NOTICE: The following
articles are written by the authors themselves and not by me, I am not trying
to violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
On this day (December 13, 2005), Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams was
executed by lethal injection by the State of California. He deserved to die for
what he did and there is no way, I would honor him for writing children’s’
books. I will post some quotes from the victims’ families and several articles
from different people who felt he must die.
Summary: In the early morning hours of February 28,
1979, Williams and three friends were riding around in two cars, smoking
PCP-laced cigarettes, looking to "make some money." After making two
unsuccessful restaurant and liquor store robbery attempts, they eventually went
to a 7-Eleven store where 26 year old Army veteran and father of two, Albert Lewis
Owens, was working the overnight shift and sweeping the parking lot. Armed with
a shotgun, Williams led Owens to the back room of the store. While one of the
companions emptied the cash register drawer and took $120, the defendant
ordered Owens to get on his knees and then shot him twice in the back with the
shotgun. Williams said later that he did so to eliminate witnesses. One of his
accomplices testified at trial that Williams later made fun of the noises made
by Owens when he was shot, causing Williams to laugh hysterically.
Eleven
days later, at about 5:30 a.m., Williams and another man broke down the door
and entered the Brookhaven Motel at 10411 South Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles
and shot to death 76-year old Thsai Shai Young, his 63-year old wife Yen-I Yang
and their 43-year old daughter Ye Chen Lin. He took $50 in cash and left.
Williams
and Raymond Washington co-founded the Crips, a street gang, in 1971. While
incarcerated on Death Row, Williams gained notoriety by authoring children's
books with an anti-gang message and promoting peace. In recent years, he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and for Peace. He gained
unparalelled support from celebrities and anti-death penalty activists,
including Mike Farrell, Jesse Jackson, Jamie Foxx, and others who argued that
his work and redemption on death row merited a reprieve from execution.
 |
| Albert Lewis Owens |
"He killed my father, and that will never change," she said. "I think he is a horrible and awful man.
"I don't think it's fair that he gets to breathe and walk
around and have interactions, and my father, whose only crime was showing up
for work, can't do those things," Owens said. "The
impact that my father's death had on me is long-reaching and affects me
today."
Rebecca
Owens has been pushing for Williams' execution since she found out he was still
alive. She says her father's life should be spotlighted rather than Williams'.
She
has distant memories of her father, of him running on the beach, working on
cars in the front yard, and laughing at her aversion to liver.
She
has flown to California to visit his grave and to speak about the effect the
crime had on her. She initiated a boycott of "Redemption," the film
starring Jamie Foxx that tells the story of Williams' life. And she plans to be
at San Quentin State Prison when Williams dies by lethal injection.
"I want it to be done, to see it over," she said.
"He refuses to take responsibility for his actions," she said. "His apology (for the gang lifestyle), give me a break.
His victims are still faceless people. I don't want him dead because I think
the death penalty will deter people from crime, but I do believe he should not
be living on taxpayer money."
Albert
Owens' stepmother, Lora Owens, wrote a letter to Schwarzenegger saying that
Williams does not deserve clemency and that his professed redemption is an
atrocity.
"To be redeemed, one must accept responsibility for the deeds
and not claim to be redeemed to get out of the punishment set forth," Lora Owens wrote. "Williams has declared his own style of redemption for
his own gain.
"He is a murderer and has caused the Owens family anguish for
the last 26 years," she wrote. "His just punishment, his execution,
could provide us some closure and peace."
"If there is a controversy against the death penalty, then they
need to go to the legislature and work to get it changed, but don't stand
behind a killer like Williams because then they don't care what he did,"
she said. "It could have been your child instead of our child."
 |
|
A pro death penalty demonstrator holds a sign
reading Hang the Bastard makes his way through the crowd gathered at the east
gate.
|
Should we kill this Crip?
He's a murderer. He should die.
By Joshua
Marquis, district attorney of Clatsop County, Ore., is vice president of the
National District Attorneys Assn. and co-author of "Debating the Death
Penalty."
December
4, 2005
There are
heartfelt moral and religious reasons to oppose capital punishment, but holding
up Stanley Tookie Williams as a symbol of redemption is absurd and obscene.
It is especially offensive to his victims' families, whose names the celebrities championing his cause probably don't know. News coverage rarely mentions Albert Owens or the Yang family, all gunned down by Williams in a series of crimes in 1979. The Crips' reputed co-founder also bears moral responsibility for the deaths of countless young black men.
It is especially offensive to his victims' families, whose names the celebrities championing his cause probably don't know. News coverage rarely mentions Albert Owens or the Yang family, all gunned down by Williams in a series of crimes in 1979. The Crips' reputed co-founder also bears moral responsibility for the deaths of countless young black men.
Williams
told the BBC in a 2003 interview that his imprisonment is the result of
"bad karma." He is more right than he probably intended. Karma is the
consequence of choices freely made. Williams chose death for a lot of people,
without justice, without appeal, without consideration of anything other than
his totalitarian goals.
Stripped
of his celebrity, Williams isn't much different from the more than 600 men on
California's death row. He killed multiple victims, he has never taken
responsibility for his crimes, and he has had decades to fight his death
sentence.
Not only
did he brag to his brother about the dying anguish of Owens, but after
slaughtering the Yang family, he boasted to fellow gang members he had killed
"some buddhaheads." His true distinction comes only in his possibly
being the second African American among the 12 people the state of California
has executed in the last 35 years.
According
to a Gallup poll in May, nearly 75% of Americans support capital punishment for
murderers. There are some murderers so heinous and so evil that removing them
is the measure of the severity of their violation of the social contract.
Williams qualifies.
Religious,
artistic and academic elites that most vociferously oppose capital punishment
are the least affected by violent crime. They invariably avoid discussion of
the toll homicide takes on victims, their survivors and the communities hardest
hit by murder — people of color and the poor. A black man in the United States
is seven times more likely to be a victim of homicide than a white man.
So what
makes Williams deserving of the extraordinary benefit of commutation? We are
asked to believe that because he has coauthored some children's books he has
"reformed." Yet he refuses to do what we morally and legally expect
even from shoplifters: to express remorse for his actions. His true legacy may
lie with his children. His namesake, Stanley Williams Jr., is doing time in
another California prison for second-degree murder.
Williams
claims he discourages kids from getting involved in gang life, yet a San
Quentin official recently suggested that he still orchestrates gang activity
outside the prison, according to an Associated Press story.
In his
2004 memoir, he refused to back off the code against "snitching," in
which identifying a drive-by shooter is considered a worse sin than shooting a
4-year-old in the head with a Tech-9.
The
clamor for Williams' clemency may persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to
dispense mercy to him, something Williams never gave Owens, the Yangs or any of
the thousands of people the Crips have killed, maimed or terrorized.
But
clemency for Williams will not advance serious discussion of the merits of
capital punishment. Nor will it succeed in silencing the distant voices of the
victims who never make the headlines except as a footnote to the saga of a gang
lord adopted by the glitterati.
Williams'
case recalls that of Norman Mailer and his friends, who "adopted"
killer/writer Jack Henry Abbott. After Mailer and others secured his release
from prison, Abbott stabbed and killed a young aspiring actor.
If his
sentence is commuted, Williams will be an even shinier icon to the thugs who
follow his example into violence and incarceration. He will roam in the general
prison population, while his disciples stalk California's streets and malls.
Copyright
© 2011, Los Angeles Times
December 1, 2005
Tookie's Tales
By Debra Saunders
Lies so pervade the campaign waged to "save" convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams that Williams and company don't even bother to cover their tracks when they say things they know aren't true.
Tookie's Tales
By Debra Saunders
Lies so pervade the campaign waged to "save" convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams that Williams and company don't even bother to cover their tracks when they say things they know aren't true.
So in an interview Monday with
MSNBC's fatuous Rita Cosby, as Williams' Dec. 13 execution date looms and
supporters are pressing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant him clemency, the
death row inmate claimed that he was convicted by an "all-white
jury." That's not true, and Williams knows it.
In fact, Williams' own clemency
lawyers have stipulated that the jury that convicted him in the 1979 murders of
Albert Owens, Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Yee Chen Lin during two armed
robberies was not all-white. In the clemency petition, Williams' latest set of
lawyers argued that prosecutor Robert Martin had kicked all African Americans
off the jury. When prosecutors produced a death certificate that showed that
juror William McLurkin was black, the lawyers noted in a reply that it doesn't
matter if McLurkin was black or part-black, because he "looked
Filipino."
Hello. That's not white.
Williams' own Web site (www.tookie.com)
features a fact sheet that, while asserting that no African Americans were on
the jury, stipulates a Filipino and Latino served on the jury.
Why did Williams say something
that he knew wasn't true? I just figure he knew he could get away with it. In
the MSNBC transcript of the Cosby interview, Williams, a co-founder of the
Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles when a teenager, said, "I never
ordered, nor have I initiated, any killings on my part, period."
The not-guilty-of-murder quote
flies in the face of the clemency petition's "atonement" claim. To
wit: Williams "has accepted responsibility, repented and done whatever he
could, from where he is, to atone."
No: Williams has done whatever he
could to seem to apologize, while dodging any consequences of admitting his
crimes. Let me add a few things you may not know: The not-all-white jury
convicted Williams after his alibi defense crumbled. Also, jurors had learned
of Williams' plans for an armed escape from jail. The jury foreman testified
that when the guilty verdict was announced, Williams mouthed this threat to the
panel: "I'm going to get each and every one of you mother--."
Over the years as he appealed his
conviction, his appellate lawyers claimed that Williams did not receive
adequate counsel because his trial lawyer did not use a diminished capacity
defense, as Williams was brain-damaged -- due to drug abuse, mental illness and
head injuries.
An appellate judge weighed in,
"A mental-state defense would have contradicted (the alibi) defense by
conceding petitioner's presence at the scenes of the murders." Despite
numerous appeals, various courts -- including the liberal Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals -- continued to uphold his conviction.
His lawyers now laud Williams
because he "refuses to make a false confession, knowing it could benefit
him penally, (which) shows the strength of his character." What then of
his character on the brain-damage dodge -- an odd defense for a man whom
supporters hail as a jailhouse philosopher and co-author of children's books?
Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky
Delgadillo told me he sees Williams' legacy as one of "death and
violence" -- with more than 300 gang-related homicides in Los Angeles
alone each year. "No matter how he tries to distance himself from violent
gangs, he helped create them," Delgadillo noted.
Crediting Williams for denouncing
gangs is sort of like praising tobacco companies for their anti-smoking
campaigns. Should Schwarzenegger grant clemency? Delgadillo said, "I think
the justice system has done its job, and a jury of his peers found him
guilty." (In plain talk: no clemency.)
Williams' lawyers also say the
clemency petition only asks for life without parole. That is technically true
-- and entirely misleading, considering Williams' many claims to MSNBC's Cosby
that he is "innocent," and that "being able to live, it would
allow me to prove my innocence." That can only mean one thing: That after
the execution is stayed, Williams will spend years filing more appeals. He
won't be satisfied with a life behind bars. He wants out.
Back in 2000, when Swiss
legislator Mario Fehr nominated Williams for the Nobel Peace Prize, Fehr told
me over the phone that Williams "might not even have killed those four
people. I don't know what he did 20 years ago." Fehr, you see, wanted to
send the message to young people "that no matter what mistakes you have
made in your life, you can change for the better."
The Tookie-philes are so filled
with their own uplifting message that they are participating in a campaign to
free a convicted killer. They can't really care that Williams gunned down four
innocent people -- not when they are willing to embrace his lies, and abet a
cold-blooded killer's bid to go free.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
December 9, 2012
Martyrdom?
By John Leo
12/19/2005
“Tookie” Williams, put to death by lethal injection
last week in California, was a “legend” who underwent “a meaningful martyrdom
that sent a lasting message to the world,” according to old-time leftist Tom
Hayden, formerly Mr. Jane Fonda.” Meaningful martyrdom”? What can Hayden be
talking about? Martyrs die for a cause. Williams died for executing four
unarmed people during two 1979 robberies, shooting a woman in the face, and
laughing uncontrollably at the gurgling sounds a male victim made as he died in
agony.
Opposing the death penalty, of course, means
speaking out even for people like Williams. Still the campaign for him has been
wretched excess. His book editor and friend Barbara Becnel, compared him to
Rosa Parks. She plans a massive funeral as well as a memorial to him in South
Africa. Several people nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize (anybody can
nominate anybody, by the way.) Because California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger denied clemency, Austrians took his name off the Arnold
Schwarzenegger stadium near Graz, his hometown. A Christian political group
suggested the stadium be named for Williams. In the U.S., all the usual
suspects have been whipping up support and sympathy for Williams, including
Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon and Snoop Dogg.
So much attention to the murderer, almost none for
those he killed. So let’s remember them here: Albert Owens, a veteran and
father of two young girls, shot at a 7-11, and three member of an
Asian-American family who ran the Brookhaven Motel-Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang
and Yee-Chen Lin. In a rare bit of commentary, William John Hagan of Canada
Free Press wrote:” The mainstream media has ignored the realities of the
Williams case in order to promote an anti-death-penalty agenda. To present this
mass murderer as a martyr is an insult to victims everywhere.”
Hayden said Williams was “railroaded,” another
fantasy. In the Owens killing, two accomplices said he did the shooting.
In the motel case, Williams was picked up ten minutes after the shooting of the
three member of the Yang family. Shotgun shells at the motel were traced to a
shotgun William purchased in 1974. Williams was living with a couple, who
testified that he told them details of the three murders that only the killer
would know. They gave police the shotgun and said Williams kept it under his
bed.
One man said Williams had bragged about killing
three people who lived on Vermont Street-the location of the motel. The witness
later said his testimony was coerced, but a three-judge panel on the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that claim. A fellow inmate at Los Angeles
County Jail testified that Williams drew up an elaborate escape plan, which
involved blowing up a van carrying prisoners from jail to court and killing
guards and inmates. Handwritten notes by Williams, which featured his habit of
using stars to dot his I’s, corroborated the story of the plan. The fellow
inmate also testified that Williams had admitted the motel murders.
Williams has been riding the death-row celebrity train
for some time. Jamie Foxx made a TV movie about him “Redemption,” referring to
his decision to write children’s books warning against the gang life. But the
death row killer who writes high-minded books to promote clemency is not a new
phenomenon. In his column, Hagan discusses Williams’s checkered career in
prison, including two instances of throwing chemicals in the eyes of guards. In
denying clemency, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that Williams had
never apologized for the murders, or even admitted committing them. A farewell
message from Williams contained the lyrics of “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching
song. So the unapologetic killer apparently had no clue about how he reached
death row.
The media keep converting killers into celebrities
deserving of our sympathy. Gary Gilmore, a Utah murderer, was the subject of an
enormous book by Norman Mailer, and the ACLU furiously pursued his cause even
after Gilmore said he wanted to die. Mailer turned the killer Jack Henry Abbott
into a radical chic celeb and a sought-after Manhattan dinner guest once Mailer
and other prominent folk helped get him paroled. He grew suddenly less popular
when he killed again, knifing a waiter to death. Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted
cop-killer, is a big name on the left, enlisted to speak on National Public
Radio (at least until the protests got too loud) and invited to give major
talks, including commencement addresses at two colleges. Now add Williams to
the list-the Rosa Parks and Nobel candidate of unrepentant killers.
Misplaced sympathy for killers
(First of two parts)
STANLEY
''TOOKIE" Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California's
San Quentin prison next Tuesday. His death will occur nearly 27 years after he
brutally murdered Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk in Whittier, Calif., and three
members of the Yang family -- Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and their daughter,
Yee-Chen Lin -- at the Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles.
Unlike
the peaceful, painless demise awaiting Williams, the deaths of his victims were
horrific: He shot each of them at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun,
shattering their bodies so that they died in agony. Their suffering amused him.
''You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him," Williams
bragged after killing Albert Owens. According to the district attorney's
summary of the evidence, ''Williams then made gurgling or growling noises and
laughed hysterically about Owens's death."
As
cofounder of the deadly Crips street gang in 1971, Williams's criminal legacy
goes well beyond the four murders for which he was convicted. The gang violence
he unleashed 34 years ago has destroyed thousands of lives and left countless
other victims scarred by rape, assault, and armed robbery. Though he now claims
to have reformed and has written books with an antigang message, he has never
admitted his guilt or expressed any remorse for the slaughter of Albert Owens
and the Yang family. If his supposed contrition amounts to anything more than
lip service, he has yet to prove it. Williams adamantly refuses to be debriefed
by police about the Crips and their operations or to provide any information
that could help bring other killers to justice. In fact, officials at San
Quentin have said he continues to orchestrate gang activity from behind bars.
Incredibly,
this thug is the object of the left's latest craze. For many anti-death penalty
fundamentalists, it is not enough to oppose the execution of a savage killer --
the killer must be extolled as a noble soul whose death would be a loss for
humanity. Thus Hollywood has honored Williams with a made-for-TV movie. The
media have weighed in with sympathetic stories. A slew of celebrities,
including such moral giants as Tom Hayden and Snoop Dogg, are clamoring for
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and spare Williams's life. And
all but forgotten amid this orgy of adulation are the victims Williams so
cruelly murdered nearly three decades ago.
What
is it that makes victims so easy to forget? When Kenneth Boyd was executed in
North Carolina last week, it was reported everywhere that he was the 1,000th
murderer to be put to death since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976.
But how many stories devoted more than a passing mention to the two people Boyd
sent to early graves -- his estranged wife, Julie Curry Boyd, and her father,
Thomas Curry? Why doesn't the media's round-number fetish extend to the victims
of homicide as well as the perpetrators? If the 1,000th execution made
headlines, why didn't the 1,000th murder? Or the 10,000th? Or the 100,000th?
Actually
there have been close to 600,000 homicides in the United States since 1976, and
the total climbs by roughly 15,000 each year. Where is the uproar over those round numbers? Where
are the protests, the petitions, the Hollywood rallies aimed at stopping those deaths? I understand
that some people think capital punishment is wrong as a matter of principle.
What I cannot understand is how anyone can be more outraged by the lawful
execution each year of a few dozen murderers than by the annual slaughter of
thousands of victims at the hands of such murderers.
Opponents
of capital punishment make much of the theoretical possibility that an innocent
defendant might be killed. What they never acknowledge is that the abolition of
capital punishment guarantees that innocent victims will die. That isn't only
because executing murderers has a powerful deterrent effect, as a number of
recent studies confirm. It is also because prison bars can't keep some killers
from killing again.
In
its latest roundup of death penalty statistics, ''Capital Punishment,
2004," the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that at least 101
murderers now on death row were already in prison when they murdered their
victims; at least 44 others were prison escapees.
Lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key may sound appealing. But some murderers will
always escape and murder again. Others will kill in prison.
Ultimately,
the case for putting murderers like Williams and Boyd to death isn't just a
practical one, strong though the practical arguments are. It is also a moral
one. When the state executes a murderer, it is making a statement about the
demands of justice and the sanctity of human life -- a statement as old as
Genesis, and as essential as ever.
Next: The bishops and the death penalty.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is
jacoby@globe.com. 
Death-row celebrity has
direct link to this city's ills
December
10, 2005|By GREGORY KANE
Stanley
"Tookie" Williams sits on California's death row awaiting his
execution Tuesday. Does his plight have a connection with Baltimore?
Oh, you
betcha.
Williams
is a co-founder of the Crips gang. In 1981, Williams was found guilty of
murdering Albert Owens during the robbery of a 7-Eleven in the Los Angeles
area. Three other men joined Williams in the robbery. One testified against him
at his trial.
In the
same trial, Williams was found guilty of murdering Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen
and Yu-Chin Yang Lin in a motel robbery. All four murders occurred in 1979.
Since his
imprisonment on death row, Williams has become a cause celebre among blacks in
the entertainment world who don't know any better. How else can we explain
rapper Snoop Dogg proudly proclaiming before television cameras that Williams
is "our Martin Luther King"? That might hold up as the "Negro,
please" moment of the 21st century.
Liberal
Hollywood types have jumped on the Williams-is-a-hero bandwagon. There has been
a movie about him. (Not one movie yet about his victims.) His supporters claim
that because he has written a series of children's books advising youngsters
not to get involved with gangs, Williams is now "redeemed" and worthy
of clemency.
California
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger heard lawyers for Williams argue his clemency case
Thursday. What Schwarzenegger should take into account when he considers
clemency for Williams is how sincere "Tookie's" claims of
"redemption" are. Judging from comments Williams made to CBS news
correspondent Ed Bradley on a 2004 segment of 60 Minutes, the co-founder of the
Crips is still a gangbanger.
The issue
here is "debriefing." That's the term prison officials use for gang
members who claim they've given up the life. Once they do, prison honchos
demand that they tell everything they know about the criminal activities of
their former cohorts.
Williams
- Mr. Anti-Gang, Mr. "I've Been Redeemed" - has refused to be
debriefed.
"I
have to say that the word `debriefing' is a euphemistic term for
snitching," Williams said. "And my convictions won't allow
that."
So he
still clings to the gang-banger's code of not snitching. That doesn't sound
like "redemption" to me. That sounds like Williams has been conning a
lot of people for a lot of years.
And it
sounds like Williams' "don't be a snitch" convictions have reached
the streets of Baltimore.
Remember
our town's infamous Stop Snitching DVD? Those guys brandishing the guns,
talking about the criminal life and what they would do to those
"snitches" who cut deals with police and finger other criminals?
Baltimore's frighteningly high homicide count can be directly traced to this
tortured principle of "no snitching."
It's a
principle Williams warmly embraces, one that has led to an entire cottage
industry devoted to "stop snitching." There are not only the DVDs,
but "stop snitching" T-shirts and caps.
Rap songs
talk despairingly of "snitches" and proudly of criminals. Some
magazines devoted to rap music do the same. Even lawyers arguing for Williams'
clemency have gotten in on the "anti-snitch" craze.
Responding
to prosecutors who said Williams' startling admission that snitching would
violate his convictions proves he's not worthy of clemency, Williams' lawyers
wrote in their brief that "the District Attorney also claims the absence
of personal redemption because Stanley Williams will not compromise his
personal convictions by submitting to `debriefing.' The District Attorney
demands that Stanley Williams prove his personal redemption by assuming the
role of `informant' which, in a free society, only the police and prosecutor
treat as an act of honor."
Did y'all
get that? According to Tookie's lawyers, Williams is the honorable one in this
situation. Those same lawyers not very subtly implied that police beat false
testimony out of one witness who testified against Williams and all but accused
prosecutors of suborning perjury during his trial. They've questioned the
integrity of everybody involved in the trial of Stanley "Tookie"
Williams except Stanley "Tookie" Williams.
According
to his lawyers, Williams is the only one who has told the truth about the four
murders. Williams is the only one whose integrity is beyond reproach. Williams
is the only one who has acted with honor.
Yes, and
Santy Clause will indeed be coming to town in 15 days.
This is a
case of the values of decent folks being turned upside down and the values of
criminals being shoved in their place. If Williams is indeed
"redeemed," then it's not a matter of "snitching." It's a
matter of confessing. As in confessing sins.
There
will be no confessions from Williams - just two terse sentences about his
convictions against snitching that have undone all the words in his anti-gang
books and cast doubt on his claims of redemption. What Williams is really
teaching the youth of America is that it's honorable to dummy up when they have
knowledge of a crime.
If he's
executed, is that really the legacy Williams wants to take to his grave?
Let Tookie Williams Die
By: Ben Johnson
Thursday, December 01, 2005
By: Ben Johnson
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Save Tookie Williams...a seat in
the gas chamber.
TOOKIE WILLIAMS WROTE JUVENILE LITERATURE SO INSPIRING, IT’S A PITY HIS VICTIMS NEVER GOT TO READ IT TO THEIR CHILDREN. Last night, the California State Supreme Court refused to grant a stay of execution to convicted murderer and co-founder of the deadly street gang the Crips, Stanley “Tookie” Williams Sr. Short of a governor’s pardon, Tookie will (finally) die by lethal injection in San Quentin on December 13 for the brutal murder of four people in 1979. A group of Hollywood’s limousine “liberals,” radical leftists, and Farrakhanites now urge Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (whom they otherwise despise) to grant clemency – and he has granted them a private hearing next week to discuss the matter. We wish he’d instead offer them front row seats to the blessed event.
Tookie
Williams founded the Crips in 1971, eight years before he and three other men
went on a murder-and-robbery spree that netted approximately $250 and left four
people dead. The murders were notably gratuitous. Albert Owens – the clerk in
Whittier, California – lay prostrate on the floor of a back room as Williams
shot him twice in the back. Williams told one of the three men who went along
on the job he killed Owens because he didn’t want any witnesses to identify him
and
“because he was white and he was killing all white people.” He then robbed the
Brookhaven Motel, in the process murdering an elderly Chinese couple and their
daughter (whom he referred to as “Buddhaheads”). Tookie killed all his victims
with a 12-gauge shotgun, which he held inches from their quivering bodies
before pulling the trigger to inflict maximum damage.
Clemency
was not Williams’ first option: escape was. Within weeks of his capture, he
devised a plan; he would have two accomplices meet the van that transported the
quartet from prison to the courthouse. They would kill the two deputies on
board, and Williams would kill the one prisoner who could act as a witness
against him in the Owens murder. The survivors would then dynamite the van, so
authorities would not immediately know who escaped. Williams went on to plot
subsequent escapes, assault prison guards, and order gangland murders from
behind bars. His violence and intransigence got him six years in solitary
confinement.
After the
escape plans fizzled, he exploited California’s leftist judicial establishment
to the fullest, but the evidence against him was so overwhelming even the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals could not overturn his conviction.
In the
last 11 years, Tookie got smart and embarked on a massive PR campaign to
portray himself as a “redeemed” former gang member, writing children’s books
against the gang mentality. In the process, he became the Left’s latest noble
savage. Nearly 20 years after being sentenced to murder, Tookie got to meet
Winnie Mandela, Louis Farrakhan,
and other VIPs; last Monday, Jesse
Jackson and Bianca Jagger dropped by the cellblock. Williams was nominated
for the 2001 Nobel
Peace Prize. (The committee rejected him, either because he did not
sufficiently criticize
U.S. foreign policy or because he had not
killed enough people to qualify.)
Williams’
purported chrysalis convinced
Tinseltown’s Mumia Abu Jamal groupies to beg his clemency: Susan
Sarandon, Tim
Robbins, Mike
Farrell, former Crip
Snoop Doggy Dogg, Danny
Glover, Anjelica Huston, Jamie Foxx, and Bonnie
Raitt – not to mention such washed-up ‘80s leftists as Desmond
Tutu, Mario
Cuomo, and Jesse
Jackson – have asked that his sentence be commuted. Sixties radical Tom
Hayden has vouched
for Tookie’s “transformation,” although admitting Tookie Williams’ supposed
change of heart “is not the primary cause of [gang] truces.” (Emphasis
in original.)
At a
“Save the Peacemaker” rally last weekend, Nation of
Islam Western Regional Minister Tony Muhammad (standing in for grand mullah
Louis
Farrakhan himself) said the United States murdered millions of Indians,
which makes it the real criminal:
This government needs clemency from God
itself. Our president needs clemency; a president who has murdered tens of
thousands on foreign soil. He needs to show that he is a redeemed man, and
even in that act, President Bush can call for the clemency of Stan “Tookie”
Williams.
He then
told Gov. Schwarzenegger, “If you execute, you destroy the hopes of hundreds of
young men and women who have gotten involved in gang culture.”
Despite
his alleged turnaround, prison officials state
Williams is still involved with the Crips, directing action from his
jail cell for the past eleven years. San Quentin spokesman Vernell Crittendon
notes Tookie still maintains an “unusually large bank account,” being mailed
checks 50 or 100 times larger than those other inmates (like Scott Peterson)
receive. Not only has he never admitted guilt in the murder – much less
expressed any remorse – and continues to consort with Crips in prison.
And he’s
never helped the one force that could effectively stop the Crips: the Los
Angeles Police Department. Tookie Williams has revealed nothing about the
personnel, practices, or operational structure of the gang he co-founded. In
his writings, he boasts he
“underwent many years of soul-searching and re-education, without ‘debriefing’
(another word for ‘snitching’).” Snitching, he says, would “rip
my dignity out of my chest” – an unfortunate image for a man who shot (at
least) four people through the torso at close range.
Tookie’s
good example failed to rub off on those closest to him. The California penal
system seems to be holding a Williams family reunion. His son, Stanley “Little
Tookie” Williams Jr., serves alongside him in San Quentin, convicted on a
16-year sentence for second-degree murder of a 20-year-old woman. Another son,
registered sex offender Lafayette Jones, is now wanted by Fontana, California,
police for allegedly molesting
an ex-girlfriend’s 13-year-old daughter at gunpoint, holding
the child captive for six hours on the afternoon of on November 13.
Based on
all this and more, L.A.’s top police officials have petitioned
Schwarzenegger to reject clemency appeals.
Allowing
Tookie Williams to receive the death sentence 24 years after it was imposed by
a jury of his peers is not an outrage; the outrage is that thousands of
Americans were conned into lavishing sympathy on this murderer instead of his
victims and their families, that a street thug who’s learned to manipulate the
Left enjoys glowing press coverage, a positive biopic,
warm personal relations with Hollywood’s elite, and an honored position in the
Crips. (And the New York Times probably considers even this cruel and
unusual punishment.)
Opponents
of the death penalty say a death sentence will keep Tookie from completing “all
the good work” he began in prison. This is part of the exchange when one
commits certain heinous crimes: he forfeits the right even to do good works –
just as he denied his four victims the right to write children’s books, design
socially constructive grade school curricula, or encourage people to “reduce,
reuse, and recycle.” His good works – if there are any – will be continued by
good people, the kind who don’t end up on death row for carrying out repeated
executions.
The Left
claims the death penalty is no deterrent but Tookie’s “powerful story of
redemption” is, showing children they, too, could wind
up incarcerated. If his incarceration serves as a deterrent against gang
violence, his death will make a more “powerful” tale yet. If it doesn’t, his
execution will not interfere with that. Either way, weakness and surrender are
never a deterrent – to totalitarians, terrorists, or common street thugs.
I’m not a
father confessor, but I’m fairly certain of this moral arithmetic: Writing
children’s books is not an appropriate penance for killing an entire family in
as bloody a way as possible, dedicating his entire life to a ruthless pursuit
of violence, and founding an organization that has trapped generations of inner
city youths into the same destructive cycle. Whether Tookie Williams has
achieved “redemption” is not a concern of the state – as the idolatrous,
secular Left would have it (“immanentizing
the eschaton” as William F.
Buckley Jr. called it) – it is a matter to be decided when Stanley Williams
Sr. stands before a Higher Authority. Which meeting should arranged with all
speed.
Ben
Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and co-author, with David
Horowitz, of the book Party of
Defeat. He is also the author of the books Teresa
Heinz Kerry's Radical Gifts (2009) and 57
Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving
(2004).
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