THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG A tale of two departures

ONE DAY AFTER notorious gang leader and vicious killer Tookie Williams was executed in California - despite weeks of very vocal, vociferous protests by Hollywood stars and political and civil-rights leaders - another man was executed in Mississippi.

John B. Nixon Sr. was 77 when he was executed on Dec. 14. He was the oldest man to be executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 and the oldest to be executed since 1916.

Unlike the Tookie Williams execution, there were no protests of the Nixon execution. No claims about discrimination. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did not travel to Mississippi to meet with the condemned. Sometime actor Mike Farrell did not fly to Mississippi to appear in front of the prison on TV and rant about the inequities of this particular case or of the justice system in general. Fox News and Air American host Alan Colmes did not say Nixon might be innocent because there was no DNA evidence.

You have to wonder why this execution was ignored. After all, it had had more reasons than the Williams case for commuting the sentence to life.

Nixon was convicted of the 1985 murder-for-hire of Virginia Tucker. The woman's ex-husband, Elester Joseph Ponthieux, hired him. He shot and wounded Thomas Tucker, her current husband, before killing her, as he was contracted to do. Ponthieux, the man who hired him, only received a life sentence. Nixon, sentenced in 1986, made every possible appeal. All were rejected and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barber did not grant clemency.

Many differences between the two cases would seem to lend themselves more for clemency for Nixon as opposed to Tookie Williams:

Nixon murdered just one person. Williams murdered four people during two separate crimes. Nixon was 20 years older than Williams and had much less time to live. Nixon was a former auto mechanic who volunteered for the Navy during World War II and was honorably discharged. Tookie was the founder and leader of a murderous gang.

Unlike Tookie, Nixon was diagnosed with a mental disorder. Unlike Tookie, Nixon saved the lives of other people.

So there were a great many reasons to spare Nixon. Yet the only protests made about executing him was a simple statement from the Web site of the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty and something from a Canadian anti-death penalty group. And a few news reports.

Contrast that with the shower of media stories, TV programs, Web sites and radio shows all about Tookie Williams. He even had a TV movie made about him.