Execution date set for founder of 'Crips' gang

LOS ANGELES - Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a street gang leader and convicted killer who has become a cause celebre for death penalty opponents, will die by lethal injection on December 13, a Los Angeles judge has ruled.

Williams, who admits founding the notorious Crips street gang while a teen-ager but maintains his innocence in the four 1979 murders that landed him on death row, has exhausted nearly a quarter century of appeals and will likely be executed unless he can win clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Superior Court Judge William Pounders rejected a request for another delay by attorneys for the 51-year-old Williams, one of America's best-known death row inmates who in October lost a bid to have the US Supreme Court review his case.

"I am signing the warrant of execution," Pounders said, adding that Williams had already had 24 years to press his case. During that time he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize five times for a series of books he wrote from prison urging children to reject gangs and violence.

Schwarzenegger was aware of Williams' case but had not made a decision on clemency, his spokeswoman said.

One victim's relative was pleased by the ruling.

"I feel like, perchance, justice may soon be completed," said Laura Owens, stepmother to Albert Lewis Owens, one of the four people Williams was convicted of killing. "It's been a long time."

VICTIMS SHOT POINT BLANK

The courtroom was filled with about three dozen Williams supporters, including actor Mike Farrell, who told reporters: "I ask the governor to be a leader, be a man, to be a human being and stop this execution and to call for a moratorium on all executions while we examine our system and find out what is wrong and fix what is wrong."

According to witnesses at his trial, Williams shot Owens during a February 27, 1979, convenience store robbery, later bragging and laughing to his accomplices about choking sounds the 26-year-old clerk made as he died.

About two weeks later, court records show, Williams broke down the door of an Asian-American family-owned motel, killing the mother and father with shotgun blasts to the stomach. When the couple's daughter came out of her bedroom, he shot her in the face at point-blank range.

Prosecutors say he admitted committing the motel murders, boasting that he targeted Asians because, he believed, they had money and were intimidated by his size.

Williams, who insists he was wrongly convicted and argues that prosecutors kept blacks off the jury, was the subject of a sympathetic 2004 TV movie, "Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story," starring Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx.

"It is galling," Laura Owens said of the film and acclaim Williams has won. "... It's the fact that he's on death row and the right-to-life people have taken him up as a cause. Obviously these are people who have never walked where I'm walking."

California, which has more than 600 people on death row, has executed 11 people, eight of them white men, since the death penalty was reinstated in the late 1970s

- REUTERS