The Stanley Williams Execution: Schwarzenegger’s Statement
One reason the California governor did not grant clemency was the failure of ‘Tookie’ Williams to admit his crimes and take responsibility:
Schwarzenegger said there was no question that Williams had murdered four people in 1979. Williams’ repeated refusal to admit that became, to the governor, a powerful factor against clemency.
“Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption.”
The evidence of guilt, the governor’s statement said, included testimony from two of Williams’ accomplices, ballistics evidence linking Williams’ shotgun to the murders and testimony from four people that Williams had at different times confessed to one or both murders.
Moreover, he said, after Williams’ arrest, he conspired to escape “by blowing up a jail transportation bus and killing the deputies guarding” it. Although the escape was never carried out, “there are detailed escape plans in Williams’ own handwriting,” the statement said, adding that an escape plan is “consistent with guilt, not innocence.”
Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said she thought that Williams’ clemency bid was plagued from the start by his position that he would never acknowledge that he committed the four murders.
“I will never admit capital crimes that I did not commit — not even to save my life,” Williams wrote in his 2004 autobiography “Blue Rage, Black Redemption.” He repeated that position Monday afternoon in a conversation with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jackson told reporters.
“Tookie wanted to have it both ways — he wanted to maintain his actual innocence claim so that he would have something to argue in the courts, but he still wanted to claim that he had been redeemed,” Levenson said. “In the end, he lost on both fronts.”
As several of my commenters have noted, this was not really a close call at all; there are far better ‘test cases’ for death penalty opponents than this one…
I haven’t followed this case all that closely, but I do find it interesting that the Schwarzenegger statement was the first time I heard Williams refused to admit to the crimes. His defenders kept playing up the reformed-ganster image, but somehow they failed to point out that according to Tookie, he didn’t have anything to atone for.
I agree with you completely Mark on this being a lousy test case. It seems to be almost tailor-made to depict death-penalty opponents as soft-headed limousine liberals – supporting a prisoner becomes trendy among Hollywood stars because he wrote a children’s book.
It seems to me the things that have made a dent in the usual support for the death penalty in the polls has been the evidence of innocent people getting executed and the feeling the application of the death penalty is haphazard at best. Rather than jumping haphazardly on individual hip cases like Williams or Mumia, opponents would do better to keep arguing that the death penalty should be abolished for everyone, not just criminals with radical street cred.
Have you heard about the Cory Maye case? Read up on it, because it’s fascinating/horrifying. I’d think it’d be something you’d want to blog about, maybe.