The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to halt the scheduled execution of convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, the Crips gang founder who became an anti-gang activist while in prison and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In a last-ditch legal move, defense attorneys petitioned the high court earlier this month, alleging shoddy forensic testing and other errors may have wrongly sent Williams to San Quentin State Prison, where he is scheduled die by injection Dec. 13. The defense derided as "junk science" ballistics evidence showing that a shotgun registered to Williams was used to kill three people during a 1979 motel robbery. The attorneys asked the court to allow re-examination of the evidence. Prosecutors argued there was no good reason to reopen Williams' case. Allegations about the shotgun evidence were based not on fact but on "innuendo, supposition and the patent bias of his purported expert," prosecutors said. The high court voted 4-2 without comment to deny the inmate's petition. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or a federal court could still intervene to spare the 51-year-old Williams.
Nathan Barankin, spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, expressed satisfaction with Wednesday's ruling. "The extraordinary relief Williams sought is reserved for those cases which have legal merit," he said. Williams, condemned in 1981, has maintained his innocence. Among his claims is that fabricated testimony sent him to death row. He also says prosecutors violated his rights when they dismissed all potential black jurors from his case. The California Supreme Court, federal trial and appeals courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court have already ruled against him in earlier appeals.
Williams is asking for clemency from Schwarzenegger for killing Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang and Yu-Chin Yang Lin in the motel robbery, and Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk gunned down in a separate killing. Clemency would commute his sentence to life without parole. While in prison, Williams has campaigned for an end to youth gang violence and written a series of children's books. He has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize and four times for the Nobel Prize for literature. Williams and a high school friend started the Crips in Los Angeles in 1971 and it grew into one of the nation's most notorious street gangs.
| I was in LA during some of the worst Crips v. Bloods violence. Bad bad juju. |