Final clemency appeals denied for Crips gang founder

SAN FRANCISCO – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to block the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, rejecting the notion that the founder of the murderous Crips gang had atoned for his crimes and found redemption on death row.

Williams, 51, was set to die by injection at San Quentin Prison early today for murdering four people during two 1979 holdups.

Williams’ case became one of the nation’s biggest death-row cause celebres in decades. It set off a nationwide debate over the possibility of redemption on death row, with Hollywood stars and capital punishment foes arguing that Williams had made amends by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs.

But Schwarzenegger suggested Monday that Williams’ supposed change of heart was not genuine, noting that the inmate had not owned up to his crimes or shown any real remorse for the countless killings committed by the Crips.

“Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Schwarzenegger wrote less than 12 hours before the execution. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”

Williams was condemned in 1981 for gunning down convenience store clerk Albert Owens, 26, at a 7-Eleven in Whittier and killing Yen-I Yang, 76, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63, and the couple’s daughter Yu-Chin Yang Lin, 43, at the Los Angeles motel they owned. Williams claimed he was innocent.

Inside the prison’s walls, the Los Angeles Times reported, Williams passed the day quietly in a holding cell just steps from the death chamber, visiting with friends and talking on the telephone while under constant watch by guards. A prison spokesman said Williams was “calm and upbeat.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals and Schwarzenegger declined requests to reconsider, and a last-ditch petition by the defense to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution was rejected.

Williams and a friend founded the Crips in Los Angeles in 1971. Authorities say it is responsible for hundreds of deaths, many of them in battles with the rival Bloods for turf and control of the drug trade.

Among the celebrities who took up Williams’ cause were Jamie Foxx, who played the gang leader in a cable movie about Williams; rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip; Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in “Dead Man Walking”; and Bianca Jagger. During Williams’ 24 years on death row, a Swiss legislator, college professors and others nominated him for the Nobel Prizes in peace and literature.