Time is running out for Stanley 'œTookie' Williams, said Adam Liptak in The New York Times. On Dec. 13, California is scheduled to execute Williams, co-founder of the notorious Crips street gang, for killing four people with a shotgun in 1979. 'œI have a despicable background,' Tookie acknowledges. 'œBut people forget that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched.' For the last decade, Williams has devoted his life in prison to telling young people to stay away from gangs. In prerecorded messages, children's books, and inspirational telephone lectures, he has warned urban youngsters that the gang life and violence will ruin their lives. Now the pressure is on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said the San Jose Mercury News in an editorial. Thousands of petitioners, including a score of Hollywood celebrities, have asked the governor to commute Williams' sentence to life without parole. If Schwarzenegger determines that 'œWilliams can and will be an asset to society from behind bars,' he must stop the execution.
Schwarzenegger would be a fool to intervene, said Rich Lowry in National Review. Despite all his ostensible good works, Williams has yet to confess to his murders, much less express remorse for them. His imprisonment, he said in 2003, was 'œthe result of 'bad karma.'' Tell that to the families of the four people he savagely blew away at point-blank range, including a 76-year-old man and his 63-year-old wife. If he's now a cause célèbre, it's only because such useful Hollywood dupes as Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, and Jamie Foxx are pleading his case. Take away the stardust, said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney of Clatsop County, Ore., in the Los Angeles Times, and 'œWilliams isn't much different from the more than 600 men on California's death row.'
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