A Last Lesson Lost

In Angels With Dirty Faces, Pat O'Brien and James Cagney play childhood friends who go on to lead very different lives as adults.

The movie also features a group of boys, known as "The Dead End Kids," which just about sums up their lives. Pat O'Brien's character is trying to save them. But The Kids want to be cool, like Cagney.

The movie ends with Cagney on Death Row. O'Brien comes in to hear his Confession. As penance, O'Brien asks Cagney to do one thing. They have one of those end-of-the-movie speeches, with Cagney talking about personal dignity and O'Brien talking about the responsibility a role model has.

In the end, Cagney does what O'Brien asks and The Kids see Cagney as not cool, but as a frightened adult, who messed up big time.

"Tookie" Williams could have used his final act on Earth to send the ultimate message to the kids he professed to love, the kids he wrote books for to keep them out of gangs.

Instead, writes Kevin Fagan in the San Francisco Chronicle: The execution of convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams was a defiant, determined and messy affair -- surprising right up to the bitter end, just like his unfortunate life.

In fact, Mr. Fagan titles his article "This was not a man who went meekly."

To the end, then, Mr. Williams saw himself as above the Law, apart from social conventions. His actions at his death seem to contradict the content of his books, the notion that he was reformed.

If, indeed, he was innocent of the murders of Albert Owens, Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, and Yu-Chin Yang Lin as he insisted, he could have accepted his death as atonement for his involvement in gang life. By co-founding the Crips, Mr. Williams was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the murder and mayhem they have committed. Mr. Williams could have acknowledged that gangs and gang culture made him a likely suspect and that his conviction had a much to do with his lifestyle as what he might--or might not--have done.

Perhaps that was asking too much from an ordinary man. Perhaps that was asking too much even for a man who had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps it could only have happened in Hollywood.