The Feld-Blog

What do Yasser Arafat and Mother Theresa have in common? Desmond Tutu and Dalai Lama? Gorbachev and Martin Luther King, Jr.? They all won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s right. All six of them won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now granted not all of these people lived virtuous lives from birth, but all were able to make significant progress towards peace at some point in their lives. So where am I going with this? I think the point is that it is possible for someone to reform his or her life. Tookie Williams, former co-founder of the Crips, and late children’s author and Nobel-Peace-Prize nominee, is a perfect example.

Schwarzenegger, the California Supreme Court, and The US Supreme Court failed to stay Tookie William’s execution. His funeral was held on Tuesday. Why did it come to that? In the end, Schwarzenegger had the last say in whether or not Williams was to be executed. So now for my next rhetorical question: How does anyone publicly refuse to save a man who is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

I am not necessarily saying Williams should have been set free, but someone could have at least stayed his execution. I won’t deny that he did a lot of harm in his early life, but America needs to recognize the potential for people to reform. At this point I hope he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He has done a tremendous amount of good to stem gang violence in his adult life. Furthermore, who else is going stand up and face gangs? To reach these kids, we need someone with credibility and no one but Williams had that kind of credibility.

I hope Williams wins the Prize. He deserves it. To turn his life around and do all that good in America when it would have been infinitely easier to give up on himself and the world while staring at the inside of his prison cell is an incredible achievement. Desmond Tutu turned his life around and his efforts were recognized. Yasser Arafat put left his terrorist ties to sit down at the negotiating table for peace in the Middle East (though little came from it). Williams has definitely earned this status. He turned his life around and worked his entire adult life to fix the problems he caused in adolescence. He deserves it. He deserved to live, but now, this is the least we can give him.