NOT ALL BLACKS OPPOSED TO DEATH PENALTY.

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

THE small crowd of clergy, community activists and death-penalty opponents that gathered in front of the Los Angeles courthouse to demand clemency for Stanley ``Tookie'' Williams was no different than most other such gatherings. But there was one very loud exception.

A young African-American man shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer who should die. This was no agitator or crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate.

I was not surprised that there are many blacks such as this fellow who want Williams dead. The instant I publicly went to bat for clemency for Williams, and against the death penalty in general, the e-mails and angry comments came hot and heavy.

Black critics were especially bitter in reviling me. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, that he helped found, has unleashed on poor, black communities.

These hardened attitudes fly in the face of conventional wisdom that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren't.

During the past decade, even as more whites say they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty or oppose it, more blacks have said that murderers, even black ones, must pay with their lives. A Harris Interactive poll in August 2001 found that nearly half of black respondents supported capital punishment. Three years later, a Gallup Poll found that black support for the death penalty still hovered at near 50 percent.

The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black-versus-white racial issue. In large part, that's because whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims.

The Justice Department's annual crime victim surveys have consistently found that blacks are nearly twice as likely to be victims of murder than are whites. The leading cause of death among young black males under age 24 is homicide. In nearly all cases, other blacks will kill them. Blacks fed up with the continuing surge in murder violence that tears black communities.

A hint of that came in a June 1999 Justice Department survey which found that blacks in a dozen cities generally applauded the police. This shocked and confounded some black leaders who assumed, like everyone else, that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren't. They are anti-racist and abusive police officers, and demand efficient, fair policing in their communities. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities, they have also repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the cops and help identify shooters.

Then there's the myth of the ``soft'' black juror. It goes like this: Black jurors are so hateful of white authority that they would gleefully nullify the law and let a black lawbreaker waltz out of court a free man or woman even if that person is a killer. This is nonsense. In most big cities, blacks make up a majority, or a significant percentage, of those who sit on juries, and they convict other blacks of crimes every day.

It's true, though, that in past years, blacks were the staunchest opponents of capital punishment, and they had good cause to be. The death penalty was a vicious, blatantly racist weapon wielded by prosecutors, particularly in the South, against blacks on the flimsiest evidence as long as their alleged victims were white. However, crime fears and rampaging violence have made more blacks regard the death penalty not as a weapon to hammer blacks, but to hammer violent criminals.

Tookie certainly no longer fits the label of the violent predator. He has done everything humanly possible to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence-prone youth. But many blacks have lost friends and loved ones to those gun-toting youths. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them.

It's unfair to blame one man for the sins of some in the youth generation, but when the body count rises, people must blame someone, for Williams is that someone. It's then only a short step from that for them to loudly say that Tookie must die.