United States authorities on Tuesday executed Stanley ”Tookie” Williams, a convicted killer who was at the centre of one of biggest anti-death-penalty campaigns in the US in decades, a spokesperson for San Quentin prison said.
Williams, executed by lethal injection, was declared dead at 12.35am local time, she added.
He was strapped to a trolley and injected with a sedative and potassium chloride to induce paralysis. He was then given pancuronium bromide to bring on a heart attack.
Several thousand people gathered outside the prison, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean south of San Francisco, raising their voices in anger when Williams’s execution was announced.
Some carried candles, others signs reading ”Save Tookie” and ”Love is the answer”.
”It’s over, but it’s not,” said Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of several well-known personalities who supported Williams in his quest to have his execution stayed.
”He came in without any kind of resistance, was strapped down, showed no kind of resistance whatsoever,” said Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez, who witnessed the execution along with nearly 40 other people, including supporters of Williams and the families of his victims.
Williams (51) was found guilty in 1981 of four murders, those of a convenience-store clerk and a family of Chinese immigrants.
He had admitted being a founder of the brutal Crips gang that terrorised Los Angeles at the time, but denied the killings. While on death row, he renounced his violent past and wrote acclaimed books to try to persuade youths not to join gangs.
Hollywood stars and civil rights activists had joined an international campaign to try to save Williams’s life. But all court appeals were rejected and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down his clemency bid on Monday.
Citing Williams’s refusal to apologise for the 1979 murders, which he has always maintained he did not commit, Schwarzenegger said he could not justify overturning the verdict of the courts.
”Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption,” Schwarzenegger wrote in his published decision.
”The basis of Williams’s clemency request is not innocence. Rather, the basis of the request is the personal redemption Stanley Williams has experienced and the positive impact of the message he sends. But Williams’s claim of innocence remains a key factor to evaluating his claim of personal redemption. It is impossible to separate Williams’s claim of innocence from his claim of redemption.”
Calling the decision ”racist and immoral”, Todd Chretien, an anti-death-penalty campaigner who had been observing a vigil outside the gates of the prison, said: ”This decision is a gigantic moral failing. It confirms the racism of the death penalty, and sends a message to young Latino and African-American people that the governor and the attorney general do not care about them.”
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political commentator, said the decision was determined by the governor’s faltering political fortunes.
”He’s a conservative Republican, he’s up for a tough re-election next year and he needs the Republican base,” he said. ”This country puts a lot of lip service into the concept of redemption. The message this decision sends is horrible and hypocritical.” — AFP, Guardian Unlimited Â