Clock ticks down on Williams execution at San Quentin
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- No one paid much attention to Stanley Tookie Williams when he was on trial in 1981 for murdering four people.
Today, as the clock ticks down on his scheduled execution, the former Los Angeles gang leader is world famous as a Nobel Prize-nominated author, the subject of an award-winning movie and a cause celebre for celebrities and death penalty opponents.
The change in status has made Williams' upcoming execution California's highest-profile death penalty case in decades, producing feverish preparations Sunday throughout the state and at San Quentin State Prison, where the co-founder of the Crips was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
In San Francisco, a team of defense lawyers appealed to the California Supreme Court for the second time in two weeks to call off the execution, while Sister Helen Prejean, the inspiration for the film "Dead Man Walking," added her voice to the chorus calling on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to spare Williams' life.
"They are working out of the same moral framework that a gang does," said Prejean, a nun who ministers to death row inmates and was in town to accept an award from the American Civil Liberties Union.
At San Quentin, home to the most populated death row in the nation, a team of guards watched Williams for unusual behavior and recorded his activities every 15 minutes. The death chamber where as many as 50 people are allowed to witness executions was cleaned and stocked with fresh supplies of medical tape, syringes and the chemicals that would paralyze Williams and stop his heart.
The California Highway Patrol readied security measures for outside the prison, where hundreds of people were expected to rally Monday night. Aides to Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, announced that the governor wasn't yet ready to respond to Williams' request for clemency.
At least publicly, the person least occupied with his fate seemed to be Williams himself. He has said he doesn't plan to take the prison up on its offer of a last meal, a minister or spaces on the witness list for his friends or family. While he wants to live, he's prepared to die, Williams said.
"Me fearing what I'm facing, what possible good is it going to do for me? How is that going to benefit me?" Williams said during a recent interview with The Associated Press. "If it's my time to be executed, what's all the ranting and raving going to do?"
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http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/12/12/news/state/121105193212.txt
