Dec. 8, 2005

Tookie's Clemency Campaign Gathers Steam

Christmas lights glowed in store windows near the Columbia University campus, but the students had much more on their minds than mistletoe and presents. They crowded behind police barricades, braving the cold to protest a speech by former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft at Columbia’s Lerner Hall as well as the upcoming execution of Stan “Tookie” Williams, a California death row inmate scheduled to die by lethal injection on Dec. 13.

The campaign to stay Williams’ execution and reexamine his guilt has been gathering momentum as his scheduled execution date approaches. Last week, Williams was the subject of dozens of articles in papers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. Celebrities such as Russell Crowe, Susan Sarandon, Jamie Foxx and Snoop Dogg have recently lent themselves to Tookie’s cause.

On Dec. 8, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger “will be holding a private clemency hearing” on Williams’ behalf, said Julie Soderlund, his deputy press secretary. Soderlund said the private hearing was one of three options available to the governor after Williams filed a clemency petition on Nov. 8. Schwarzenegger could have denied the petition outright, and he could have ordered a clemency hearing be held by the state board of parole.

Williams, one of the founders of the notorious Crips gang, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981 for the shotgun killings of 26-year-old Albert Owens, the clerk at a convenience store in Whittier, Calif., during a robbery in February 1979, as well an elderly couple, Yen-I and Tsai-Shai Yan, and their 43-year-old daughter, Yee-Chen Lin, during a holdup at a motel less than a month later.

Questions have since been raised about Williams’ guilt. Lee Wengrad, of the group the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, was at the rally to show support for Williams’ cause. Wengrad said eyewitness testimony crucial to Williams’ conviction came from “jailhouse informants who had incentive to lie,” and Williams “didn’t have good legal representation.” Wengrad also alleged that race played a part in Williams’ conviction, pointing out that the venue for the trial was shifted to “an all-white, conservative community,” that of Torrance, Calif. Williams has long maintained his innocence.

According to tookie.com, a pro-Williams Web site, the prosecutor who convicted Williams intentionally kept blacks off the jury and made “numerous racist remarks” during the trial. The Web site also calls into question the credibility of key witnesses against Williams, stating that one was a “paid police informant” who spared himself by testifying: He too was facing the death penalty for charges including murder and rape, and was allowed to plead to lesser offenses after saying that Williams confessed to him from an adjacent jail cell.

In 2005, the Supreme Court threw out an appeal on Williams’ behalf asking that his conviction be reevaluated, based in part on allegations of discrimination during his original trial, a ruling the Web site categorized as “a full frontal attack on the civil rights of all Americans.”

But to many of Williams’ supporters, his guilt or innocence in the 1979 slayings is irrelevant. They point to his socially conscious work as evidence of reform and argue that the benefits of commuting Williams’ sentence far outweigh the benefits of executing him.

While in prison, Williams authored 10 books, including nine children’s books and an autobiography, and has been a vocal anti-violence advocate. Williams has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times; he’s been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature four times. President George W. Bush bestowed the 2005 Presidential Call to Service Award on Williams in recognition of his community service efforts but has not spoken out against Williams’ scheduled execution.

“It’s a criminal act to execute someone like that — who’s shown the power of redemption and shown that it’s possible to make a contribution to society even from behind bars,” Wengrad said.

Anthony Papa, who was imprisoned under New York’s infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws for 12 years before being granted clemency by Governor George Pataki in 1997, was also at the Columbia rally to support Williams’ bid for mercy. “I know what he’s going through,” Papa said of Williams. Like Williams, Papa also reinvented himself in jail. He began to paint, earning an exhibition of his work at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2004.

Opposition for Ashcroft, whose speech began about 30 minutes after the rally ended, and support for a sparing Williams’ life went hand in hand for many present at the rally.

“We’re all fighting for the same cause,” said Nathan Seles-Alvarez, a young man from Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Seles-Alvarez called the death penalty “barbaric tool” but stopped short of proclaiming Williams innocent. “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t,” said Seles-Alvarez when asked if he thought Williams had a hand in the 1979 murders. “The point is he didn’t get a fair trail.”

At least two petitions against William’s scheduled execution circulated among the demonstrators, and fliers urging the reader to call and e-mail Schwarzenegger were distributed.

The demonstration, which was loud but peaceful, culminated in a short march through Columbia’s campus. The marcher’s chant said it all: “Jail Ashcroft! Free Tookie!”

Update: Citing Williams' unwillingness to accept responsibility for the crimes he was convicted of, and calling into question the former gang leader's claims of personal redemption, Governor Schwarzenegger denied Williams' clemency request as well as two subsequent requests by Williams' lawyers to postpone the execution. Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed, as scheduled, at California's San Quentin prison.