Schwarzenegger hears last appeal for 'Crips' gang leader

Stanley Tookie Williams

SACRAMENTO - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger held a clemency hearing on condemned Crips gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams on Thursday ahead of one of the most anticipated decisions of his administration.

Williams, 51, murdered a store clerk and a family running a motel in separate 1979 robberies. After 24 years in prison, he is set to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday at San Quentin prison north of San Francisco.

During a 60-minute session behind closed doors, Williams' lawyers asked Schwarzenegger to commute their client's sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Rather than repeat arguments, which have failed in court, that Williams is innocent, lawyers argued Williams is worth more alive than dead because of his work in urging youths to avoid gangs.

"Stanley Williams has been where these at-risk children are, and the whole thrust of his message is 'don't do what I did,"' said Peter Fleming, one of Williams' attorneys. "His message whatever the result is the message of peace."

Neither Fleming nor prosecutors would comment on how the meeting with the governor went, although the defence attorney did say: "I'm still frightened to death."

California prosecutors and prison officials call Williams a poor candidate for clemency because he has not admitted to the murders and still has gang ties.

"The evidence in this case is truly overwhelming," said John Monaghan, assistant head deputy district attorney in Las Angeles. "There are certain murders, not any murder, where an individual's conduct is just so abhorrent, the crime is so brutal, it simply justifies the ultimate punishment."

Defence lawyers say Schwarzenegger represents the last significant chance to spare Williams' life after the California Supreme Court declined last week to stop the execution.

"When we review death judgments we can review only for error," Chief Justice Ronald George said this week. "We cannot exercise that element of mercy which is properly considered as part of outside-the-legal-process function of a governor or a president in granting clemency or a pardon."

Schwarzenegger's office expects a decision before Monday. Monaghan of the DA's office said he also expects more last-minute defence legal filings.

"You can bet your bottom dollar that between now and Tuesday additional petitions will be filed by Mr Williams' attorneys in state and federal court," he said. "Mr. Williams wants out of prison. This has nothing to do with redemption."

Supporters of clemency for Williams, including celebrities such as Bianca Jagger and actor Jamie Foxx, who played Williams in a recent movie, have stepped up their lobbying in recent days. On Wednesday, a university professor also resubmitted the former gang leader's name for a Nobel Peace Prize.

"It's one attempt just to draw attention to the anti-gang work that Mr Williams has been doing," said Philip Gasper, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California.

Schwarzenegger has twice denied clemency appeals since coming to office in 2003. The last California governor to grant clemency before an execution was Ronald Reagan in 1967.

Williams, an avid bodybuilder, says he met Schwarzenegger several times in the early 1970s in the Los Angeles area, including at the famed Muscle Beach gym. The governor has said he does not recall meeting Williams.

"There are millions of people that have said that they have worked out with me," he said last month. "So first of all, many of them did, and I don't remember them, and many of them didn't."

- REUTERS