The Supreme Court refused to take the case of California death row inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a founder of the Crips street gang. The 51-year-old former gang member who claims he is innocent was condemned for killing four people in 1981 and says jailhouse informants fabricated testimony that he confessed to the murders.
While in prison, Williams has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for literature for his work on a series of children's books and efforts intended to curtail youth gang violence. Last year, the cable channel FX aired a movie that depicted the killer and former gangbanger as an advocate for street peace. The film was called "Redemption." The families of his four victims and the prosecutor who put him on death row were appalled by the film. To them, the movie glorified Williams while ignoring the violent shotgun deaths during two separate 1979 robberies. Outraged and indignant would be just a beginning of how I feel,'' said Lora Owens, the stepmother who raised Albert Owens, a 23-year-old store clerk slain more than two decades ago. ``I'm outraged they'd even call it `Redemption.' '' Robert Martin, the now-retired prosecutor who tried Williams, has no use for the movie. "The person who lives gets all the attention," Martin said. "The people who die get very little attention. They are in their graves."
In the first murder, a jury convicted Williams of shooting to death a 7-Eleven clerk for $120. An accomplice testified that Williams gunned down Albert Lewis Owens, a father of two daughters, to eliminate any witnesses. Williams, according to his cohorts, later mimicked the sounds Owens made as he lay dying. Two weeks later, the same jury found, he killed again at a downtown Los Angeles motel, shooting motel owners Thsai-Shai and Yen-I-Yang, and their daughter, Yee Chen Lin. There were no eyewitnesses, but a number of people testified that Williams told them he killed the three with a shotgun to keep them from identifying him as he robbed them of $600. Williams did not testify at his 1981 trial, but his defense argued that he had alibis for both holdups. The jury, which was not told Williams was a gang leader, didn't buy his defense. That same jury then decided on death for Williams after a penalty phase in which no evidence was presented to spare his life. "I don't think his guilt is an issue anybody has taken seriously,'' says former prosecutor Martin. "I think Williams has had no concern for anybody else's life except his own. When people go to San Quentin, they get San Quentinitis. I don't find it unusual he might have regrets now about being the co-founder of one of the worst gangs in America.''
Williams' supporters say he was railroaded. But every court that has reviewed Williams' case has rejected his claims of innocence. Even his trial lawyer, Joe Ingber, acknowledges that the prosecution ``had a lot on the table'' in terms of evidence. Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Association and a veteran of Los Angeles gang wars, is skeptical of Williams' rehabilitation and his death row work. "It doesn't balance against four lives," McBride says. Nobody is more offended by Williams' recognition than members of the victims' families, furious at the attention Williams has received. "We are the ones that have been waiting 24 years for justice to be served," says Rebecca Owens Vaul, Albert Owens' daughter. "I find it beyond bad taste that the man that killed my father has been nominated for not one, but two Nobel Peace Prizes. I would like to be able to see my father's grave and tell him that the man that took him away from us has finally been brought to justice."
The Williams case reached the Supreme Court following a February decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, as did the Supreme Court, refused to grant Williams another hearing based on his argument that prosecutors violated his rights when they dismissed all potential black jurors from hearing the case. The California Criminal Justice Legal Foundation is urging against clemency, and no California governor has granted clemency to a condemned murderer since Ronald Reagan spared the life of a severely brain-damaged killer in 1967. "Perhaps now he will finally get the punishment that a jury unanimously agreed he deserved," said the group's president, Michael Rushford.
