John Mitchell: Watered-down justice in Wilson’s cold-heart

According to Alonzo Harris, the corrupted police officer Denzel Washington played in the movie “Training Day,” the last thing someone smells in the gas chamber is the scent of pine oil. If this is so, at some point in the not-so-distant future, this should be the the final sensory stimulation brothers Cartlon Hipps and Ramone Williams ever experience.
Hipps and Williams, both African Americans, fatally shot Philadelphia police Sgt. Robert Wilson III, then 30, on March 5, 2015, in a GameStop store in North Philadelphia.
Wilson, also African American, was in a good place when he was killed, facing life headfirst and doing what cowards like Hipps and Williams spend their entire worthless lives running from: buying a birthday gift for his 9-year-old son.
Hipps and Williams went into the store to do what makes so many people — Black, white and everything in between — fear most about young Black men — the majority of whom are upstanding people. They were sticking up the place when the pair killed Wilson in a gunfight during an attempted robbery.
For snuffing out the life of a man whose walk was a template for true manhood — that of a family man whose life stood in stark contradiction to vile stereotypes every Black man is unfairly saddled with in great part because there are far too many savages like Hipps and Williams – the two prison detainees deserve forfeiture of theirs.
But on Monday, the two facing murder charges accepted plea deals from the District Attorney’s Office for life sentences plus 50 to 100 years for the heinous crime, this despite the pleading by Wilson’s broken-hearted family that very reasonably views justice in this case as the trading of one life for two that snatched a husband and a father from them forever.
Sounds fair to me.
Former District Attorney Seth Williams’ office did the right thing when it informed Wilson’s family that he would seek the death penalty for Hipps and Williams. New DA Larry Krasner campaigned on the promise that he would no longer seek the death penalty, which is applied disproportionately to African Americans across the board.

In a city where the majority of those caught up in the system come from African-American families that make up more than 43 percent of the population, it is in a rare confluence, both politically astute and socially humane.
But none of this dispenses with the reality that each case is unique unto itself. If the perusal of the death penalty is what the aggrieved Wilson family feels is required to bring closure in the slaughter of a father, a husband and a public servant who put his life on the line every day he left the house, so be it. Who are we to protest?
Wilson’s grandmother, Constance Wilson, said as much during her victim impact statement in court Monday, telling the pair: “They should’ve put the jail on top of you. Both of you.”
Police Commissioner Richard Ross also has said that this is a capital punishment case.
I can’t help but wonder that this might have played out differently had Wilson’s killers been white. I could be wrong, but in the current political climate, I can’t bring myself to believe that there would not be a louder outcry for the death penalty other than what we are getting from a trio — a Black family, fellow officers and the Fraternal Order of Police.