SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- With his execution scheduled for Tuesday, his attorneys have made their final appeals. Now, Crips co-founder and convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams must wait on death row to find out if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will spare his life.
Attorneys for Williams, who helped create the Crips street gang, met for about an hour with Schwarzenegger on Thursday to appeal for his clemency, a decision the governor could make at the 11th hour. Attorneys on both sides were reticent about the meeting.
Williams' lead attorney, Peter Fleming, told reporters, "I'm still frightened to death." Asked about Williams' chance of getting clemency, Fleming said, "I'm not an oddsmaker."
Williams is scheduled to die Tuesday, 17 days before his 52nd birthday, for four murders he was convicted of committing in 1979.
Williams was sentenced to death in 1981. The governor must decide by Monday whether to send him to the death chamber, but Schwarzenegger's office has indicated that the decision will likely come sooner.
If Schwarzenegger decides to grant him clemency, Williams will have his death sentence commuted to life in prison without parole, a fate his attorneys say he deserves for his anti-gang crusades from jail and his authoring of children's books warning kids about the dangers of gang life. Proceeds from those books have been donated to anti-gang community groups.
However, lead prosecutor John Monaghan scoffs at the notion of Williams' good will and repentance, saying the gang leader killed four people in an "abhorrent manner" and that he has never admitted to or apologized for his crimes. Moreover, Monaghan said, Williams has refused to provide authorities with any valuable information about the Crips.
"These were extremely brutal crimes," he told reporters. "Mr. Williams should pay the ultimate penalty for his crimes." (Read how prison officials have tried to offset Williams' positive press)
Williams was convicted of shooting the teen clerk of a Los Angeles, California, convenience store in the back as the 17-year-old lay on the floor.
He also was convicted of shooting and killing a Chinese couple and their 41-year-old daughter and stealing less than $100 from their motel room.
All four murders were handled in a single trial.
Fleming said Williams told him he never admitted to the crimes because he didn't commit them. "If my innocence will cost me my life, so be it," Fleming recalled his client once telling him.
But Monaghan said Williams won't confess because he would have no shot at getting his sentence commuted if he did.
"In the face of overwhelming evidence, he denies he committed them because he knows if he admitted he committed them, he simply wouldn't have a chance at all," he said. "If Mr. Williams truly had turned a new leaf, he would sit down and he would debrief. He would lay out everything he knows about the Crips gang."
The fight to save Williams has become a cause celebre with Hollywood heavy hitters like rapper Snoop Dogg and actor Jamie Foxx speaking in favor of Williams.
They are just two of the many celebrities and politicians weighing in on the case, thus putting intense pressure on Schwarzenegger, who already has been given an earful by law enforcement officials, religious groups, victims' rights advocates, death penalty opponents and the NAACP.
Outside the California Capitol Thursday, scores of protesters gathered to support Williams, holding signs that read "Save Tookie!" and "Abolish the racist death penalty."
Williams' attorneys petitioned the state's high court November 10 to reopen the case, alleging that the forensic testing on the shell casings from the motel was faulty and that informants lied to prosecutors. In a 4-2 vote last week, the California Supreme Court declined to stop the execution.
I have no clue why anyone would want him spared. The murders he committed deserve the death penalty. He founded a major gang, a legacy of death and destruction that continues to this day.
EXACTLY! Why do we allow people who commit HEINOUS crimes, sit in prison their entire lives? They haven't earned that. There is no rehibilation for those people. PERIOD! Sorry but, I don't have mercy for those kinds of people, at all.
:::>^..^<::: ~*~The Journey is more important than the end or the start~*~ :::>^..^<:::
There are hundreds of people on death row in California. Don't know why it takes 20 years for it go through.
And about Tookie, despite all his reform, he has never told authorities about the inner workings of his former gang nor has he ever taken responsibility for his crimes. He just wants to be a free man again, plain and simple.
The 9th circut court of appeals is responsible for the hold up in CA. They stall the process with appeal after appeal.
Tookie never appologized, never informed on the gang. So what that he wrote books telling kids not to join gangs? He still could have done more to take down his old gang.
(AP) SAN FRANCISCO - The California Supreme Court late Sunday refused to grant a stay of execution for convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, meaning the former gang leader who became an outspoken critic of gang violence will be executed early Tuesday unless the governor grants clemency or a last-ditch federal appeal succeeds.
Williams' supporters also made another pitch directly to the governor Sunday to spare his life, telling Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a letter that they had a new witness who could help prove Williams' innocence.
"All we need now is time to investigate to make sure this story is real," said NAACP California President Alice Huffman. "We're hoping and praying for clemency, but we're not going to leave any stone unturned."
Schwarzenegger said last week that he was agonizing over Williams' request for clemency.
Prosecutors and family members of the victims have urged him to deny the request, in part because Williams continues to deny guilt in the slayings. No clemency request has been granted in California since 1967, when Ronald Reagan spared a mentally ill killer.
Following the state Supreme Court ruling, lawyers for Williams immediately asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here to block his looming execution. A decision was expected Monday.
Williams' supporters, an outspoken group ranging from community leaders to actors and rappers, have held rallies in his support and argue that executing Williams would send the wrong message.
They say he has redeemed himself by speaking out against violence and writing children's books on the evils of gang life. During his 24 years at San Quentin, the Crips street gang founder turned his life around to the point that a Swiss legislator, college professors and others repeatedly submitted his name for Nobel peace and literature prizes.
Williams, 51, was condemned for the slaying of a man during a robbery in February 1979 and the deaths of a couple and their daughter at a South Los Angeles motel the following month.
He denies committing the murders but has apologized for founding the Crips, a gang prosecutors blamed for thousands of murders in Los Angeles and beyond.
Williams is scheduled for lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. He would be the 12th inmate executed by the state since California reinstated the death penalty in 1977.
The state Supreme Court ruled 6-0 against staying his execution, saying Williams' last-minute appeal lacked merit and was untimely. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Brault had implored the justices early Sunday to dismiss the petition, writing that it "is without merit and is manifestly designed for delay."
The justices earlier had denied a defense request to reopen the case over allegations that shoddy forensics linked a weapon used in three of the murders to a shotgun registered to Williams.
In the defense request for a stay of execution, attorney Verna Wefald had argued that Los Angeles County prosecutors failed to disclose at trial that witness Alfred Coward was not a U.S. citizen and that he had a violent criminal history. Coward is now in prison in Canada for the murder of a man during a robbery.
"All of the witnesses who implicated Williams were criminals who were given significant incentives to testify against him and ongoing benefits for their testimony," Wefald wrote.
The California Supreme Court, a federal district court judge in Los Angeles, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court have all upheld his convictions.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday refused to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, the founder of the murderous Crips gang who awaited execution after midnight in a case that stirred debate over capital punishment and the possibility of redemption on death row.
Schwarzenegger was unswayed by pleas from Hollywood stars and petitions from more than 50,000 people who said that Williams had made amends during more than two decades in prison by writing a memoir and children's books about the dangers of gangs.
"After studying the evidence, searching the history, listening to the arguments and wrestling with the profound consequences, I could find no justification for granting clemency," Schwarzenegger said, less than 12 hours before the execution. "The facts do not justify overturning the jury's verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case."
Schwarzenegger could have commuted the death sentence to life in prison without parole.
With a reprieve from the federal courts considered unlikely, Williams, 51, was set to die by injection at San Quentin State Prison early Tuesday for murdering four people in two 1979 holdups.
Williams' fate became one of the nation's biggest death-row cause celebres in decades.
Prosecutors and victims' advocates contended Williams was undeserving of clemency from the governor because he did not own up to his crimes and refused to inform on fellow gang members. They also argued that the Crips gang that Williams co-founded in Los Angeles in 1971 is responsible for hundreds of deaths, many of them in battles with the rival Bloods for turf and control of the drug trade.
Williams stood to become the 12th California condemned inmate executed since lawmakers reinstated the death penalty in 1977 after a brief hiatus.
Williams was condemned in 1981 for gunning down a clerk in a convenience store holdup and a mother, father and daughter in a motel robbery weeks later. Williams claimed he was innocent.
The last time a California governor granted clemency was in 1967, when Ronald Reagan spared a mentally infirm killer. Schwarzenegger — a Republican who has come under fire from members of his own party as too accommodating to liberals — rejected clemency twice before during his two years in office.
Just before the governor announced his decision on clemency, the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals denied Williams' request for a reprieve, saying among other things that there was no "clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence."
In his last-ditch appeal, Williams claimed that he should have been allowed to argue at his trial that someone else killed one of the four victims, and that shoddy forensics connected him to the other killings.
Williams was convicted of killing Yen-I Yang, 76, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63, and Yu-Chin Yang Lin, 43, at a Los Angeles motel the family owned, and Albert Owens, 26, a 7-Eleven clerk gunned down in Whittier.
Among the celebrities who took up Williams' cause were Jamie Foxx, who played the gang leader in a cable movie about Williams; rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip; Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in "Dead Man Walking"; Bianca Jagger; and former "M A S H" star Mike Farrell. During Williams' 24 years on death row, a Swiss legislator, college professors and others nominated him for the Nobel Prizes in peace and literature.
"If Stanley Williams does not merit clemency," defense attorney Peter Fleming Jr. asked, "what meaning does clemency retain in this state?"
The impending execution resulted in feverish preparations over the weekend by those on both sides of the debate, with the California Highway Patrol planning to tighten security outside the prison, where hundreds of protesters were expected.
A group of about three dozen death penalty protesters were joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson as they marched across the Golden Gate Bridge after dawn Monday en route to the gates of San Quentin, where they were expected to rally with hundreds of people.
At least publicly, the person apparently least occupied with his fate seemed to be Williams himself.
"Me fearing what I'm facing, what possible good is it going to do for me? How is that going to benefit me?" Williams said in a recent interview. "If it's my time to be executed, what's all the ranting and raving going to do?"
I don't know how this is a racial thing. Saw this lady with a sign that said, 'stop the racist death penalty.' Huh?
And then there are these 'community leaders' telling people to not riot or whatever. Then I'm thinking, was anyone going to in the first place? Now they have an idea...
12-09-2005 04:09 AM
