Free Republic

By Senator Roy Ashburn, 18th Senate District The recent spotlight on the impending execution of multiple-murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams has once again highlighted the flaws in California’s death penalty law. Williams was put to death at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, after he was denied clemency by Governor Schwarzenegger. Williams was convicted in 1981 of murdering four people and sentenced to death. Yet 26 years after his victims took their final breaths, the killer still lives. His lawyers have continued to maneuver to thwart the sentence duly handed down by a jury of his peers until the very end. Williams’s case...

One night only - December 12, 2006, "Tookie: The Legacy, the Peacemaker."

SAN FRANCISCO - The Black Repertory Group will re-enact the execution of Crips co-founder and murderer Stanley Tookie Williams to mark the one-year anniversary of the former gang leader's death by lethal injection. Williams' longtime friend and co-author Barbara Becnel and Shirley Neal, a vice president at The Africa Channel, are co-producing the Dec. 12 event to show what they witnessed as "dramatic and horrific." "This is what the state of California is doing in the name of its people," Becnel told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "We were there. We saw it. Now we want the public to see...

Lawyers for another condemned inmate say Stanley Tookie Williams may have felt horrible pain. Prison officials allowed the execution of convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams to proceed, even though a nurse had failed to hook up a backup intravenous line minutes before authorities delivered the lethal injection drugs, according to court filings made public Tuesday. Defense attorneys for a man on death row at San Quentin cited the problem as part of a legal challenge to California's lethal injection procedure. Later this month, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose will hear the challenge, which asserts that condemned prisoners...

The ashes of executed Crips gang co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams were spread in a lake in South Africa in accordance with his will, a friend said. Barbara Becnel, who co-authored children's books with Williams and witnessed his execution, said in a statement Friday that she and Williams' longtime friend Shirley Neal sprinkled the ashes into the lake Sunday in Thokoza Park in the city of Soweto, as Williams had requested. "On his last day of life Stan asked me to spread his ashes in South Africa," Becnel said. "He wanted to return to the motherland." Williams was cremated after his...

NASHVILLE — Just hours before Tennessee was set to execute two inmates, a federal judge issued a stay of execution for one of the convicted murderers. Judge Todd Campbell halted the Wednesday execution of Paul Dennis Reid and ordered a hearing on whether the inmate is mentally competent to stop appealing his seven death sentences for a string of 1997 murders. In the past 45 years, Tennessee has executed one inmate. Campbell's order Tuesday put a stop — at least temporarily — to the state's preparations to administer lethal injection to two condemned murderers on the same day. Reid, who...

SACRAMENTO - Death penalty moratorium supporters will try again this week to put a hold on executions in California, the state with the largest death row in the country. A bill by Assembly members Sally Lieber, D-Santa Clara, and Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, would bar executions at least until 2008 - after a state commission has reported on ways to improve the accuracy of jury verdicts in criminal cases. The measure is scheduled for a hearing Tuesday by the Assembly Public Safety Committee. The Public Safety Committee approved a similar bill by Koretz and Lieber in January, but that measure...

Friends of Tookie Facing Charges Dear Friends, My name is Gloria Ross and my uncle, Anthony Ross is an inmate on San Quentin's Death Row. I have very unfortunate news regarding the situation of approximately eight (8) inmates (figure is yet to be verified) sitting on San Quentin's death row who were very good friends of Stan Tookie Williams. On December 8, 2005, these men (including my uncle) were taken from their cells by guards in riot gear and told that they were going to be questioned and investigated under the charges that they were conspiring to incite a riot...

SAN FRANCISCO - Like so many other administrative complaints made by California prisoners, the one filed by Michael Angelo Morales this month is squeezed onto a one-page prison form. But Morales' message sounds an unusual note of urgency: "My execution by lethal injection is imminent and will be a cruel and unusual form of punishment." Morales has a Feb. 21 date in the death chamber for the rape and murder of a teenage girl in Lodi. In a neat script he explains his "grave concerns." He fears that pancuronium bromide, the second of three drugs administered in executions by California...

The oldest man to ever enter California's execution chamber met his doom Tuesday the way he'd wanted to: With the faint lilt of Native American chants ringing in the air around him, and loved ones mouthing "I love you" to him as his damaged vision slowly faded to black. A symbolic Indian feather lay on quadruple murderer Clarence Ray Allen's chest for the entire 33-minute execution, rising and falling until the lethal poisons piped into his veins through intravenous tubes stopped his breathing and he at last lay completely still. "Hoka Hey, (an Indian saying meaning) it's a good day...

Renford Reese is an associate professor of political science at Cal Poly Pomona University, a really big admirer of Crips gang founder and murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams and the author of an essay entitled, "M.L. King Jr., Tookie Williams: kindred spirits?," in which he favorably compares Tookie to the Rev. King. Dr. Reese's paean, featured on the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin website, laments about the execution of this cold-blooded racist, because, "in his cell in San Quentin, Williams created a series of children's books titled ‘'Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence,'" written with former journalist and Tookie groupie, Barbara...

Railcar Killer's Date With Death Set Death Row Inmate To Be Executed On May 10 POSTED: 10:09 am CST January 6, 2006 UPDATED: 2:15 pm CST January 6, 2006 HOUSTON -- Condemned serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz, the Mexican drifter dubbed the "Railcar Killer," was scheduled Friday to be executed on May 10 for raping and killing a Houston doctor. Maturino Resendiz's lawyer, Jack Zimmermann, objected to the setting of the execution date while an appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is pending, but prosecutor Roe Wilson argued that the appeals process could continue even with an...

Editor's Note: African-Americans who rallied for clemency for Stanley "Tookie" Williams must do the same for Clarence Ray Allen, a non-black, 76-year-old blind man just weeks away from execution, the writer says. LOS ANGELES--In the wee hours of the morning on Jan. 17, another man will be put to death by lethal injection in the State of California. This comes exactly 36 days after the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. But where are the protesters? With less than a month to go before the scheduled execution of a 76-year-old blind, deaf and wheelchair-confined man, there has been no public outcry...

What is it about the fate of convicted killer Stanley "Tookie" Williams that so engrossed the Hollyleft and Euroleft? A founder of the Crips – a Los Angeles criminal gang whose record of murder, rape and robbery makes Al Capone's Cicero crowd look like the Lavender Hill Mob – Tookie was convicted in 1979 of the cold-blooded killing of four innocent people in a pair of robberies. Albert Owens, a 26-year-old Whittier, Calif., 7-Eleven employee, was shotgunned to death. Days later, an elderly Asian couple who ran a motel, Yen-I Yang and Thsai-Shai Yang, and their 43-year-old daughter, Yee Chen...

Many of the most heartwarming tales of the holiday season come out of Austria. One thinks of Oberndorf and the little parish church where the organ broke down on Christmas Eve 1818 and so Father Mohr and his organist Franz Gruber wrote a simple song that could be sung with only the accompaniment of a guitar: "Silent Night." One thinks of the von Trapp family saying so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu and scramming Nazi Salzburg for a new life in Vermont. And now we have a third inspirational story from little Austria. One...

Many of the most heartwarming tales come out of Austria. One thinks of Oberndorf and the little parish church where the organ broke down on Christmas Eve 1818 and so Father Mohr and his organist Franz Gruber wrote a simple song that could be sung with only the accompaniment of a guitar: "Silent Night." One thinks of the von Trapp family saying so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu and scramming Nazi Salzburg for a new life in Vermont. And now we have a third inspirational story from little Austria. One day, a few years...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's name has been expunged from the websites of his Austrian hometown in the latest chapter of the row over the US death penalty. The editing came a day after the California governor's name was removed from Graz's main football stadium. Local politicians berated Mr Schwarzenegger - one of Graz's most famous sons - after he refused to pardon a prominent US death row inmate. The governor subsequently made clear he wanted nothing more to do with Graz. He returned a "ring of honour" the city awarded him in 1999 and demanded his name no longer be used in...

US celebrities and rights activists have lamented the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams at his funeral. Hundreds of mourners came to the violence-wracked area of Los Angeles where Williams founded the murderous Crips gang three decades ago. Under heavy police presence, a long line of people entered the 1,500-seat Bethel AME Church. Vendors sold T-shirts with Williams' picture, and a large TV set up in the parking lot allowed the overflow crowd to watch the service. Williams was executed on December 13 despite clemency pleas from celebrities and others who said he had rededicated his life to peace. "It's nine-fifteen...

VIENNA, Austria - The mayor of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian hometown on Tuesday begged the California governor to reconsider his decision to end ties to the city after locals assailed him for his death penalty stance. Siegfried Nagl, mayor of the southern city of Graz, said he dashed off a letter to Schwarzenegger pleading with him not to return a ring of honor bestowed on him by officials in his birthplace in 1999 and reassuring him that most residents still admire him. "I hope that very soon we'll hear you say, 'I'll be back,'" Nagl told the actor-turned-politician, one of Austria's...

Posthumously yours, Stanley Williams* By David Howard December 20, 2005 NOTE: David Howard, of Ojai, is a peace activist and writer who held a candle for Williams at the Ventura County Government Center on the night of the execution. Dear Arnold Schwarzenegger, I've been dead for a few days now. You've probably already forgotten about me and moved on to more important matters like condemning gay marriage, helping the Minutemen keep Mexicans out of California, and preparing another diatribe to deny clemency to Clarence Allen, the 75-year-old blind Choctaw Indian you'll execute Jan. 17. Still, I beseech you -- once...