| | 1. "Response to Stanley Williams' Petition for Executive Clemency ", Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, 11/16/05 2. Who is Stanley "Tookie" Williams?, Know Gangs "Williams might regret his past, there is no act that will make up for the damage Williams has done and the devastation he has caused. Why not find a better role model for our children?" http://www.knowgangs.com/blog/tookie.htm 3. "Tookie's Tales", Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/1/05 "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. " 4. "He's a murderer. He should die.", Joshua Marquis, Los Angeles Times, 12/4/05 "Not only did (Williams) 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." Marquis is the district attorney of Clatsop County, Ore., vice president of the National District Attorneys Assn. and coauthor of "Debating the Death Penalty." http://joshmarquis.blogspot.com 5. "Crime and punishment", David Reinhard, The Oregonian, 12/1/05 "(Williams) broke down the door at the Brookhaven Motel. . . shot Yen-I Yang and his wife, Tsai-Shai Yang, the hotel owners, and her daughter Yee-Chen Lin, who was visiting from Taiwan." "Yen-I Yang and Tsai-Shai Yang left six children and 10 grandchildren. Yee-Chen Lin left behind three children in Taiwan." 6. "Misplaced Sympathy for Killers", Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 12/7/05 "(Williams) shot each of (the 4 murder victims) 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 then made gurgling or growling noises and laughed hysterically about Owens's death.' " 7. CALLing out “Tookie” Williams, Dan Tierney, The Daily Cardinal (U of Wisconsin-Madison), 11/17/05 8. "If death penalty is law, this execution must stand", By Rubel Shelly, The Tennessean, 12/11/05
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051211/NEWS03/512110400/1017/NEWS 9. "DEATH-ROW CELEBRITY HAS DIRECT LINK TO THIS CITY'S ILLS", Gregory Kane, BALTIMORE SUN, 12/10/05
"So (Williams) 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." 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 coauthor of "Debating the Death Penalty."
Los Angeles Times
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.
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. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/editorials/la-op-tookieexecute4dec04,0,1229497,print.story?coll=la-home-sunday-opinion
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