If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is feeling conflicted as he weighs life or death in the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, he is not alone.
Bill Knox opposes capital punishment because he believes it has not "been handled fairly over the decades ... especially in the minority communities."
Still, the law is the law. If Schwarzenegger believes, after Thursday's clemency hearing, that Williams deserves to die for the 1979 murders of four people, "then he has to carry out the sentence," said Knox, a 57-year-old retired corporate executive in Danville, an affluent suburb east of San Francisco.
"I don't personally like it, but I have to separate myself from a bigger system," he said.
Just over Altamont Pass, dotted with churning windmills and grazing cows, Joe Cisneros is equally torn.
He supports the death penalty "to a certain extent." But the Williams case is a hard one, he says.
"What he's doing, writing books, trying to keep future generations out of gangs -- that type of a figure kids might want to listen to," said the 58-year-old Cisneros, who has operated a hair salon in downtown Tracy for nearly 30 years. On the other hand, he said, "You've got to show these gangbangers if you do the crime, you've got to pay for it."
Cisneros finally threw his hands in the air, literally, his palms facing the ceiling. "When you're in that position like Arnold is, it's a tough one," Cisneros concluded. "I can't make that judgment call. I just can't."
Deciding whether someone should live or die with the sanction of the state cannot be an easy thing. Schwarzenegger has already said he dreads deciding whether to let the Dec. 13 execution go forward. But although the judgment will not hinge on politics, the choice is particularly fraught for Schwarzenegger as he seeks to recover from last month's disastrous special election and runs for a second term next year.
Abandoned by a large swath of the state's Democratic-leaning electorate, Republican Schwarzenegger has worked to reclaim his centrist image by aggressively reaching out to old adversaries, even going so far as naming a longtime Democratic activist, Susan Kennedy, as his new chief of staff.
Granting clemency to Williams "would fit in with that kind of new characterization" of the governor as a more "humane, caring individual," said Larry N. Gerston, a San Jose State political scientist.
