descent into darkness...not long now....AP report from scene [View All]

Stanley "Tookie" Williams, one of the most celebrated death row inmates in many years, faced execution early today after last-minute appeals failed and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency.

Williams, co-founder of the notorious Crips gang, had been on death row nearly a quarter century for the 1979 shotgun murders of four people in Los Angeles. He maintained his innocence and never expressed remorse, a key factor that Schwarzenegger said influenced his decision.

In recent weeks, death row opponents and Hollywood celebrities including Jamie Foxx, Sean Penn, Mike Farrell and Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip, had led a determined campaign, culminating Monday night outside San Quentin State Prison, to spare Williams because of his self-described redemption and good works.

Protesters rally

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, among the crowd that rallied outside the prison on San Francisco Bay in the hours before Williams was to die by lethal injection, was seen leaving San Quentin. He visited Williams and was apparently one of Williams' last visitors.

As night fell, the protesters were heavily outnumbered by media awaiting the execution.

Death penalty opponent Krista Minami, 37, from nearby San Anselmo, said she was unsurprised the governor had declined to stop the execution. "The guy is the 'Terminator,' right?" she said, referring to one of the actor-turned-governor's most successful film roles.

Bruce Vidler, 43, a painter from Oakland, said execution was unnecessary. "Lock him up and throw away the key. You don't have to kill him," Vidler said. "Life without the possibility of parole is punishment enough."


Williams, 51, entered prison as a young man with a large Afro and a bodybuilder's physique and evolved into a bespectacled graybeard writer and lecturer.

He had been nominated several times for the Nobel peace and literature prizes for his crusade to steer children away from gangs.

"If Stanley Williams does not merit clemency," defense lawyer Peter Fleming asked, "what meaning does clemency retain in this state?"

Prosecutors argued, most recently before Schwarzenegger at a clemency hearing Thursday, that Williams' crimes were the senseless, vicious slayings of four defenseless people. He shot one of his victims, a 7-Eleven clerk, twice in the back. The subsequent robbery netted $100.

Moreover, prosecutors said that if Williams truly was rehabilitated he would have agreed to inform on the Crips and help diminish the influence of a gang whose violence has spread across the country.

"Is Williams' redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?" Schwarzenegger asked in a statement issued less than 12 hours before the scheduled execution and not long after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected a stay of execution. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption."

Hours later, the Supreme Court also refused to intervene.