
courage and conviction; they may go against prevailing political wisdom
(two-thirds of Californians favor the death penalty).

In the rare case these days when governors do grant clemency, their
decision is almost always based on errors or omissions in the judicial
system, rather than mercy. Indeed, the very word mercy, beautiful as it
is, has come to seem quaintly outmoded.

"Modern governors reveal themselves to be shallow when then they are
unready to talk about mercy and grace as an important part of just
punishment," argued Bryan Stevenson, a professor at New York University
Law School. "We celebrate redemption in so many situations, but refuse
that latitude in a criminal justice system still biased against the
poor, particularly the African-American poor."

Williams was African-American. In the early 1970s he co-founded the
Crips youth gang in south central Los Angeles. The gang and its
countless copycat offshoots have been responsible for numberless
crimes.

In 1997, Williams wrote: "So today I apologize to you all - the
children of America and South Africa - who must cope every day with
dangerous street gangs. I no longer participate in the so-called
gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did."

He went on to say that he had written the "Tookie Speaks Out Against
Gang Violence" children's book series in a bid to "end child-on-child
brutality and black-on-black brutality."

Nobody can say how much impact these publications had. Schwarzenegger
was dismissive: "The continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one
to question the efficacy of Williams' message," the decision reads.

That's a risible argument, like saying the continued pervasiveness of
teenage pregnancies shows that the efforts of those who speak out
against them are useless. Williams had some effect on a huge social
problem; it's fair to believe that if his life had not ended at 51 he
would have had more.

Williams was also a black man sent in the end to his death by a white
man. Like a lot of black kids, he had it tough, and in his youth he did
heinous things. Social hardship is no excuse for murder, but there is
no escaping the fact that justice is a racial issue in the United
States.

As Stevenson, who is African-American, put it: "Most people of color
believe they are presumed guilty."

That view has a history: slavery, lynchings, police misconduct, justice
denied. By various means, white America has tried to redeem itself from
that terrible past. It has wanted to believe, unlike Schwarzenegger,
that redemption is possible.