Gang chief claimed innocence until death

STANLEY Tookie Williams, who was executed in California yesterday, maintained his innocence right up until his death, even when an admission of guilt may have spared him execution.

Even after the courts and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected a flurry of Williams’s last-ditch appeals before his execution early yesterday, his supporters vowed to prove his innocence.

Williams, the Crips gang co-founder whose case stirred a national debate about capital punishment versus the possibility of redemption, was executed for killing four people in 1979.

Williams was led into the death chamber at San Quentin prison at midnight, shackled and handcuffed. He declined to give a formal final statement.

He seemed frustrated by the length of time it took officials to insert the intravenous lines in his arms. He repeatedly looked up, shaking his head at supporters, reporters and witnesses.

In all, it took 22 minutes to insert the needle.

“You doing that right?” it sounded as if he asked one of the men with a needle.

It took much less time to die; he appeared to stop breathing just moments after a prison official read the death warrant and said, “The execution shall now proceed.”

Williams was described as “complacent, quiet and thoughtful,” by Corrections Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton in the hours before the execution. He declined to have a last meal as he waited in the holding cell, drinking milk instead. Prison officials said he spent his last hours reading mail, watching television and meeting with his lawyers and friends.

Williams, 51, died at 12.35am local time (8.35am Irish time).

After he was declared dead, his supporters shouted in unison: “The state of California just killed an innocent man,” as they walked out of the chamber.

Lora Owens, stepmother of one of the four people Williams was convicted of killing witnessed the execution. “I believe it was a just punishment long overdue,” she told ABC television.

Williams’s case became one of the nation’s biggest death-row debates in decades, with Hollywood opponents and capital punishment foes arguing that Williams’s sentence should be commuted to life in prison because he had made amends by writing children’s books about the dangers of gangs and violence.

Williams became the 12th person executed in California since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

In the days leading up to the execution, state and federal courts refused to reopen his case. On Monday, Mr Schwarzenegger denied Williams’s request for clemency, suggesting that his supposed change of heart was not genuine because he had not shown any real remorse for the killings committed by the Crips.

“Is Williams’s redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Mr Schwarzenegger wrote.

Witnesses at the trial said he boasted about the killings, saying: “You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him.”

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.

Williams never wavered from that claim of innocence and said he refused to confess to crimes he did not commit, even if doing so would save his life. He said he redeemed himself while in prison and apologised for starting the Crips.