The California Supreme Court on Sunday rejected a last-minute legal effort to block Tuesday's execution of convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams, while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put off announcing any decision on whether to spare his life until today.
The six sitting justices unanimously denied Williams' lawyer's request for a stay of execution. The Supreme Court, in an order signed by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, indicated that the justices have reviewed all nine claims made by his lawyer and denied each one of them on the merits -- even though "each claim also is barred as untimely and successive," a legal term that means the justices viewed the claims as repetitive.
Williams' attorney Verna Wefald declined to comment. But she already has prepared a petition asking the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to review the case today, and plans to go to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
Among the claims in her rejected appeal to the state Supreme Court was the assertion that one witness against Williams had an undisclosed history of violent crimes and that a key jailhouse informant had manipulated Williams while he was forcibly drugged by authorities.
Williams, co-founder of the Crips street gang, has become an international figure and the subject of a clemency campaign based on the claim that he has redeemed himself with anti-gang activism from death row. He has denied he committed four murders he was convicted of more than two decades ago.
Williams' supporters on Sunday said they have uncovered new information that would help exonerate him -- information already passed on to the governor.
Alice Huffman, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People's state president, said the group received a call Thursday from a former Los Angeles County jail inmate who can bolster Williams' allegations that he was framed by police working with a jailhouse informant.
The NAACP contact, Gordon Bradbury von Ellerman, 46, of Los Angeles, said he saw officers deliver police reports about Williams' case to George Oglesby, an inmate who later testified against him. Von Ellerman said he came forward only now because he did not learn until last week that Oglesby had been a witness at Williams' murder trial.
The governor has until midnight tonight to make a clemency decision that would commute Williams' death sentence to life in prison.
