Clarence Ray Allen was executed at San Quentin last night:

Only about 300 people turned out to protest the execution ... [it] did not draw the oratory of the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the folk-singing of Joan Baez, both of whom were among the 2,000 people outside San Quentin's walls the night Stanley Tookie Williams was put to death last month.

There's plenty of good reasons to oppose the death penalty. But to me that sums up the problem with the Save Tookie campaign: what passes for principled objection to the death penalty sometimes looks more like opportunistic grandstanding.

Clarence is just as dead as Tookie. Apparently if Clarence had written some children's books – or maybe if Clarence had been black instead of native American – he would've pulled better ratings.

And was Tookie really that worthy of all the attention? It wasn't like anyone seriously thought he was wrongly accused, nor was there DNA evidence waiting in the wings to exonerate him.

He was a bad dude. He was convicted by a jury and it was upheld all the way through the appeals process. He never once took accountability for the murders, which to me made his "jailhouse redemption" quite a bit less convincing. He was like the "Blair Witch Project" of death row inmates: extremely positive word of mouth, but then you see it up close and you're like "why are people so into this?"

Ah, the vagaries of public taste. So let us note the death of Clarence, who suffered the accident of bad scheduling, and had an exceptionally tough act to follow.

17 Jan 06