Case Draws Conflicting Views
With the condemned prisoner's petition for clemency denied by the governor, one of Stanley Tookie Williams' closest associates stood outside the forbidding iron gates of San Quentin Prison at nightfall Monday and lamented Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision.
"I was surprised, because I thought the governor would have mercy," said Fred Jackson, 67, who runs the Internet Project for Street Peace, one of Williams' programs to reduce gang violence. "I thought the governor would look within his own humanity and find compassion."
Moments later, as the cold, damp dusk rolled in across San Francisco Bay, Jackson turned and walked through the gates for a final visit with Williams, set to be executed less than eight hours later for the murders of four people in two armed robberies.
A throng of news reporters and demonstrators protesting the execution grew throughout the evening as Williams' final moments approached.
"This isn't justice," said Erika Blue, a local television host who was there Monday night as a protester. "Why does this man have to die?"
About 400 miles away, at sun-drenched Plummer Park in West Hollywood, elementary school teacher Paul Young thought he had the answer.
"The guy's a thug and he murdered four people," Young said. "These thugs have to know that you can't just go around indiscriminately killing people. Look at all the lives this guy has ruined."
Young, 54, scoffed at claims that Williams' authorship of children's books during more than two decades in prison showed atonement and merited mercy.
"You say we should forgive you, because you wrote a couple of books?" he asked rhetorically.
Williams' pending execution elicited strong and conflicting feelings throughout the state about crime, punishment and mercy, exposing the deep fault lines that are part of California's social landscape.
Hollywood luminaries, political liberals, groups opposed to capital punishment and African American leaders contended that Williams had redeemed himself by renouncing the gang violence of his youth in South Los Angeles.
But law enforcement officers and other opponents of clemency argued that Williams was a cold-blooded gangster who was justly found guilty of four murders and appropriately sentenced to die.
In San Francisco on Monday, death penalty critics reacted angrily to the governor's denial of clemency. Actor Mike Farrell, president of a group called Death Penalty Focus, called Schwarzenegger's decision "a shameful failure of leadership and a collapse of moral courage."
