Stanley 'Tookie' Williams Executed By Lethal Injection
The execution at San Quentin just after midnight took longer than usual, as the execution team spent 12 minutes trying to find a vein in the muscular 51-year-old's arm.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Contra Costa Times
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. - Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed by lethal injection early Tuesday morning, ending an emotionally charged campaign to spare the co-founder of the notorious Crips street gang.
Williams, 51, was pronounced dead at 12:35 a.m. PST after spending nearly half his life on death row.
He was convicted of four 1979 shotgun murders and became the 12th California inmate executed in the modern death-penalty era.
Williams' death, carried out in the prison's 67-year-old, lime-green gas chamber, followed a flurry of 11th-hour appeals to state and federal courts.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency for Williams in a five-page written statement issued at 12:30 p.m. Monday, shortly after a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Williams' request for reprieve. The U.S. Supreme Court later rejected his final appeal.
Twice Monday evening Schwarzenegger refused to postpone the lethal injection.
Williams, who initially declined to invite witnesses to his execution, changed his mind about 6:30 p.m. and named five people, whom the California Department of Corrections refused to identify.
Fifty people observed Williams' death, including 17 reporters. Although Department of Corrections officials refused to say if anyone from the victims' families were included, victim Albert Owens' stepmother, Lora Owens, was expected.
Owens has been adamant about wanting Williams' death sentence carried out.
Williams spent his final hours with Department of Corrections staff in a 45-foot-square "death watch cell" adjacent to the execution chamber. He read from a stack of 50 to 75 letters offering solace from well-wishers from as far away as Italy and Israel.
He did not ask for his own spiritual adviser, but Williams earlier Monday visited with six people, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
He declined to request a final meal but was offered the prison's meal of the day: chili macaroni, green beans, a roll and iced tea.
"He's been very calm, very cooperative," said department spokeswoman Elaine Jennings.
Williams was 17 when he and a friend, Raymond Washington, founded the Crips, a violent Los Angeles street gang that would spread wildly across the country and overseas.
A jury convicted Williams in the 1979 shotgun killings of convenience store clerk Albert Owens, 26, during a 7-Eleven robbery in Whittier; and of Yen-I Yang, 76, his wife, Tsai-Shai Yang, 63, and their daughter, Ye-Chen Lin, 43, during a robbery at the motel they ran in Los Angeles.
He racked up several violent offenses in his early years at San Quentin but later claimed to have experienced a transformation during six years of isolation in the "Hole."
Over the past decade, his cautionary children's books and campaign for gang peace brought him a rare celebrity, spurred by perennial Nobel Peace Prize nominations and a cable TV movie starring Jamie Foxx as Williams.
The NAACP and death penalty opponents mounted an aggressive campaign for mercy. Pleas came from numerous Hollywood stars, Jackson and thousands of parents, teachers and youths vouching for the value of his work.
But while Williams apologized for the gang's violent legacy, he maintained his innocence in the killings that landed him on death row. In his memoir, "Blue Rage, Black Redemption," Williams takes credit for numerous acts of raw violence but never admits committing or ordering murder.
In his clemency denial, Schwarzenegger cast suspicion on Williams' redemption, writing that the evidence of his guilt was clear.
"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption," the governor stated in his decision. "In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."
Jonathan Harris, an attorney who argued for clemency last week at a meeting with Schwarzenegger, chided the governor for not meeting personally with Williams.
"It is impossible for me to believe, if you have met Stanley Williams and spent time with him, you would not believe in his personal redemption," said Harris.
Late Monday, Harris twice asked the governor to postpone the execution based on the claims of four people who have come forward to cast doubt on witness testimony in Williams' murder trial. Harris asked for a reprieve until the Legislature considers a bill next month that would enact a death penalty moratorium.
Jackson, who met with the condemned man Monday, said Williams was hopeful early in the day, then smiled when Jackson told him of Schwarzenegger's decision.
"He knows that he's made a huge turnaround," said Jackson. "He'll be martyred as a force for good."
Williams' prosecution, which featured the testimony of criminal associates, an accomplice and a jailhouse informant, stood up to numerous state and federal court challenges.
He appealed on a variety of claims, including charges that his trial was tainted by racially biased jury selection, that police work was shoddy and that prosecutors withheld secret deals for leniency with at least one person who testified that Williams bragged about the crimes.
He argued that his lawyer failed to seek his own ballistics tests to counter a police expert who tied Williams' sawed-off, 12-gauge shotgun to a shell found at the motel crime scene. In recent appeals, Williams also argued that he was involuntarily drugged while in jail awaiting trial.
Prosecutors pointed to hand-written notes that Williams wrote from jail, plotting to escape, blow up a bus with dynamite and kill an accomplice who would later testify against him.
"This case has been in a perpetual state of appeal for 2 { decades," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer. "When witnesses come out with radically new testimony at the eleventh-hour before an execution, it's viewed skeptically."
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(c) 2005, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.).
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