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Lalo Alcaraz LA Weekly Cagle 7.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/lalo.asp

DNA tests could show if Va. executed innocent man

Posted 12/22/2005 10:36 PM Updated 12/22/2005 10:41 PM
USA TODAY
By Richard Willing

Virginia's governor is preparing to order DNA tests that could show that a coal miner executed for a rape-murder in 1992 did not commit the crime.
If the tests, which Democratic Gov. Mark Warner is expected to order before he leaves office in mid-January, clear Roger Coleman, death penalty opponents say it would be the first time in the history of the American death penalty that an executed convict is scientifically shown to be innocent.

"The final argument (of death penalty advocates) is that no innocent person has been executed," said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., group that seeks to end capital punishment.

"If you find an innocent man who has been executed, that's a final nail through that," Dieter said.

Ellen Qualls, a spokeswoman for Warner, said the governor's office has "basically worked out" details of how tests will be conducted with Coleman's representatives and with a California lab that has held evidence from the crime scene for about 15 years.

She said a decision on testing will be made shortly.

Forensic Science Associates of Richmond, Calif., performed DNA analysis before Coleman's execution, using a now-obsolete technique. The tests could not exclude Coleman as the killer, but could not say definitively that he committed the crime.

DNA tests developed since that time could exonerate Coleman or confirm his guilt.

Coleman, a coal miner in Grundy, in southwest Virginia, was convicted of the 1981 rape-murder of Wanda McCoy, his sister-in-law.

He claimed innocence from the start, testifying at his trial that he was elsewhere at the time the crime occurred.

Several witnesses gave evidence that tended to support his alibi.

Because Coleman's lawyers missed a filing deadline, appeals court judges did not see additional evidence suggesting that another man raped and murdered McCoy.

Coleman's execution was opposed by Pope John Paul II. Coleman protested his innocence to the end, and predicted that he would "eventually" be exonerated.

Michael McGlothlin, a Grundy lawyer who prosecuted the case, remains convinced of his guilt.

McGlothlin's version: The miner was a likely suspect, having been convicted four years earlier for an attempted rape. Coleman's alibi was countered by other witnesses. The other man Coleman's supporters say could have been the killer was investigated and found to have a different blood type than the rapist.

"I'm in favor of testing which can resolve difficult matters, but I'm also in favor of facts," McGlothlin said."

"Because the facts are inconvenient for Mr. Coleman, that doesn't make them any less factual," he said.

John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University and death penalty supporter, says opponents will incur a "major hit to their credibility" if DNA tests confirm Coleman's guilt.

DNA tests could show if Va. executed innocent man, UT, 22.12.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-22-execution-dna_x.htm

The body of Stanley Tookie Williams lies in an open casket
after his funeral at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Executed Calif. killer Williams hailed at funeral
R 20.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=
2005-12-21T024821Z_01_KRA109151_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

A member of the "Eastside Crips" flashes gang symbols
while arriving at the Bethel A.M.E. church for the funeral
of Stanley Tookie Williams in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Rapper Snoop Dogg reads a poem he wrote at the funeral
of Stanley Tookie Williams in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Ric Francis/Pool

Rapper Snoop Dogg pumps his fist at the funeral
of Stanley Tookie Williams in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Travon Williams, son of Stanley Tookie Williams,
punches his fist during Williams' funeral in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Bianca Jagger speaks at the funeral of Stanley Tookie Williams
in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Sanitita Jackson sings as her father The Rev. Jesse Jackson (L) looks on
during the funeral of Stanley Tookie Williams in Los Angeles December 20, 2005.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Executed Calif. killer Williams hailed at funeral

Tue Dec 20, 2005 9:50 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Supporters of Stanley Tookie Williams, including civil rights leaders and masked gang members, gathered at a church in South Los Angeles on Monday to pay tribute to a convicted killer whose execution last week prompted renewed debate about capital punishment.

Some 2,000 people packed the church and spilled into a nearby parking lot as speakers, including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, hailed Williams from a pulpit near his casket and denounced the application of capital punishment in California.

Jackson and others who rallied to Williams' cause described the former leader of the Crips gang as a man who had achieved redemption on death row by promoting an anti-gang message and helping to promote a gangland truce.

Williams was executed at San Quentin prison on December 13 for the brutal murders of four people in 1979.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied a last minute bid for clemency by Williams, who maintained his innocence but had exhausted legal appeals.

"Tookie Williams is dead. We are not safer. We are not more secure. We are not more humane." Jackson said. "The state does not have the moral authority...to kill."

Outside the church, several dozen young men wore the signature blue T-shirts and baseball caps of the Crips gang. Some wore blue bandannas over their faces to conceal their identity.

A hundred or more helmeted police with riot gear lined the street in front of the church to control the crowd as the four-and-a-half-hour service drew to a close.

'GOD DETERMINES REDEMPTION'

Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who spoke at the funeral by telephone from New York, lashed out at Schwarzenegger, a former Hollywood action star.

"In the last 25 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger was promoting violence as the Terminator, while Tookie Williams was writing books of peace and harmony," Sharpton said. "We cannot have Terminators determining redemption. God determines redemption."

Williams was convicted in 1981 of the shooting Albert Owens to death with a shotgun as the convenience store clerk lay facing down on the floor in a $120 robbery.

Two weeks later, Williams shot and killed Yen-Yi Yang and Tsai-Shai Yang, an elderly Taiwanese couple who ran a motel, along with their daughter, Yu-Chin Yang Lin.

In denying clemency, Schwarzenegger noted that Williams had never admitted guilt or apologized for his crimes and questioned whether he had fully renounced violence.

Celebrity speakers at Tuesday's funeral included Bianca Jagger and rapper and former gang member Snoop Dogg, who grew teary eyed as he read a poem in tribute to Williams.

Farrakhan compared Williams to Jesus, saying both had been betrayed by false witnesses and sent to their death after politicians failed to intervene. He called Williams, "the patron saint for all those struggling in the gang life."

"If you feed on the words of brother Stan, he will come closer to you and you will not only see the redemption of Brother Stan, but you will be part of his redemption," Farrakhan said.

Barbara Becnel, who had campaigned for Williams' release and witnessed his execution, closed the funeral by reading a final statement written on death row.

"If I am to die tonight, then the most important message that I want the youth to remember is that I am no longer a man of war. I die a man of peace," Becnel said, reading from the statement.

The funeral ended as 100 doves were released outside the church at dusk.

A brief scuffle broke out between apparent members of rival gang factions after the funeral and was broken up by security personnel by the Nation of Islam.

Despite the repeated calls inside the chapel for peace, three gunshots rang out from one of the streets nearby as the crowd broke up, prompting some to duck for cover.

Police said that no one had been hurt and that no arrests had been made.

Executed Calif. killer Williams hailed at funeral, R, 20.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-21T024821Z_01_KRA109151_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Date Missed, Court Rebuffs Low-I.Q. Man Facing Death

December 17, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Though the Supreme Court has prohibited the execution of the mentally retarded, a Texas death row inmate who may be retarded cannot raise the issue in federal court because his lawyer missed a filing deadline, a federal appeals court ruled this week.

The inmate, Marvin Lee Wilson, has "made a prima facie showing of mental retardation," a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit wrote in an unsigned decision on Tuesday, meaning the court presumed Mr. Wilson to be retarded for purposes of its ruling.

But the panel said it was powerless to consider the case because Mr. Wilson's lawyer filed papers concerning his retardation in a federal trial court without first obtaining required permission from the appeals court, which he did not seek until a deadline had expired.

"However harsh the result may be," the panel said, its hands are tied by deadlines established in a 1996 federal law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The same law now forbids Mr. Wilson, convicted of killing a police informant, to appeal the Fifth Circuit's ruling to the Supreme Court.

The Fifth Circuit court, which hears appeals from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has been frequently criticized by the Supreme Court for its decisions in capital cases. Still, said James W. Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, the Wilson decision surprised him.

"Executing someone who is categorically exempt from the death penalty," Mr. Marcus said, "would be new ground, even for Texas."

The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing the mentally retarded was unconstitutional. But it gave the states little guidance about how to make that determination.

In Texas, under a 2004 decision of its Court of Criminal Appeals, judges consider three things: whether defendants have "significantly subaverage" intelligence, using "an I.Q. of about 70 or below" as a benchmark; whether they lack fundamental social and practical skills; and whether they can demonstrate that both conditions existed before age 18. Other states look to similar factors, though some use an I.Q. of 75 as a rough cutoff.

At a hearing in state court in 2004, Mr. Wilson's lawyers presented evidence from a psychologist, Donald Trahan, who said Mr. Wilson's I.Q. had most recently been measured at 61. A 1971 test had measured it at 73. In 1987, it was 75.

Dr. Trahan said Mr. Wilson read at a first- or second-grade level, did not understand how bank accounts worked and had trouble with simple financial tasks like making change.

A childhood friend, Walter Kelly, said Mr. Wilson had had difficulty with basic skills as a child.

"He would put on his belt so tight that it would almost cut off his circulation," Mr. Kelly said. "He couldn't even play with simple toys like marbles or tops."

Prosecutors presented no evidence of their own at that hearing. In court papers, they said the nature of Mr. Wilson's crime itself proved that he was not retarded. The Supreme Court's 2002 decision, they wrote, "was never intended to protect capital murderers who commit execution-style killings."

Mr. Wilson, now 47, was convicted in 1998 of kidnapping and killing the police informant, Jerry Williams, in 1992. Information from Mr. Williams had led to Mr. Wilson's arrest for cocaine possession.

In August 2004, Judge Larry Gist of the state district court in Beaumont, Tex., ruled that Mr. Wilson had failed to prove that he was mentally retarded. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in a three-paragraph decision three months later.

Mr. Wilson's lawyer, Jim Delee, then sought review in the federal courts but became tangled in the procedures and deadlines set out in the 1996 law. The judges who ruled against his client this week were Jacques L. Wiener Jr. and Emilio M. Garza, both appointed to the appeals court by the first President Bush, and W. Eugene Davis, by President Ronald Reagan.

This year the Supreme Court banned the execution of people who were under 18 at the time of their crimes. Mr. Marcus, of the Texas Defender Service, said it would be inconceivable to execute a juvenile offender even if his lawyer failed to raise the issue of his age at the proper time.

"If Mr. Wilson had been 14 years old at the time of the crime but, in the eyes of the court, the issue was raised late, would it be O.K. for Texas to kill him?" Mr. Marcus said. "The question in this case is no different."

Date Missed, Court Rebuffs Low-I.Q. Man Facing Death, NYT, 17.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/national/17death.html

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNG05G7QMA1.DTL&o=0

THE EXECUTION OF STANLEY TOOKIE WILLIAMS > Eyewitness: Prisoner did not die meekly, quietly
SFC 14.12.2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNG05G7QMA1.DTL

After Williams, a new dilemma for governor

Next: Gravely ill and blind man, 75, scheduled to die

Wednesday, December 14, 2005
San Francisco Chronicle
Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer

Clarence Ray Allen, the next inmate scheduled to die in San Quentin State Prison's execution chamber, may pose a quandary as vexing for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Stanley Tookie Williams.

Allen, who has spent more than a quarter-century on Death Row, is slated to die by lethal injection Jan. 17. He would be the oldest and most infirm prisoner executed in the United States since the death penalty was restored in 1977, according to his lawyers.

Allen, who turns 76 on Jan. 16, uses a wheelchair. An advanced case of diabetes has left him legally blind. He suffered a heart attack Sept. 2.

His lawyers filed a 33-page petition for clemency Tuesday with the governor's office in Sacramento.

"He's the oldest inmate on California's Death Row. ... He's enfeebled," Michael Satris, one of Allen's lawyers, said in an interview. "No prisoner in the state of California has ever been executed at that age.

"It's almost unprecedented worldwide," Satris said. "There hasn't been an execution in this country for more than 50 years of someone as old as Ray Allen."

Several condemned inmates at San Quentin are in their 70s, and more than two dozen are in their 60s.

The state says Allen's deteriorating health is irrelevant.

"He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death, and the law requires that his sentence be carried out regardless of his age or health," said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer. "It's the same for any other inmate, whether you are sentenced to death or to 10 years in prison. The law requires that you serve your sentence and pay the penalty."

In reviewing the case earlier this year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco found no doubt that Allen was guilty of commissioning three murders in Fresno from his prison cell in 1980 while serving a life term for ordering another murder.

The court wrote that although Allen's trial counsel failed to represent him adequately, evidence of his guilt was "overwhelming." The panel concluded that the crimes warranted "the harshest penalty" under the law.

Allen, who ran a security company in Fresno, was linked by prosecutors to a series of armed robberies in the Central Valley. He was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murder in 1974 of his son's girlfriend. From behind bars at Folsom Prison, prosecutors said, he masterminded the murders in 1980 of three witnesses from his previous trial and conspired to kill four other witnesses.

A parolee, Billy Ray Hamilton, was convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out the three murders with a sawed-off shotgun.

The federal appeals court said that by attacking witnesses, "Allen struck the greatest blow possible upon our criminal justice system." The judges also noted that Allen had expressed no remorse for the crimes.

Allen's lawyers say the bulk of evidence against him at trial came from witnesses who were informants and that three of them have since recanted their testimony.

Their request for clemency, however, is similar to the failed bid that attorneys for Williams made shortly before he was put to death -- namely, that the state has nothing to gain by carrying out the execution.

"Ray Allen has been virtually a model inmate for more than two decades on Death Row," Satris said. "He presents absolutely no danger at this point, as incapacitated as he is. There's no legitimate state purpose served by executing him. It would be gratuitous punishment."

Last week, Allen's lawyers filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that seeks a stay of his execution for at least 60 days or until his medical needs are met. They contend that Allen's ill health has interfered with his ability to assist his attorneys in preparing his clemency petition.

Allen's lawyers are trying to halt his execution on the grounds that his failing health has been exacerbated by substandard medical care at San Quentin. Citing a federal judge's ruling in May that castigated the prison's health care system, Allen's lawyers say his incarceration and treatment of his illness amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

Annette Carnegie, one of Allen's lawyers, said the prison had cut off her client's medication for diabetes and hypertension for no apparent reason from June to August, which she said may have led to his heart attack.

Since then, Carnegie said, Allen has been transferred from hospital to hospital and prison to prison, inhibiting his lawyers' access to him.

The attorney general's office says Allen has had plenty of time to prepare his clemency bid.

"We know from the record that he's met with his attorneys about two dozen times over the last couple of months," Barankin said, "and he's actively participating with his attorneys in forming his legal strategy and clemency petition."

After Williams, a new dilemma for governor > Next: Gravely ill and blind man, 75, scheduled to die, SFC, 14.12.2005, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNGNKG7Q0T1.DTL

THE EXECUTION OF STANLEY TOOKIE WILLIAMS

Eyewitness: Prisoner did not die meekly, quietly

Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The San Francisco Chronicle
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

It took 36 agonizing minutes to get to the defining moment of Stanley Tookie Williams' execution by lethal injection early Tuesday, and when it came it shot through the stuffy, crowded witness room like lightning.

Williams lay dead, strapped to his gurney. It was 12:35 a.m. The prison guards had just ordered the 39 witnesses to leave, and the first to go were three friends Williams had asked to watch his final moments. It was so quiet that when one man jangled his pocket change, it echoed off the walls.

Then, just as they crossed the doorway to the chilly outdoors, the three whipped their heads back and screamed in unison: "The state of California just killed an innocent man!" Across the room sat Lora Owens, stepmother of one of the murder victims -- and the stone face she'd worn for the entire execution dissolved. Her eyes filled with horror, and she burst into tears, pressing a tissue to her face.

And there it was: The twin emotions enveloping the execution of the 12th man put to death by California since capital punishment was revived in 1992 after a quarter-century hiatus.

On one side were the furious supporters of Williams, 51, who co-founded the Crips gang in the early 1970s but later renounced violence while in prison and wrote influential books advocating peace. On the other was the trail of survivors left grieving for the four people he was convicted of shotgunning to death in 1979 in Southern California.

The two sides never came to a meeting of the minds. Not even in the end.

The dramatics seemed far from anybody's mind when the execution began precisely at 11:59 p.m. Monday.

The oval door of the death chamber popped open -- it looks like a submarine hatch -- and Williams shuffled in with a green-uniformed guard on each side, loosely holding his arms, and three following behind. His wrists were handcuffed to a waist chain. His eyes were calm behind steel-frame glasses, lips set firmly above a gray beard.

It looked like it would be just like the nine lethal injections before it: controlled, noiseless, practically antiseptic.

With a chest like a barrel and bulging arms the size of toned thighs, Williams had to squeeze with his guards along the 7 1/2-foot-wide chamber's glass window just to get to the side of the gurney. There, he lay down slowly, and after the guards unlocked his wrists, he helpfully spread his arms along the gurney and became still. In two minutes, the team had him lashed down tight: black straps with buckles at his shoulders, chest, waist, knees and feet, and brown-leather Velcro straps at his wrists.

Williams stared straight up and his lips moved rapidly, praying quietly. At one point, a tiny tear slid down his cheek.

The three guards left, and five others walked in.

It was time to insert the needles.

Watching tensely the whole while were the 39 witnesses. They'd been marched into the witness room by a phalanx of guards a few minutes before midnight and placed in a half-circle around the death chamber -- 11 in chairs at the window, the rest on risers against three walls. It's impossible to tell who many witnesses are, because by prison rules nobody can move from their spot or talk, but they always consist of four groups: Supporters of the condemned man, supporters of his victims, 17 media representatives, and more than dozen law enforcement and legal officials.

In this execution, at least five were related to the four people Williams was convicted of killing -- convenience store clerk Albert Owens, 26, and motel owners Yen-I Yang, 76, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63, and their daughter Yee-Chen Lin, 43. Prison sources said the victim witnesses were all from the Owens family.

The three who shouted on their way out were led by bushy-haired Barbara Becnel, co-author of his anti-gang books. Also witnessing on Williams' behalf were his attorney, Peter Fleming, and another lawyer.

Nobody said a word at first. Everybody stood rigidly.

The first catheter slid in messily at the crook of Williams' right elbow, taking just two minutes to seat but spurting so much blood at the needle point that a cotton swab was soaked, shining deep red before it was taped off.

Then came the real trouble. A medical technician, a woman with short black hair, had to poke for 11 minutes before her needle hit home.

At the first stick, at 12:04, Williams clenched his toes. At 12:05, he struggled mightily against the straps holding him down to look up at the press gallery behind him, dishing out a hard stare for six long seconds. By 12:10 a.m., the medical tech's lips were tight and white and sweat was pooling on her forehead as she probed Williams' arm.

"You guys doing that right?" Williams asked angrily, frustration clear on his face. The female guard whispered something back; it was hard to hear anything through the thick glass walls of the death chamber. One guard, jaw clenched tightly, patted Williams' shoulder as if to comfort him.

Outside the chamber, Becnel stood with her two companions -- a woman and a man -- at the only window with a clear line of sight into Williams' eyes, and it was as if they were trying to will themselves right through the glass to stand alongside their friend. They thrust their fists up in what seemed to be a black power salute, and the man called out softly, "Tookie." They whispered "I love you" and "God bless you" as they looked adoringly into Williams' eyes.

Meanwhile, 10 feet away, Lora Owens sat stiffly, looking through the glass at the top of Williams' head. Her thick red hair never moved, and her mouth was a tight line. A blond woman sitting next to her put her arm around her, and then removed it and clasped her hands in her lap.

At 12:16 a.m., the second needle was inserted. His hands were taped, mummy-like, to the gurney arms. The guards hurried out the door and sealed it, leaving Williams alone with two clear intravenous lines snaking off his arms and into holes in the back wall of the death chamber.

At 12:18 a.m., a female prison guard loudly read off the warrant proclaiming that prisoner number C29300 had been sentenced to die and "the execution shall now proceed." Williams forced his head up one last time to stare into the eyes of his five friends -- and he kept it raised until he passed out 1 1/2 minutes later from the first salvo of chemicals, sodium pentothal to put him to sleep. Sorrow washed over the faces of Becnel and her female companion as his head sank, and they clasped their hands in prayer.

From there on it was a nail-biting vigil for everyone outside staring in. There was no way to know which chemicals were being administered because the plungers sending them into the intravenous tubes are pressed by unseen hands behind the chamber walls. Williams' chest heaved several times as he lay with his eyes closed, but somewhere in the 15 minutes from 12:20 to 12:35 a.m., the executioners filled his veins with pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing, then potassium chloride to stop his heart.

Finally, someone behind the walls called out, "He's flatlined," and it was over. A hand shoved a paper through a peephole in the witness room, a guard read off a quick statement affirming Williams' death, and 30 seconds later the room was cleared.

That's when the outburst happened. It was the first time since California restarted executions in 1992 that anybody had yelled or even spoken loudly during the grim procedure -- and as much as anything, that is what set this execution apart.

All of the other men killed by lethal injection lay so quietly on the gurney that, except for a few small movements, it was hard to tell if they were even awake. Even in the two gassings at San Quentin that preceded the injections, Robert Alton Harris and David Edwin Mason faced their ends stoically. The witnesses, too, have never done more than mouth a few silent words and cry quietly -- and the victim and prisoner advocates certainly never reacted to each other.

Williams and his friends were different.

It was like they were determined to get through his final minutes on Earth on their own terms -- even up to the tradition of the condemned man issuing a final statement. Williams, ever-defiant against the system he considered unfair, gave no final words to Warden Steve Ornoski, who said later that Williams chose instead to leave his final message with Becnel. Sources said she may reveal it at a funeral in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The main complication in the death chamber this time was the excruciatingly long wait for the poisons to work. During the last execution, when triple-killer Donald Beardslee was killed in January, the actual injection process took four fewer minutes; injections for "Freeway Killer" William Bonin required only four minutes in 1996. But prison officials had an explanation.

He was a big man," Warden Steve Ornoski said in a post-execution briefing. The techs didn't have to administer extra shots of chemicals, he said; the poisons just needed time to work.

It made sense. Williams was the most muscular man put to death in the modern era of executions in California, and it appeared as if his bulky body was fighting off the inevitable, even after consciousness and the ability to move had fled.

This was not a man who went meekly.

THE EXECUTION OF STANLEY TOOKIE WILLIAMS > Eyewitness: Prisoner did not die meekly, quietly, SFC, 14.12.2005, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNG05G7QMA1.DTL

Execution Ignites New Fire in Death Penalty Debate

December 14, 2005
The New York Times
By SARAH KERSHAW

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 13 - As plans were under way to hold a large public funeral for Stanley Tookie Williams, the former gangster executed by lethal injection early Tuesday morning, and scatter his ashes in South Africa, his death was stirring fresh passion on both sides of the debate over capital punishment in California.

There was also debate within the debate over what impact the execution would have, either on a spate of scheduled executions here or the broader question of where California was headed on the death penalty.

Critics of the death penalty, who, among others across the nation and around the world, helped lead one of the most highly publicized campaigns in decades to save a death row inmate's life, said Mr. Williams's execution had already galvanized public opposition to capital punishment. They said the execution would become a powerful tool in their fight to overturn the death penalty, or at least suspend executions in the state.

It is possible that at least five death row inmates in California could be executed in the next year. Of the five, only one, Clarence Ray Allen, 75, the oldest condemned prisoner in the state, has a scheduled execution date, Jan. 17.

"It was a profoundly sad day this morning when they killed Stanley Williams, a needless act of violence by the state that accomplishes nothing," said Lance G. Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, one of the groups that rallied to Mr. Williams's cause.

Mr. Lindsey said his group was hopeful that the publicity surrounding the Williams case would aid in the effort to have capital cases more closely scrutinized in California.

Most Californians support the death penalty, although those numbers have begun to decline in recent years, according to several polls.

Mr. Williams, 51, a co-founder of the Crips gang of Los Angeles who was convicted of murdering four people in 1979, had become, to his supporters, an example of jailhouse redemption and a powerful critic of gang life, both from his cell and through his writings.

Mr. Williams, who was executed at 12:35 a.m. Tuesday at San Quentin State Prison, maintained his innocence and pursued a series of legal appeals, including a petition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency and another for a stay of his execution, until the final moments of his life. Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, cited Mr. Williams's refusal to admit to the murders as a reason he denied the request to commute his sentence to life in prison.

To those who supported his execution, Mr. Williams was a remorseless, brutal killer responsible for starting a notorious gang now blamed for the death of perhaps thousands of people. And advocates for the death penalty said they did not believe his case would hold special sway here with either the public or lawmakers considering a temporary moratorium on executions.

"I can't see in what sense it would lend momentum," said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento.

He added that Mr. Williams's supporters, including the rap star Snoop Dogg, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, "picked the wrong guy" to show what was wrong with the death penalty.

"It would be like picking Hitler for clemency," he said. "I don't know of a criminal enterprise that has caused more harm than the Crips. Timothy McVeigh didn't kill as many people as Tookie's gang did last year in Los Angeles itself."

But Barbara Becnel, a close friend and an editor of Mr. Williams's books who was arranging his funeral, said she would continue to try to prove his innocence.

"For the people who opposed Stan," Ms. Becnel said, "they wanted to blame him directly for everything the Crips did. The Crips was a local gang, an L.A. gang, albeit a large one, when he was arrested in 1979. They arrest him and set him up and he never sees the light of day again and the gang becomes statewide, nationwide, worldwide."

Ms. Becnel added, "Is a dead man going to be responsible for everything that the Crips do from here on out?"

She watched the execution, which took 36 minutes and 15 seconds, said reporters who witnessed it, longer than expected, as a nurse struggled for about 12 minutes to insert a needle into Mr. Williams's left arm.

Ms. Becnel described the procedure as "an absolutely barbaric display of truly how cruel the punishment of the death penalty is."

"It took the staff at San Quentin 35 minutes to kill Stan," she said. "During the course of their bumbling, we watched him grimace in pain, we watched him finally reach a point of frustration, where you saw him lift his head up, and you could see he was saying, Can't you just do this?"

Ms. Becnel said she was arranging to have Mr. Williams's body flown to Los Angeles, where she said a funeral with an open coffin was being planned for Monday or Tuesday. She said Mr. Williams, who was visited by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the prison in 1999, requested that he be buried under a yohimbe tree in South Africa or that his ashes be scattered over the "Blue Nile River, to feed the fishes and other organisms."

She said she was making plans to scatter the ashes somewhere in South Africa, with a memorial there planned for sometime in January.

An aide to Ms. Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, told a South African newspaper, Beeld, on Tuesday that "she will keep her promise to ensure that Williams is buried in South Africa."

Joe R. Hicks, a former board member of Death Penalty Focus, a San Francisco group that opposes the death penalty, who now supports capital punishment, said Mr. Williams deserved to die.

But Mr. Hicks, now the vice president of a conservative Los Angeles group, Community Advocates, said he believed that Mr. Williams's execution would touch off "an upsurge of anti-death-penalty work that may have some effect on upcoming campaigns to get rid of the death penalty in California."

"There will be an increased frenzy around this," he said. "And it will all spin off the Tookie case."

Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting from San Francisco for this article.

Execution Ignites New Fire in Death Penalty Debate, NYT, 14.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/national/14tookie.html

Execution puts spotlight on moratorium effort

Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:37 PM ET
Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams has put the spotlight on a campaign by opponents of the death penalty for state legislation that would temporarily halt capital punishment in California.

Assemblyman Paul Koretz, a Democrat, said on Tuesday he would renew a push for a bill he introduced earlier this year that calls for the state to stop executing condemned prisoners until January 1, 2009, so a committee can investigate whether California's justice system sends innocent people to death row.

"It's targeted at the accuracy of the system," Koretz said of his bill. "If you don't execute people for a couple of years, I don't see the great harm, but you could prevent an innocent person from being executed."

Koretz predicted that Democrats, who control California's legislature, in the state Assembly would rally behind his bill following Williams' execution, and provide enough votes to overcome expected opposition by minority Republicans.

Williams was the 12th person executed since California reinstated the death penalty in 1977.

Koretz's bill will have a legislative hearing a week ahead of the state's next scheduled execution, but the lawmaker said the bill was unlikely to influence the state's planned execution of Clarence Ray Allen.

Allen, 75, is scheduled to die on January 17, 2006, for ordering three murders while serving a life-sentence in prison for arranging the murder of his son's girlfriend, a potential witness against him in a burglary case.

Execution puts spotlight on moratorium effort, R, 13.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-14T003702Z_01_SPI401891_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-CALIFORNIA.xml

Protesters outside San Quentin State prison burn an American flag.

Associated Press photo by Eric Risberg

SFGate.com
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=8&f=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNG05G7QMA1.DTL

THE EXECUTION OF STANLEY TOOKIE WILLIAMS > Eyewitness: Prisoner did not die meekly, quietly
SFC 14.12.2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/14/MNG05G7QMA1.DTL

Stanley Tookie Williams, Crips Gang Co-Founder, Is Executed

December 13, 2005
By SARAH KERSHAW
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 13 - Stanley Tookie Williams, a condemned gangster whose execution drew more national and international attention than any here in decades, was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 12:35 this morning at San Quentin State Prison.

Mr. Williams, 51, a co-founder and leader of the Crips gang of Los Angeles who was convicted of the brutal murders of four people in 1979 amid an avalanche of gang violence there, had become, to his supporters, an icon of jailhouse redemption and a powerful critic from his cell on death row and through his writings of the perils and misguided allure of the gang life on the nation's urban streets.

Outside the gates of San Quentin, an estimated 1,000 people held a largely peaceful vigil, reading aloud from Mr. Williams's books, with some, shortly after midnight Monday, shouting, "Long live Tookie Williams!" At 12:38 a.m., three minutes after Mr. Williams was pronounced dead - after a process that took 36 minutes and 15 seconds from the time Mr. Williams was brought into the chamber - the crowd sang "We Shall Overcome."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday rejected arguments that Mr. Williams was either innocent of capital murder or deserving of mercy because of his claims of redemption, and denied a clemency petition to commute his sentence to life in prison. Late Monday, Mr. Schwarzenegger also turned down a request from the defense for a stay of execution based on a last-minute claim of innocence citing new accounts from witnesses.

And at about 11:30 p.m. Monday, the governor rejected a second request for a 60-day reprieve, a legal appeal that prison officials said slightly delayed the start of the execution, originally scheduled for 12:01.

Among the 39 witnesses - including journalists, victims' relatives, Mr. Williams's lawyers and supporters and prison officials - several of the journalists who said they had witnessed other executions described the lethal injection procedure as unusually long, as a nurse struggled to insert a needle in Mr. Williams's muscular left arm for about 12 minutes. Mr. Williams, who was strapped to what looked like a tilted-back dental chair inside the sea-foam green death chamber, appeared frustrated, witnesses, including the prison warden, said.

Several times he lifted his head from the gurney to look up at his supporters, some of who were blowing kisses, and he was mouthing "I love you," the witnesses said.

The prison warden, Steve Ornoski, said the execution was not unusually drawn out, although he did say he noticed that Mr. Williams, who appeared to be trying to help his executioners during the process, seemed exasperated.

"It depends on the person's veins and whether they are readily accessible," Mr. Ornoski said. "And also it's a high pressure assignment for someone that's in front of so many people."

Mr. Williams, who was among 651 death row inmates at San Quentin, today became the 12th man executed in the state since California reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

While witnesses are expected to be silent during an execution, when Mr. Williams was pronounced dead, three of the five witnesses he asked to watch him die shouted, "The state of California just killed an innocent man!"

Lora Owens, the stepmother of Albert Owens, a 26-year-old clerk at a Los Angeles 7-11 whom Mr. Williams was convicted of killing at point blank range with a sawed off shotgun, was stoic as she watched the execution, witnesses said. But after the outburst from Mr. Williams's supporters, Ms. Owens, who said earlier that the execution would finally bring justice to her stepson, broke down in tears, the witnesses said.

Besides the governor's refusal to spare his life, Mr. Williams had suffered two other setbacks Monday, as first a federal appeals court and then the Supreme Court ruled against granting a stay of execution.

In his decision denying clemency, issued less than 12 hours before Mr. Williams was scheduled to die, Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote that the case had been appealed to various courts since Mr. Williams was condemned in 1981, each one upholding his conviction.

The governor described the four murders in chilling detail, cited a long list of the evidence against Mr. Williams, and said the proof of his guilt was "strong and compelling."

"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings," Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote, "there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who joined several hundred protestors at San Quentin and visited Mr. Williams twice Monday, said he had been the first person to tell Mr. Williams about the governor's decision, which most people had agreed was to be the final word on his fate, despite the last minute legal appeals.

"I told him the clemency had been rejected," Mr. Jackson said in a telephone interview as he was leaving the prison late Monday evening. "He kind of grimaced and then he smiled and said, 'We will not give up hope.' "

The clemency request was based on what lawyers for Mr. Williams said was evidence of his dramatic turnaround in prison, where Mr. Williams became a vocal critic of gang violence, speaking out through children's books, lectures and memoirs. One memoir was the basis for a 2004 television film, "Redemption," staring Jamie Foxx, one of the many celebrities, including rap star Snoop Dogg, and activists who rushed to join the effort to save Mr. Williams's life in recent weeks.

"Our petition for clemency was based on Stanley Williams's personal redemption, his good works and positive impact that those works have had on thousands and thousands of kids across this country and on Williams's ability to continue to do those good works going forward," Jonathan Harris, one of his lawyers, said at a news conference in Sacramento on Monday.

"I have spent many an hour with Stanley Williams," Mr. Harris said, "and I refuse to accept that Stanley Williams's redemption is not genuine." He said the defense team had failed to persuade the governor to meet with Mr. Williams.

In his decision, the governor cited a planned escape by Mr. Williams while he was awaiting trial that involved his "blowing up a jail transportation bus and killing the deputies guarding the bus" as an example of behavior that is "consistent with guilt, not innocence." He also said there was no evidence that Mr. Williams's speaking out against gang violence had any effect on "the continued pervasiveness of gang violence" in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., joined Mr. Harris at the news conference and said the governor's decision to allow the execution to go forward was politically motivated. It comes at a time when he is under fire from his own party for appointing a Democrat as his new chief of staff and after the defeat of four ballot measures he supported during a special election in November.

But the governor's office declined to elaborate on his decision to deny clemency.

Polls show that a majority of Californians supports the death penalty.

As Mr. Williams's supporters rallied around the state Monday and Tuesday, with no reports of violence, as some had feared, from police, others said he deserved to be executed.

Before leaving for San Quentin to witness the execution, Ms. Owens told CNN: "I'm just glad that we're almost to the end of this. I'm glad that finally Albert is going to have the justice he deserves."

In South Los Angeles, where the Crips have been blamed for hundreds of killings, several residents said they believed that if Mr. Williams was guilty, he should be put to death.

"If he'd have killed your daughter, you'd want him dead," said Lee Johnson, 89, a retired construction worker. "He killed somebody. You got to pay for what you do."

At San Quentin at 6 p.m. Monday, officials moved Mr. Williams into what is known as the "death watch cell," a 6-by-8-foot enclosure with a toilet and a sink about 15 feet from the execution chamber. They said he was searched, given a change of clothes - blue denim jeans and a blue T-shirt - and a stack of 50 to 75 letters from friends, school children and others.

Over the next few hours, he watched some television in a guarded adjacent cell but spent most of the time on the telephone with lawyers and supporters, discussing their failed last-ditch efforts to have the governor intervene, the officials said.

Mr. Williams decided in the final hours to allow five personal witnesses to his death, the number to which he was entitled, including Barbara Becnel, his longtime friend and advocate, who will take possession of his body but who did not yet release details of funeral arrangements.

Mr. Jackson said he had tried to persuade Mr. Williams to have witnesses there, saying to him, "You need to leave with a look in the face of the people who love you and not a look in the face of the executioners. You need to have witnesses. When it's over, your friends can tell your story."

Mr. Williams did not request a last meal, although he ate oatmeal earlier in the day Monday and drank water and milk throughout the day and evening, prison officials said.

In an interview with the New York Times at the prison on Nov. 29, Mr. Williams said of the traditional last rite, "I'd be out of my mind to accept a meal from a place that wants to destroy me."

Mr. Williams's supporters and lawyers who had seen him in recent days said he was at peace with his imminent death.

But, in the Times interview he said: "To threaten me with death does not accomplish the means of the criminal justice system or satiate those who think my death or my demise will be a closure for them. Their loved ones will not rise up from the grave and love them. I wish they could. I sympathize or empathize with everyone who has lost a loved one. But I didn't do it. My death would not mollify them."

Of the execution, he said: "I'll go through it with dignity, with integrity, with love and bliss in my heart. I smile at everything, and I'm quite sure I'll smile then, too."

Carolyn Marshall, Michael Falcone and Adam Liptak contributed reporting from San Quentin, Calif. for this article, and Cindy Chang from Los Angeles.

Stanley Tookie Williams, Crips Gang Co-Founder, Is Executed, NYT, 13.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/national/13cnd-Tookie.html?hp&ex=1134536400&en=3add2d384d8a855b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ex-Crips leader Williams executed

Tue Dec 13, 2005 10:33 AM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN QUENTIN, California (Reuters) - California prison officials executed Stanley Tookie Williams, the ex-leader of the Crips gang who brutally killed four people in 1979, early on Tuesday after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top courts rejected appeals to spare his life.

The time of death was 12:35 a.m. PST (0835 GMT) Tuesday.

Some 2,000 opponents of the death penalty gathered outside the gates of San Quentin, where civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson addressed the crowd and folk singer Joan Baez sang spirituals.

The execution by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco followed a frenzied but failed effort to reopen the case by supporters of Williams, 51, who repudiated gang life during his 24 years on death row.

The case generated fierce debate over the death penalty in the United States because Williams has written a series of books warning young people against gangs.

Witnesses said guards struggled for about 12 minutes to place the needle in a vein in his left arm, frustrating Williams who occasionally spoke with the guards preparing his death, asking at one point: "Still can't find it?"

After he was strapped down, he raised his head often, especially to look at Barbara Becnel, the editor of his books and foremost supporter who helped bring broad publicity to his case. After his death, Becnel and two other supporters broke the silence in the witness room, saying: "The state of California just killed an innocent man."

A relative of one of the victims wept as the prisoner's supporters made their defiant statement.

Becnel and other supporters said Williams' anti-gang work showed the inmate had changed fundamentally in the half of his life he has spent in prison. But Schwarzenegger and others said his continued protestations of innocence negated any claim that he had redeemed himself.

"Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders of the four victims in this case," Schwarzenegger wrote on Monday in denying clemency.

"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption."

"Based on the cumulative weight of the evidence, there is no reason to second guess the jury's decision of guilt or raise significant doubts or serious reservations about Williams' convictions and death sentence."

CROWDS PROTEST AT PRISON

Jackson said he broke the news on Monday afternoon that Schwarzenegger had denied clemency as Williams met several supporters in prison.

"He said 'Don't cry, let's remain strong,'" Jackson told Reuters. "He smiled, you know, with a certain strength, a certain resolve."

"I think he feels a comfort in his new legacy as a social transformer," Jackson said.

"I am not the kind of person to sit around and worry about being executed," Williams told Reuters last month. "I have faith and if it doesn't go my way, it doesn't go my way."

Williams was convicted in 1981 of killing Albert Owens as he lay face down on the floor of a 7-Eleven convenience store in a $120 robbery. Two weeks later, Williams shot dead an elderly Taiwanese immigrant couple running a motel, as well as their visiting daughter.

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict's advisor for justice issues, Cardinal Renato Martino, condemned the execution and called the death penalty "the negation of human dignity."

Prison officials said Williams was composed and cooperative and said he did not request a final meal after eating oatmeal and drinking milk earlier in the day.

Among the throng gathered outside the prison was Christina Williams, 23, who said: "I wanted to show them we oppose the death penalty even if you are a murderer." She held hands with her two young children and wore a "Save Tookie" button on his jacket. "He changed his life and deserves a second chance."

The nation's top courts disagreed.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected final appeals to reconsider the case.

(Additional reporting by Michael Kahn)

Ex-Crips leader Williams executed, R, 13.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-13T153334Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Thousands gather to protest at Williams execution

Tue Dec 13, 2005 5:27 AM ET
Reuters
By Michael Kahn

SAN QUENTIN, California (Reuters) - Some dropped to their knees in prayer, others held candles but many in the crowd of thousands that gathered to protest the execution on Tuesday of Stanley Tookie Williams simply waited silently for the inevitable.

The crowd began gathering early on Monday and quickly swelled with people of all ages to mark one of the largest protests in recent memory during an execution at the gates of the prison overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Dozens of police officers lined the road and television news helicopters hovered above the crowd. Residents stood on their stoops and climbed onto roofs to get a clear view of speakers that included Jesse Jackson, actor Mike Farrell, former gang members and leaders of the Nation of Islam.

Many in the crowd carried signs calling for an end to the death penalty while others read simply: "Save Tookie."

Folk singer Joan Baez sang spirituals.

The execution by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison followed a frenzied but failed effort to reopen the case by supporters of Williams, who repudiated gang life during his 24 years on Death Row.

The case has generated widespread interest and fierce debate over the death penalty in the United States because Williams, 51, has written a series of books warning young people against gang violence.

Shantel Lockhart, 16, a high school senior from nearby Fairfield, said she has followed the Williams case the past few years and wanted to show her support for the former gang leader even though she had school early the next morning.

"For all the good he has done, he doesn't deserve to die," she said.

Protesters who had attended previous executions said this was one of the largest such rallies of its kind. Many smaller and more personal protests broke out among the larger crowd.

At one end, a group holding crosses sang religious hymns while along the sidewalk a number of people sat silently in protest with candles burning in front of them. Others banged drums or prayed.

After midnight, as the execution drew near, the crowd grew quiet and some began to cry. One woman knelt on her hands and knees to pray, clutching prayer beads and bowing her head.

The size of the crowd made it difficult to tell when Williams actually died but shortly after word filtered through the crowd many turned and shuffled quietly back to their cars.

Williams, ex-leader of the violent Crips gang, was put to death for brutally killing four people in 1979 in crimes for which he has maintained his innocence.

Thousands gather to protest at Williams execution, R, 13.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-13T102739Z_01_FOR337638_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Senior Vatican cardinal condemns Tookie execution

Tue Dec 13, 2005 8:25 AM ET
Reuters

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The senior Vatican cardinal who is Pope Benedict's point man for justice issues on Tuesday condemned the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams as a "terrible" event.

"Our society should be a society which promotes life and not death," Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department, told Reuters Television.

Martino, speaking shortly after the execution of Williams in California, repeated the Roman Catholic Church's stand against capital punishment.

"This is terrible because you know the death penalty is a penalty where there is no alternative, there is no possibility for the human being who happens to be a criminal - to be corrected, to reform, to become a good citizen," he said.

"With the death penalty you don't give that alternative and that is not taking into account the many, many mistakes and errors, judicial errors that we discover from time to time were committed and innocent people were executed," he said.

California prison officials executed early on Tuesday the 51-year-old ex-leader of the Crips gang who brutally killed four people in 1979 after top courts and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected final appeals to spare his life.

Williams, who repudiated gang life during his 24 years on Death Row, always maintained his innocence over the murders.

Martino later told a news conference that the death penalty was "the negation of human dignity".

Senior Vatican cardinal condemns Tookie execution, R, 13.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-13T132233Z_01_FOR344575_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Stanley Williams

24 years of appeals from death row

Tuesday December 13, 2005
The Guardian
Sam Jones

Stanley "Tookie" Williams co-founded the Crips gang in Los Angeles in 1971. The gang has been blamed for causing hundreds of deaths during the decades it spent fighting its rivals the Bloods for control of the streets and drug trade.

In 1981, Williams was charged with four murders. The prosecution said he shot dead a 26-year-old convenience store clerk during a hold-up in 1979, and murdered a mother, father and daughter in a motel robbery 12 days later. Williams claimed he was innocent, but was convicted.

During his 24 years on death row at San Quentin prison in California, Williams wrote a number anti-gang books for children and spoke to groups by telephone about his regrets over having started a gang responsible for many deaths. He also launched a series of appeals.

Law enforcement officials including the Los Angeles county district attorney, Steve Cooley, fiercely opposed clemency. Mr Cooley has called Williams a cold-blooded killer who "left his mark forever on our society by co-founding one of the most vicious, brutal gangs in existence".

In October, the US supreme court ruled against Williams' last appeal. He had claimed that someone else killed one of the four victims, and that he was only connected to the others by shoddy forensic evidence.

On Sunday, the California supreme court voted unanimously to deny a stay of execution. Williams' lawyer filed a 150-page habeas corpus petition and request for a stay of execution. But that was denied on Monday morning by three judges who said there was no "clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence".

Williams' lawyers also took their pleas for mercy to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to whom Williams had sent a personal appeal. But Mr Schwarzenegger refused last night.

24 years of appeals from death row, G, 13.12.2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1666024,00.html

A guard tower stands near the entrance of San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California,
in this December 6, 2004 file photo. Barring last-minute court intervention,
officials will administer a lethal injection to former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams
at 12:01 a.m. PST on Tuesday in the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison.

REUTERS/Lou Dematteis/Files

Gang leader set to die as appeals fail
R 12.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=
2005-12-13T045005Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

A guard stands at the gate of the San Quentin prison in San Quentin, California December 12, 2005.

REUTERS/Kimberly White

Gang leader set to die as appeals fail
R 12.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=
2005-12-13T045005Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

View of the North Block entrance to Condemned Row at San Quentin, California October 25, 2004.
The state has condemned 629 criminals to die since the California legislature
re-enacted the death penalty in 1977, but it very rarely metes out society's ultimate punishment.
In fact, the state has only put 10 people to death since resuming executions in 1992.

Photo by Clay Mclachlan/Reuters.

Slow to Execute, California Sees Death Row Swell
Reuters Tue Nov 9, 2004 01:36 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6761858

San Quentin's execution room, designed as a gas chamber,
is now set up for lethal injections.

California Department of Corrections photo, 1996, via AP

Execution's strict protocol >
Cold efficiency and precise procedures govern
the final day of the condemned at San Quentin
SFC 12.12.2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
/c/a/2005/12/12/MNGBNG6N2E1.DTL

The lethal injection table in the execution chamber at San Quentin was first used for the execution of William Bonin in 1996.

California Department of Corrections photo, 1996, via Associated Press

Execution's strict protocol >
Cold efficiency and precise procedures govern the final day of the condemned at San Quentin
SFC 12.12.2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/12/MNGBNG6N2E1.DTL

Governor Rejects Clemency for Inmate on Death Row

December 13, 2005
The New York Times
By SARAH KERSHAW

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 12 - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected arguments that the death row inmate Stanley Tookie Williams was either innocent of capital murder or worthy of mercy because of his claims of redemption on Monday, and denied a clemency petition to commute his sentence to life in prison.

The governor's highly anticipated decision seemed to all but seal the fate of Mr. Williams, whose execution was scheduled for Tuesday. On Monday evening, hours after rejecting the clemency request, Mr. Schwarzenegger also turned down a request for a stay of execution based on a last-minute claim of innocence. Mr. Williams's lawyers cited new accounts from witnesses in making the request.

Mr. Williams, 51, a leader of the Crips gang of Los Angeles who was convicted of murdering four people in 1979 amid an avalanche of gang violence there, suffered two others setbacks Monday as first a federal appeals court and then the Supreme Court refused to grant a stay of execution.

In seeking a stay from the governor, Mr. Williams's lawyers had argued that they needed time to corroborate the accounts of three new witnesses who came forward over the last few days with evidence of Mr. Williams's innocence.

In his decision denying clemency, issued less than 12 hours before Mr. Williams was scheduled to die by lethal injection and four days after the governor heard arguments on the request from the prosecution and the defense, Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote that the case had been appealed to various courts since Mr. Williams was condemned in 1981, each one upholding his conviction.

The governor described the four murders in chilling detail, included a long list of the evidence against Mr. Williams, and said the proof of his guilt was "strong and compelling."

"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings," Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote, "there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

The clemency request was based on what lawyers for Mr. Williams said was evidence of his dramatic turnaround in prison, where Mr. Williams became a vocal critic of gang violence, speaking out through children's books, lectures and memoirs. One memoir was the basis for a 2004 television film "Redemption," staring Jamie Foxx, one of the many celebrities and activists who rushed to join the effort to save Mr. Williams's life in recent weeks.

"Our petition for clemency was based on Stanley Williams's personal redemption, his good works and positive impact that those works have had on thousands and thousands of kids across this country and on Williams's ability to continue to do those good works going forward," said Jonathan Harris, one of his lawyers, at a news conference in Sacramento.

"I have spent many an hour with Stanley Williams," Mr. Harris said, "and I refuse to accept that Stanley Williams's redemption is not genuine." He said the defense team had failed to persuade the governor to meet with Mr. Williams.

In his decision, the governor cited a planned escape by Mr. Williams while he was awaiting trial that involved his "blowing up a jail transportation bus and killing the deputies guarding the bus" as an example of behavior that is "consistent with guilt, not innocence." He also said there was no evidence that Mr. Williams's speaking out against gang violence had any effect on "the continued pervasiveness of gang violence" in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., joined Mr. Harris at the news conference and said the governor's decision to allow the execution to go forward was politically motivated. It comes at a time when he is under fire from his own party for appointing a Democrat as his new chief of staff and after the defeat of four ballot measures he supported during a special election in November.

As Mr. Williams's supporters rallied around the state, other Californians said he deserved to be executed.

Before leaving for San Quentin to witness the execution, Lora Owens, the stepmother of Albert Owens, a 26-year-old 7-Eleven clerk whom Mr. Williams was convicted of killing, told CNN: "I'm just glad that we're almost to the end of this. I'm glad that finally Albert is going to have the justice he deserves."

In South Central Los Angeles, where the Crips have been blamed for hundreds of killings, several residents said they believed that if Mr. Williams was guilty, he should be put to death.

"If he'd have killed your daughter, you'd want him dead," said Lee Johnson, 89, a retired construction worker. "He killed somebody. You got to pay for what you do."

At San Quentin, as protesters, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, gathered outside the prison gates, officials prepared to move Mr. Williams into what is known as the "death watch cell," a 6-by-8-foot enclosure with a toilet and a sink about 15 feet from the execution chamber.

Mr. Williams declined to invite any witnesses to his death and said in an interview on Nov. 29 with The New York Times that he would not request a last meal.

"I'd be out of my mind to accept a meal from a place that wants to destroy me," he said.

He said he was at peace with his imminent death. But, he said: "To threaten me with death does not accomplish the means of the criminal justice system or satiate those who think my death or my demise will be a closure for them. Their loved ones will not rise up from the grave and love them. I wish they could. I sympathize or empathize with everyone who has lost a loved one. But I didn't do it. My death would not mollify them."

Of the execution, he said, "I'll go through it with dignity, with integrity, with love and bliss in my heart. I smile at everything, and I'm quite sure I'll smile then, too."

Cindy Chang contributed reporting from Los Angeles for this article, and Adam Liptak from San Francisco.

Governor Rejects Clemency for Inmate on Death Row, NYT, 13.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/national/13tookie.html?hp&ex=1134450000&en=84209d282753e6c4&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Williams_Clemency_Decision.pdf

Execution's strict protocol

Cold efficiency and precise procedures govern the final day of the condemned at San Quentin

Monday, December 12, 2005
The San Francisco Chronicle
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

The procedure for executing a prisoner in San Quentin, the only prison in California with a death chamber, is bound by rigid rules dictating when and how each act must be performed -- from the moment the inmate wakes up on his last day of life until the moment he dies.

Prison officials say this is to ensure a maximum amount of dispassionate efficiency in the inherently grim job of killing a person.

"We try to keep this very professional," said prison spokesman Sgt. Eric Messick. "I can't see it being done any other way -- you have to treat everyone, especially the inmate, with dignity and respect. This is a very somber event."

Eleven inmates have been executed in California since the state resumed executions in 1992 after a 25-year hiatus. Two were put to death by poison gas and nine by lethal injection.

If the execution goes through as scheduled, Stanley Tookie Williams will arise this morning to find that the entire Death Row of 648 condemned prisoners, and every other maximum security cell block, has been on tight lockdown since 12:01 a.m. He will be allowed to spend his last day meeting in the prison visiting room with friends and relatives until 6 p.m., when he will be moved to a special death watch cell next to the execution chamber.

There, three guards will watch him constantly through the rest of the evening, as he is offered a last meal and can watch television, play the radio or read. The only visitors he will be allowed are a spiritual adviser and the warden.

Williams told The Chronicle he plans to refuse a last meal or anything to drink on his final evening. He has also requested none of his friends or relatives watch the execution.

"I don't want food or water or sympathy from the place that is going to kill me," he said in an interview with the paper last month. "I don't want anyone present for the sick and perverted spectacle. The thought of that is appalling and inhumane. It is disgusting for a human to sit and watch another human die.''

At 11:30 p.m., Williams will be given a new pair of denim jeans and a new blue work shirt to wear.

At 11:45 p.m., the first group of witnesses will be led into the room where the death chamber is and positioned by guards on a set of risers or a railing along the thick glass windows of the chamber. These will be state officials, lawyers and people who have asked to watch the execution on behalf of Williams or his victims.

At 11:55 p.m., media witnesses will be escorted in and positioned on risers. Nobody may move after they have been placed. Fifty witnesses total are allowed, 17 of those from the press.

Precisely at midnight, prison officials will make one last call to the state Department of Justice and Department of Corrections headquarters to determine if any last-second stays have been issued. That process usually takes less than a minute, and at 12:01 a.m. Williams will be led by three guards into the lime-green execution chamber through its only door.

Space is tight in the 7.5-foot-wide, octagonal chamber, which was designed for two lethal gas chairs but has been nearly filled with a lethal injection gurney since William Bonin became the first California prisoner executed by injection on Feb. 24, 1996. Williams is a bulky man, so there will undoubtedly be slight jostling as he is laid upon the cross-shaped gurney, and his arms and legs are strapped down.

The guards will take about five minutes to secure him, and then they leave. One medic and an assistant then come in and attach a cardiac monitor, plus needles into two veins, usually one in each arm. This takes about five minutes -- unless there are difficulties, such as with Donald Beardslee on Jan. 19 this year. In that execution, the medic had trouble finding a good second vein, and dragged through a tense 11 minutes before finally seating the needle.

Once the needles are inserted, with long intravenous lines snaking from them into the back wall of the death chamber, the warden will ask Williams if he has any last words to say. Then the warden will leave, the door will be shut, and Williams will be left alone.

From behind the walls of the chamber, out of view of the witnesses, a prison official will press three plungers in succession to send poison through the intravenous lines into Williams' veins.

The first plunger will administer 5 grams of sodium pentothal to put him to sleep. The lines will be flushed with saline solution, and the second plunger will inject 50 cc of pancuronium bromide to stop his breathing. The lines will be flushed again, and the third plunger will send in 50cc of potassium chloride to stop his heart.

Once a doctor watching the cardiac monitor -- again, out of view of the witnesses -- determines Williams is dead, a prison official will write up a short notice announcing that the execution is over. He or she will push it through a slot in a door in the back of the witness room to a guard, who will read it to the gathering.

The witnesses will immediately be led outside, the media going first. Williams' body will be delivered in the next few hours to his relatives or anyone else who has been designated to handle his remains.

The entire execution usually takes between 15 and 30 minutes.

About the author
Kevin Fagan has witnessed five executions at San Quentin.

E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com

Execution's strict protocol > Cold efficiency and precise procedures govern the final day of the condemned at San Quentin, SFC, 12.12.2005, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/12/MNGBNG6N2E1.DTL

Excerpts From an Interview With Stanley Tookie Williams

December 12, 2005
The New York Times

Two weeks to the day before his scheduled execution, which is set for 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, Stanley Tookie Williams sat in a cramped visiting cell at San Quentin State Prison and talked for 90 minutes with Adam Liptak of The New York Times.

In careful, deliberate language that alternated between the pithy and the flowery, Mr. Williams, 51, spoke about helping to found the Crips street gang, about how his years in prison had changed him and about his writing and work with children.

Though he conceded his criminal background, he maintained that he is innocent of the four 1979 murders that sent him to death row in 1981.

Following are excerpts from that interview, parts of which were published in The Times on Dec. 2, 2005.

On His Years as a Crip:

"I have a despicable background. I was a criminal. I was a co-founder of the Crips. I was a nihilist."

"I functioned primarily on street wit. I managed to make it to the 12th grade. The teachers were insipid in their methodology." "Cripping was all I knew. I lived it. I breathed it. I walked it and I talked it."

"My courage was predicated on violence, on a negative reputation, on drugs, on ignorance. The courage I have now, or fortitude, is based on faith."

On His Transformation:

"People forget that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched."

On the Case Against Him:

"I always ask the question: Can a black man in America receive justice? I can say to you or anybody else that the answer is absolutely no. There’s a myriad of things that bring me to this conclusion — prosecutorial misconduct, the biased selection of juries, the issues of informants, the exclusion of exculpatory evidence, illegal interrogation of witnesses. It’s commonplace. It’s deeply ingrained in the California criminal justice system."

On the Man the Jury Saw:

"I was darned near twice this size. I had an indelibly entrenched grimace on my face. I had total disdain for the law enforcement system and it showed. And I was shackled."

On the Families of the Victims:

"To threaten me with death does not accomplish the means of the criminal justice system or satiate those who think my death or my demise will be a closure for them. Their loved ones will not rise up from the grave and love them. I wish they could. I sympathize or empathize with everyone who has lost a loved one. But I didn’t do it. My death would not mollify them."

On His Work With Children:

"They can empathize with me. I pretty much experienced all the madness they’re going through."

"I feel a sense of bliss within. I like to see the viability of youth."

"I don’t take myself seriously. I do take my helping children and writing books exceedingly seriously."

On Taking Responsibility for the Murders:

"How can a person express contrition if he’s not guilty?"

"If I were culpable of these crimes, I’d be on my knees, begging everybody."

On What He Would Have Said to Mr. Schwarzenegger:

"First and foremost, I would say that I’m innocent. Second, I believe that if I’m allowed to get a clemency or an indefinite stay, it would allow me to continue to proliferate my positive message, including a collaboration with the N.A.A.C.P., to create a violence-prevention message for at-risk youth."

On Death Row:

"I’ve never seen a millionaire here."

"You’re surrounded by a motley of different characters. Within the madness, there are those other than myself who have opted to redeem themselves.

"The longer I sit in this animalistic cage, the more human I become. I’ve learned not to allow the negative ambience to control me. I’ve risen above all of that, like a phoenix, a black phoenix."

"Had I still been in society I never would have been able to make the kind of impact I can now."

On the Death Penalty:

"We know that it’s not a deterrent. It’s wasted a lot of the taxpayers’ money. The death penalty in a sense is a disguise for vengeance."

"It’s a barbaric system that propagates, ‘to resolve murder is to murder someone,’ another oxymoron. It doesn’t work."

"It’s a more sophisticated type of killing than a mob lynching. It’s pathetic."

"In reality, there’s no disparity between this place and Texas."

On What He Misses:

"My freedom. Being able to hold my grandchild. Being able to go to the beach. Women. Food. My mother."

On the Prospect of Execution:

"They have the audacity to ask, 'Do I want a last meal?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want anyone present?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want a preacher?' Absolutely not. I want nothing from this institution."

"I feel good. I really do. I feel good physically and mentally and spiritually. Had I not undergone this redemptive transformation, I guarantee I’d really be a mess."

"I have that joie de vivre. I love life."

"My faith sustains me. I don’t crack under pressure."

"The least I can do is maintain my dignity. I confront madness with integrity. I don’t walk around like some shuffling black man."

"I’ll go through it with dignity, with integrity, with love and bliss in my heart. I smile at everything, and I’m quite sure I’ll smile then, too. I smile to myself, and I don’t worry about it."

Excerpts From an Interview With Stanley Tookie Williams, NYT, 12.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/national/12cnd-quotes.html

Gang leader set to die as appeals fail

Mon Dec 12, 2005 11:50 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN QUENTIN, California (Reuters) - California prepared to execute Stanley Tookie Williams early on Tuesday after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency, citing the former Crips gang leader's lack of remorse for four brutal murders.

The clemency rejection, as well as the denial of last-minute appeals by three top courts on Monday, cleared the way for Williams to be executed by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday for slaying four people in two 1979 petty robberies around Los Angeles.

"Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders of the four victims in this case," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption."

"Based on the cumulative weight of the evidence, there is no reason to second guess the jury's decision of guilt or raise significant doubts or serious reservations about Williams' convictions and death sentence."

The case has generated widespread interest and fierce debate over the death penalty in the United States because Williams, 51, has written a series of books warning young people against gangs and says he has found redemption.

Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson said he broke the news to Williams that Schwarzenegger had denied clemency as the inmate met several supporters in prison.

"He said 'Don't cry, let's remain strong,'" Jackson told Reuters. "He smiled, you know, with a certain strength, a certain resolve."

"I think he feels a comfort in his new legacy as a social transformer," Jackson said.

The inmate's supporters argued he should have been spared so he could continue his anti-gang work from behind bars.

In a rare coincidence in death penalty cases, Williams has said he met Schwarzenegger at a Los Angeles-area gym in the 1970s when both men were enthusiastic bodybuilders.

The governor, weakened by a loss on all his initiatives in a special election he called last month, would have risked alienating his Republican Party base if he granted clemency.

FINAL APPEALS DENIED

"In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do," Schwarzenegger wrote.

At San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco, a prison spokesman described Williams as quiet and cooperative and said he did not request any special final meal.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected final appeals by lawyers to reconsider the case. Pondering their fifth habeas corpus petition on the case over the past quarter century, the state Supreme Court also rejected the petition on Sunday night.

"We will not rest until 12:01 a.m. tonight," attorney Jonathan Harris told reporters.

Ronald George, the California Supreme Court's chief justice, told Reuters last week there was "something wrong" with a system in which judges must routinely ponder last-minute death row filings after two decades of decisions.

Williams was convicted in 1981 of killing Albert Owens as he lay facing downward on the floor of a 7-Eleven convenience store in a $120 robbery. Two weeks later, Williams shot dead an elderly Taiwanese immigrant couple running a motel, as well as their visiting daughter.

The case has drawn wide attention to a large extent because of the dedication of a former journalist, Barbara Becnel, who edited his anti-gang books and served as a co-producer of a film staring Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx about Williams.

The scheduled execution comes just over a week after a double murderer became the 1,000th prisoner to be executed in the United States since the 1976 reimposition of capital punishment.

"I am not the kind of person to sit around and worry about being executed," Williams told Reuters last month. "I have faith and if it doesn't go my way, it doesn't go my way."

Gang leader set to die as appeals fail, R, 12.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-13T045005Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

FACTBOX-Schwarzenegger rejects death row clemency

Mon Dec 12, 2005 5:35 PM ET
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The following are highlights of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's five-page statement issued on Monday denying clemency to convicted murderer and former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams:

-- "The possible irregularities in Williams' trial have been thoroughly and carefully reviewed by the courts and there is no reason to disturb the judicial decisions that uphold the jury's decisions that he is guilty of these four murders and should pay with his life."

-- "There is little mention of atonement in his writings and his plea for clemency of the countless murders committed by the Crips following the lifestyle Williams once espoused. The senseless killing that has ruined many families, particularly in African-American communities, in the name of the Crips and gang warfare is a tragedy of our modern culture."

-- "Is Williams' redemption complete and sincere or is it just a hollow promise? Stanley Williams insists that he is innocent and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders of the four victims in this case. Without an apology or atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and redemption is the one thing Williams will not do."

-- Schwarzenegger also notes that Williams dedicated his 1998 book to a group that includes Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X as well as several convicted murders, including Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal. In particular, Schwarzenegger said the inclusion of a dedication to George Jackson, who was charged with the murder of a California prison guard and who founded the violent Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, "defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed."

FACTBOX-Schwarzenegger rejects death row clemency, R, 12.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-12T223515Z_01_SPI281281_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

FACTBOX-Key facts about Stanley Tookie Williams case

Mon Dec 12, 2005 3:53 PM ET
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Convicted killer and former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams is scheduled for execution just after midnight on Tuesday (3:01 EDT/0801 GMT) for the murders of four people in 1979.

Here are key facts surrounding the case and execution:

-- Williams was convicted of killing Albert Lewis Owens with a shotgun as the convenience store clerk lay face down during a February 28, 1979, robbery and murdering a family of three while robbing their motel on March 11, 1979.

-- Williams, who claims to have co-founded the Crips street gang, maintains his innocence, saying that he was railroaded by an all-white jury. He sought clemency for renouncing his life of crime and trying to steer children away from gangs.

-- Williams, 51, has failed to overturn the guilty verdicts and death sentence in 25 years of appeals. With the rejection of clemency, lawyers for Williams could seek further intervention from the courts, although experts say such 11th-hour appeals rarely succeed.

-- Williams' claim of redemption and work with children has won him support from such celebrities as rapper and former Crips gang member Snoop Dogg and Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who starred in a TV movie about the convicted killer. Williams has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

-- Williams would become the 12th person, all of them men, executed in the state of California since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Of the previous 11 men executed, eight were white, one was Asian, one was black and one was Native American.

-- California, which has more than 640 people on death row, last carried out an execution in January, when 61-year-old Donald Beardslee, who was put to death in January for killing two young women in 1981 while on parole for another murder.

FACTBOX-Key facts about Stanley Tookie Williams case, R, 12.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-12T205344Z_01_DIT275214_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Experts dispute Williams claim of founding Crips

Mon Dec 12, 2005 4:04 PM ET
Reuters
By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The debate over the imminent execution of Stanley Tookie Williams hinges partly on his claim that he founded the notorious Crips street gang -- then renounced a criminal life in a quest for redemption.

Though Williams, who is scheduled to die on Tuesday, maintains his innocence in the four 1979 murders that landed him on death row, he takes credit for founding the Crips a decade earlier with another teenager, Raymond Washington, and says he now regrets his role.

Prosecutors question the 51-year-old Williams' sincerity in repudiating the Crips. Experts say the convicted killer and his supporters have also overstated his role in founding the gang -- which has a reputation for violence -- as a way of emphasizing his claim of redemption.

"Actually, everybody but Tookie gives Raymond Washington credit for starting (the Crips)," said Malcolm Klein, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Southern California who has studied gangs since 1962.

"Instead of founding the gang, which is what Tookie claims, what you're really talking about is emerging as a dominant figure," Klein told Reuters. "Because he is such a dominant, violent, articulate bad guy, rather than leadership you're talking about influence."

Latino gangs first surfaced in Los Angeles after the turn of the century, historians say, and black gangs may have formed in the 1930s.

Blacks moved to Los Angeles in large numbers during World War II and those gangs gained strength until the mid-1960s, when youths were drawn to the civil-rights movement and radical political groups like the Black Panthers.

WILLIAMS AS ANTI-HERO

By the end of that decade, the Panthers had faded and 15-year-old Washington stepped into a power vacuum, creating a gang he initially called the Baby Avenues. The origins of the name "Crips" are hazy, though one theory attributes it to a disabled member known as a "cripple" to his comrades.

"The Crips were already well established when Tookie came on the scene," said retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. and gang expert Wes McBride.

"(That he created the Crips) is part of his mystique that his supporters are using to try get him commuted. It gives him a stature as an anti-hero kind of person that has now turned his life around."

McBride says Williams, known by his middle name Tookie or the nickname "Big Took," helped build and solidify the Crips. The gang caught the imagination of the media after killing the son of a prominent black attorney and entering the popular culture through Hollywood films.

The Bloods emerged as rivals to the Crips in the early 1970s and the two gangs have feuded ever since.

McBride dismissed as "nonsense" claims by Williams that he started the Crips to defend his neighborhood against other gangs.

Williams has become a cause for anti-death penalty activists, including rapper and former Crips member Snoop Dogg and Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who starred in a sympathetic TV movie about the convicted murderer.

His case is one of several that have drawn attention to the

U.S. use of the death penalty, as America recently passed its 1,000th execution since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976.

McBride said there are now some 200 Crips gangs, though most are only loosely affiliated, with some 25,000 members in the Los Angeles area. Hundreds of people, mostly young black men, are killed each year in California by gangs.

Washington was killed by a rival gang member in 1979.

"There's not a whole lot of difference between the Crips of today and the Crips of yesteryear, only there's more of them," McBride said. "They are more involved in narcotics trafficking than they used to be, but Crips will do whatever they can to make money. Bank robberies, armored car robberies."

"Their legacy is that they've helped destroy the black community," McBride said. "Gangs kill communities just as surely as they kill people."

Experts dispute Williams claim of founding Crips, R, 12.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-12T210359Z_01_DIT275827_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Demonstrators opposed to the death penalty are seen at the start of a 25-mile march
to San Quentin Prison a day before the scheduled execution of convicted killer
and Crips gang co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams in San Francisco, December 12, 2005.
REUTERS/Lou Dematteis

Court rejects California gang founder's appeal
NYT 12.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=
2005-12-12T173020Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Court rejects California gang founder's appeal

Mon Dec 12, 2005 12:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The California Supreme Court has rejected a late appeal to reopen the case of condemned Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams, leaving his fate in the hands of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday.

Williams, 51, is slated be executed at 12:01 a.m. (0801 GMT) on Tuesday for murdering four people in two 1979 robberies around Los Angeles. His supporters had hoped the anti-gang books for children he wrote in prison would help him win clemency from Schwarzenegger, but they now appear dispirited that the celebrity governor has waited until the last day to announce his decision.

Pondering their fifth habeas corpus petition on the case over the past quarter century, the state Supreme Court on Sunday night rejected his lawyers' effort filed a day before to reopen the case.

"Claims 'One' through 'Nine' are denied on the merits," the court said. "In addition, each claim also is barred as untimely and successive."

In recent weeks, Williams' supporters had argued he was a life worth sparing because his message inspires inner-city youth. The inmate was subject of a film staring Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx.

"I see that as cruel," Barbara Becnel, who edited Williams' anti-gang books, told a news conference on Sunday when asked about the delayed word from Schwarzenegger.

Prosecutors also expect last-minute appeals to other courts before the scheduled execution by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison.

In the Supreme Court petition, attorney Verna Wefald wrote: "Mr. Williams has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested.

"Given that the state's case rests on the testimony of criminal informants who had an incentive to lie, not only to obtain benefits, but to hide the truth of their involvement in these crimes, it is imperative that discovery be granted at this critical stage of Mr. Williams' case."

In an interview with Reuters last week, Ronald George, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, said there was "something wrong" with a system in which judges must routinely ponder last-minute death row legal filings after two decades of decisions.

Many death penalty experts say the claim of innocence complicates an effort to win clemency on redemptive grounds. Yet Williams has openly spoken of a brutal gang past for which he apologizes.

Death penalty opponents were expected to gather at San Quentin on the bay north of San Francisco later on Monday.

Los Angeles civic and community leaders, worried that Williams' execution could spark rioting, have urged the public to remain calm whatever the governor decides.

Court rejects California gang founder's appeal, NYT, 12.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-12T173020Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

No Word From Governor as Execution Approaches

December 12, 2005
The New York Times
By SARAH KERSHAW

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 11 - As fervor over the scheduled execution of Stanley Tookie Williams early Tuesday began to boil across California on Sunday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined for a third day to announce whether he would spare the life of Mr. Williams, a former gangster and now world-famous death row inmate, and commute his sentence to life in prison.

The governor's office would not comment further, but officials said he would announce a decision on Monday, possibly only hours before Mr. Williams's scheduled execution.

Mr. Williams, 51, a co-founder of the Crips gang of Los Angeles, was convicted of four 1979 murders. He is set to die by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

As expected, defense lawyers for Mr. Williams filed last-minute petitions Saturday in an effort to raise doubts about the evidence and win a stay for his execution, the focus in recent weeks of widespread national and international attention.

The California Supreme Court, which has already rejected a number of legal appeals, was still reviewing the latest filings as of Sunday night, although most people involved in the case say that the inmate's fate ultimately rests with the governor.

To Mr. Williams's supporters, including the many celebrities and activists who have taken up his cause, he has become a symbol of redemption and a voice of urban peace, speaking out from death row at San Quentin State Prison against gang violence through children's books, lectures and a memoir.

Several supporters who have planned rallies on Monday at San Quentin and across the state and nation said they feared that no news on Sunday was bad news.

"I just think that he would have wanted to kind of defuse the situation as much as possible if he was going to rule in our favor," said Danielle Heck, a chairwoman of the Los Angeles Save Tookie Committee. "And it seems like kind of unnecessary psychological anxiety for everyone involved."

Ms. Heck said that she believed the governor was waiting "to make sure that there is not enough chance for there to be an uproar before the execution takes place."

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which is prosecuting the Williams case, said the last-minute petitions for Mr. Williams most likely had no bearing on the governor's timetable.

"The governor will make his decision when he is ready to make his decision," said the spokeswoman, Sandi Gibbons.

The petition to reopen the case argues, among other things, that witnesses against Mr. Williams were "criminals who were given significant incentives to testify against him and ongoing benefits for their testimony," according to the filing. The petition for an emergency stay of execution cites a pending bill in the State Assembly that, if passed, will place a moratorium on all executions while a new state commission investigated wrongful convictions.

Prosecutors immediately asked the court to reject the petitions. They would not comment Sunday on the separate clemency petition, an effort to have the sentence commuted to life in prison.

But at a news conference Thursday, after the governor met privately with both sides, the lead prosecutor, John Monaghan, Los Angeles deputy district attorney, said the clemency petition was merely an effort to buy Mr. Williams more time to try and prove his innocence.

"The evidence in this case is truly overwhelming," Mr. Monaghan said. "The murders were senseless, very brutal, and Mr. Williams should pay the ultimate penalty for his crimes."

Clemency has not been granted to a death row inmate in California since 1967. Mr. Schwarzenegger has rejected two petitions since being elected in 2003.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who said he had visited Mr. Williams twice, was due to arrive in Oakland on Sunday evening and then join Mr. Williams's supporters at the prison on Monday.

"One of my fears is that if we disregard redemption, if we disregard his social contribution, if those who have shown evidence of redemption and change are rejected, it rushes in a wave of cynicism," Mr. Jackson said in a telephone interview. Mr. Jackson said he had offered to visit Mr. Williams again before his execution, but that Mr. Williams, who has said he wants no witnesses to his death, told him that if was going to die, he did not want Mr. Jackson and others coming to see him at the last minute.

"He's become part of folklore now," Mr. . Jackson said. "I hope we can have reason to see him with clemency and not see him in the casket."

In recent days Mr. Williams has received many visitors, with special privileges allowing him daylong visits, prison officials said. He has been writing often on a manual typewriter, and jogging around a rooftop enclosure set up for death row inmates, said Lt. Vernell Crittendon, a San Quentin spokesman.

On Thursday, Mr. Williams entered a phase the prison calls the "five-day countdown," and he was moved to the North Segregation unit known as Condemned Row 1, one of three buildings that house San Quentin's 651 death row inmates, Lt. Crittendon said. The prison staff is keeping a 24-hour watch on him, checking his activities every 15 minutes.

Jonathan Harris, a member of Mr. Williams's defense team who saw him on Sunday, said, "He's upbeat and he's at peace."

Wayne Owens, 55, the older brother of Albert Owens, one of the men Mr. Williams was convicted of killing during a robbery of a 7-Eleven store in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview from his home in Olathe, Kan., that his family was doing the best they could to deal privately with their emotions amid the intense news coverage of the case.

Mr. Owens, a novelist and performer, said he was opposed to the death penalty but that he would support it in this case unless he could be assured that Mr. Williams would never be freed.

"Whichever way it come out, it will be a sad day," Mr. Owens said. "It is the ultimate no-win situation. If he gets clemency, there will be sorrow about his clemency. If he does not, it will be too bad that his life is lost."

Michael Falcone and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting from San Francisco for this article, and Cindy Chang from Los Angeles.

No Word From Governor as Execution Approaches, NYT, 12.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/national/12tookie.html

Schwarzenegger still undecided on clemency

Sat Dec 10, 2005 7:12 PM ET
Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will not decide on Saturday whether to grant clemency to former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams, who is slated to be executed on Tuesday for murdering four people in 1979, his office said.

Barring clemency or last-minute court intervention, officials will administer a lethal injection to Williams at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday in the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison.

The case has generated widespread interest and fierce debate over the death penalty in the United States because Williams, 51, has written a series of books warning young people against gangs and says he has found redemption.

His supporters have said he should be spared so he can continue his anti-gang work from behind bars.

The governor's office told Reuters that Schwarzenegger would not be making a decision on Saturday and gave no indication of when he would.

Following a clemency hearing on Thursday, Schwarzenegger said the decision was a "heavy responsibility" and he was carefully studying all sides of the issue.

Granting clemency would be a risk for Schwarzenegger, weakened by a stinging loss on all his initiatives in a special election he called last month, as it could alienate his Republican party.

But it could help boost his flagging popularity in a state where Democrats are the largest party as he looks to reelection in 2006.

U.S. governors typically stay executions because of doubts over evidence in the case or fairness of the trial rather than because of redemption. Williams has said he did not commit the murders, but said he hurt many people as leader of the Crips gang in the Los Angeles area.

Schwarzenegger still undecided on clemency, R, 10.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-12-11T001137Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Real Tookie Williams elusive in death row debate

Sat Dec 10, 2005 7:12 PM ET
Reuters
By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Is Stanley Tookie Williams a cold-blooded killer who has duped Hollywood with feigned innocence, phony assertions of redemption and embellished claims of his sway over gangland Los Angeles to escape execution?

Or is Williams, who is scheduled to die on Tuesday, a wrongly convicted man who nevertheless devoted a quarter century in prison to troubled kids, saving 150,000 lives from behind bars in a campaign worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize?

The debate over the most discussed U.S. execution in recent memory hinges on the wildly divergent views of the 51-year-old man who sits on San Quentin's death row, seeking clemency from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The transcripts of Williams 1981 trial paint a disturbing picture of the Crips gang leader, who was convicted of shooting four people to death with a shotgun during robberies, later boasting about the gurgling sounds convenience store clerk Albert Owens made as he died.

During the trial, prosecutors say, Williams plotted to kill a sheriff's deputy and an accomplice who was expected to testify against him, then blow up a bus full of inmates with dynamite to escape in the resulting chaos.

After the jury read their guilty verdict Williams, according to transcripts, looked to jurors and mouthed: "I'm going to get each and every one of you motherf------."

Williams supporters, who include film star Jamie Foxx and rapper Snoop Dogg, charge that there no evidence linking him to the crimes, suggesting he was railroaded by a racist, all-white jury after three blacks were removed from the panel.

DOES TOOKIE MATTER?

Prosecutors evidence showed Williams purchased the 12-gauge shotgun used in the crimes and point to testimony by an accomplice that Williams shot Owens. Two witnesses said he confessed to the murders.

Williams declined to testify in his defense, calling his step-father, girlfriend and two fellow inmates as witnesses.

Defenders say he found redemption in San Quentin, writing books urging children to reject violence and renouncing his gang life. He offered counseling by telephone to school kids.

They say his stature as a founder of the notorious Crips gives him a unique ability to steer youth away from gangs and assert that he has saved 150,000 lives. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times for his anti-gang work and four times for the literature prize by a group of backers who include university professors from the United States and Europe.

But gang experts dispute Williams' claims to have founded the Crips and say he has little influence over teens. Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton has said that few gang members had likely heard of Williams before press coverage of his scheduled execution.

Williams has said he now regrets his role in the Crips but has refused to debrief authorities on the gang, saying that doing so would brand him a "snitch."

Others have said that Williams' books are a crass publicity campaign that have sold only a few hundred copies each.

A spokesman for Williams' publisher, Power Kids Press, said he had been instructed not to give out sales figures for the eight books but said three were still in print.

If Schwarzenegger denies clemency, Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection just after midnight on Tuesday. If Schwarzenegger spares him, Williams' sentence would be commuted to life in prison.

Real Tookie Williams elusive in death row debate, R, 10.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-12-11T001128Z_01_KNE985077_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Schwarzenegger must decide if killer is executed

Fri Dec 9, 2005 6:45 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Saying he faced a heavy responsibility, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pondered on Friday whether to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, a convicted killer and former Crips gang leader set to be executed next week.

"You just have to have an open mind on that and case by case and look at that and then make up your mind," Schwarzenegger told reporters. "But it is a very heavy responsibility."

Aides said Schwarzenegger would resolve whether to impose a lesser sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole this weekend or on Monday, the day before the scheduled execution.

The governor had heard from defense lawyers and the prosecution in a closed-door clemency hearing on Thursday.

"I'm working on it. I'm looking, studying the whole thing, reading a lot, last night until 11 o'clock, almost to midnight," he said. "And I will be reading and doing all the research on it so we make the right decision."

Little information emerged from the Thursday clemency hearing. "Arnold was a good poker player and didn't give anyone any sense of what he would do," said one person familiar with discussions at the meeting.

Williams, 51, found guilty of slaying four people, has won celebrity supporters and a well-organized publicity campaign after writing a series of books urging youth to avoid following his footsteps and getting involved with violent gangs like the Crips.

PERSONAL FAITH

"My hope lies in God above anything and everything else," Williams told Reuters in an interview at San Quentin State Prison last month. "I have faith and if it doesn't go my way, it doesn't go my way."

"I am not the kind of person to sit around and worry about being executed," he said. "I'm sure there are detractors who would like to hear that I am weeping. ... I fear nothing except God."

The core issue of this clemency is whether a murderer can earn redemption in the eyes of society for his actions after the crime. U.S. governors typically stay executions because of doubts over evidence in the case or fairness of the trial rather than because of perceived redemption.

Prosecutors say Williams acted especially brutally in the 1979 murders in which he killed a shop clerk and, in a separate petty robbery, a family of three running a motel. They also condemn his role with the Crips, a notorious gang that now has thousands of members nationwide.

"Mr. Williams wants out of prison. This has nothing to do with redemption," said John Monaghan, assistant head deputy district attorney in Los Angeles.

Williams maintains that he did not commit the murders and was targeted because of his gang activities, which he has since renounced. Supporters say he is of much more value to society alive than dead because he can continue to warn young people about the dangers of gangs.

(Additional reporting by Tamara Keith in Sacramento)

Schwarzenegger must decide if killer is executed, R, 9.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-09T234110Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Demonstrators calling for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
to grant clemency to convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams
rally at the California State Capitol in Sacramento, California
December 8, 2005.
REUTERS/Lou Dematteis

Schwarzenegger ponders high-profile death row case
R 9.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=
2005-12-09T090526Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Schwarzenegger ponders high-profile death row case

Fri Dec 9, 2005 4:05 AM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger could decide as early as Friday whether to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, the former Crips gang leader set to be executed by lethal injection next week.

Schwarzenegger heard from defense lawyers and the prosecution in a closed-door clemency hearing on Thursday. Aides said he will resolve whether to impose a lesser sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole by Monday, the day before the scheduled execution.

Williams has won celebrity supporters and a well-organized publicity campaign after writing a series of books urging youth to avoid following his footsteps and getting involved with violent gangs like the Crips.

"My hope lies in God above anything and everything else," Williams told Reuters in an interview at San Quentin State Prison last month. "I have faith and if it doesn't go my way, it doesn't go my way."

"I am not the kind of person to sit around and worry about being executed," he said. "I'm sure there are detractors who would like to hear that I am weeping. ... I fear nothing except God."

The core issue of this clemency is whether a murderer can earn redemption in the eyes of society for his actions after the crime. U.S. governors typically stay executions because of doubts over evidence in the case or fairness of the trial rather than because of perceived redemption.

Prosecutors say Williams acted especially brutally in the 1979 murders in which he killed a shop clerk and a family running a motel in robberies for small amounts of money. They also condemn his role with the Crips, a gang that now has thousands of members nationwide.

"Mr. Williams wants out of prison. This has nothing to do with redemption," said John Monaghan, assistant head deputy district attorney in Los Angeles.

Williams maintains that he did not commit the murders and was targeted because of his gang activities, which he has since renounced. Supporters say he is of much more value to society alive than dead because he can continue to warn young people about the dangers of gangs.

If his life is spared, Williams would be moved from death row at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, perhaps to a more remote state prison.

Schwarzenegger ponders high-profile death row case, R, 9.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-09T090526Z_01_MCC908296_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Lawyer says clemency is only way to spare Williams' life

USA Today
Posted 12/8/2005 11:07 AM Updated 12/8/2005 11:17 AM

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Clemency is likely the only avenue available to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, for the murder of four people 26 years ago, his lawyers said. Williams is the co-founder of the Crips gang.

Thursday, his lawyers planned to present their case to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a private meeting in Sacramento in the hopes they can convince him to grant clemency to the gangster-turned peace activist. Williams is scheduled to die Dec. 13, but with clemency he would spend life in prison without parole instead.

"I'm not going to this hearing with hope. I'm going to this hearing frightened to death," defense attorney Peter Fleming Jr. said. "If we fail as counsel, a man dies."

Prosecutors, who have said Williams should be put to death, also will meet with Schwarzenegger. Both sides will have 30 minutes to make their case.

Schwarzenegger has not indicated when or how he would decide Williams' fate. A California governor has not granted clemency since 1967, when Ronald Reagan spared the life of a brain-damaged killer.

Last week, the California Supreme Court declined to reopen the case amid allegations that shoddy forensics connected Williams to at least three of the murders. The federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, also have ruled against him.

Williams, 51, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981 for killing Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang and Yu-Chin Yang Lin in a 1979 motel robbery, and for gunning down Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk, in a separate crime. He has professed his innocence.

During a conference call with reporters, Fleming said if clemency is denied, there isn't much of a case to bring to the federal courts. He said he would have to demonstrate that Williams is innocent.

"We're not in a position to do that," Fleming said.

Los Angeles County prosecutors, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and victims' relatives have demanded Williams' execution and said Schwarzenegger should not grant clemency. Prosecutors say the Crips gang is responsible for thousands of deaths.

The pitch for clemency doesn't involve claims of innocence. Attorneys plan to argue that Williams' life should be spared because his teachings from behind bars have helped many gang members change their ways, Fleming said.

In more than two decades on death row at San Quentin Prison, Williams has renounced his past and written children's books about the dangers of gang life.

Also Wednesday, Philip Gasper, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, nominated Williams for a fifth time for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to quell gang violence from behind bars. Williams has been nominated a total of six times for the award.

Lawyer says clemency is only way to spare Williams' life, UT, 8.12.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-08-williams-clemency_x.htm

L'Internet se mobilise pour sauver «Tookie»

Ancien chef de gang repenti condamné à mort en 1981 pour quatre meurtres, Stanley «Tookie» Williams doit être executé le 13 décembre, sauf grâce du gouverneur de Californie, Arnold Schwarzenegger • Sur la Toile, ses plus ardents défenseurs font pression

Mercredi 07 décembre 2005 (Liberation.fr - 16:34)
Libération
Par Judith RUEFF

«Plus que 6 jours pour empêcher l'exécution !» L'avertissement s'affiche en lettres rouges. Juste dessous, on peut lire : « Arnold, fait le bon choix pour les enfants ! » Savetookie.org compte les jours jusqu'au 13 décembre. Le site dédié à l'ancien chef de gang repenti Stanley «Tookie» Williams, condamné à mort en 1981 pour quatre meutres et qui, - sauf grâce d' «Arnold» (Arnold Schwarzenegger, ex-star et gouverneur de Californie) -, doit être exécuté la semaine prochaine (lire Libération du 4/12-> http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=342546 ].

On y trouve tous les détails de la fabuleuse histoire du fondateur d'un des plus célèbres gangs de Los Angeles, les Crips, racontée par ses plus ardents défenseurs. Des témoignages vidéos de militants anti-racistes et de vedettes Blacks, du rappeur Snoop Dogg à l'acteur oscarisé Jamie Foxx, ou bien la compil des groupes de hip-hop américains qui le soutiennent, «Redemption». On peut aussi y commander sa biographie («Blue rage, Black redemption»), connaître l'agenda complet de toutes les manifestations de soutien prévues aux Etats-Unis et dans l'Etat de la côte ouest, trouver l'adresse e-mail ou le téléphone de bureau de Schwarzzie, etc.

Et bien sûr, signer en ligne une pétition pour demander la clémence du gouverneur qui va examiner ces jours-ci la requête des avocats de Williams de commuer la peine de mort en prison à vie. Plusieurs de ces pétitions numériques circulent sur la Toile. Par exemple, celle de Tookie.com, un autre site consacré à la défense de l'ex-gangster passé à la non-violence et aux livres pour la jeunesse des ghettos. Les pro-Tookie clament avoir réuni environ 60 000 signatures et espèrent en rassembler 100 000 avant la date fatidique. Des centaines de mails de jeunes délinquants éclairés par son exemple, de profs des quartiers chauds, de policiers ou d'officiers de justice, sont envoyés chaque semaine sur sa boite au fond du couloir de la mort.

La communauté virtuelle des défenseurs de Tookie sur le web est des plus hétéroclites. On les rencontre sur Jackin4Beat, un site de la «hip-hop nation», dans les communiqués des militants de l'Aclu (association de défenseurs de libertés civiles), on les croise sur Blogs4god, le rendez-vous des chrétiens blogueurs… Les «antis» ne sont pas en reste. Une association de défense des victimes, la crime victims united of California propose aux internautes de signer une lettre demandant l'exécution de la sentence.

L'Internet se mobilise pour sauver «Tookie», Libération, 7.12.2005, http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=343169

Hollywood se mobilise pour «Tookie»

Stanley Williams, ancien chef de gang californien repenti, doit être exécuté le 13 décembre.

Lundi 05 décembre 2005
Libération
Par Emmanuelle RICHARD
Los Angeles correspondance

Lors d'une rencontre, en 1976, sur la plage de Venice, où les body-builders californiens exhibent leurs muscles, Arnold Schwarzenegger avait complimenté les biceps de Stanley «Tookie» Williams : «gros comme des cuisses !» avait déclaré le jeune acteur, sans se douter qu'il bavardait avec l'un des fondateurs du gang meurtrier des Crips (1). Près de trois décennies plus tard, Schwarzy, devenu gouverneur de Californie, tient la vie de Williams entre ses mains. Son exécution pour quatre assassinats, commis en 1979, est prévue pour le 13 décembre, dans le couloir de la mort de San Quentin, près de San Francisco. Lui seul peut accorder la clémence à Williams, et le gouverneur ne cache pas qu'il redoute cette prise de décision : devenu militant antigang en prison, le condamné de 51 ans barbiche blanche et lunettes est une cause célèbre des opposants à la peine de mort aux Etats-Unis. Stars hollywoodiennes et leaders religieux militent pour sauver la vie de «Tookie», au grand dam des conservateurs.

Pétition. «Stanley Tookie Williams n'est pas un type quelconque, il est une source d'inspiration», déclarait récemment le rappeur Snoop Dogg, qui se décrit comme un ancien Crip. L'acteur oscarisé Jamie Foxx, qui a interprété Tookie dans un téléfilm, a galvanisé une petite foule à Los Angeles. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Danny Glover, Angelica Houston, Harry Belafonte, ou encore Russell Crowe, ont signé une pétition pour demander la clémence à Schwarzenegger, soutenus par le révérend Jesse Jackson et le prix Nobel de la paix Desmond Tutu.

Les partisans de Tookie qui a passé vingt-quatre ans dans le couloir de la mort, ont une vision romantique de sa destinée : cofondateur des Crips en 1971, Williams est arrêté en 1979 pour avoir abattu un gérant de supérette et trois membres d'une famille, propriétaire d'un motel. Condamné à mort, il clame son innocence. En prison, il renonce à son passé de leader de gang, contribue à une trêve entre les Crips et leurs rivaux, les Bloods. Il écrit une série de livres pour enfants, Tookie élève la voix contre la violence, et milite sur son site, tookie.com. Les deux journaux de Californie les plus influents demandent la clémence : «Son histoire de péché et de rédemption illustre de façon puissante l'injustice de la peine capitale», affirme le Los Angeles Times. Pour le San Francisco Chronicle, «Williams nous est bien plus utile vivant que mort.»

Bestial. A contrario, cette mobilisation déclenche les foudres des conservateurs, soulagés que la cour d'appel de San Francisco ait refusé un nouveau procès à Williams. «Il est le pire du pire en matière de criminels... Comment peut-il être réhabilité ?» s'est indignée Harriet Salerno, présidente de l'association Crime Victims United of California. «Toute cette agitation au nom d'un homme dont la spécialité bestiale était le tir à bout portant ?» s'insurge le chroniqueur Rich Lowry. A Los Angeles, les animateurs-stars de la radio KFI ont rebaptisé une heure de leur émission quotidienne «The "Kill Tookie" hour» et publient les photos des victimes massacrées sur leur site internet.

Williams refuse toutefois d'exprimer des remords pour ses meurtres : «J'ai fait beaucoup de très mauvaises choses, mais rien de cette ampleur», déclarait-il sur la chaîne MSN. Il apprécie la décision de Schwarzy de recevoir ses avocats le 8 décembre. Ceux-ci vont conjurer le Terminator devenu Gouvernator d'épargner le condamné, pour pouvoir rouvrir l'enquête. Schwarzenegger, qui se dit partagé au sujet de la peine de mort, pourrait être sensible à l'appel de certains de ses pairs de Hollywood et à l'indignation internationale. Cependant, l'élu républicain du Golden State démocrate, où 68 % des citoyens soutiennent la peine capitale, sort d'une défaite cuisante, à l'issue d'une consultation populaire début novembre. Prendra-t-il le risque politique de sauver «Tookie» ?

(1) Dans la biographie de Stanley Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption.

Hollywood se mobilise pour «Tookie», Libération, 5.12.2005, http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=342546

Maryland executes killer of teacher's aide

Mon Dec 5, 2005 10:38 PM ET
The New York Times
By Bryan Sears

BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Convicted murderer Wesley Eugene Baker was executed on Monday in Maryland for fatally shooting a teacher's aide in front of two of her grandchildren.

Baker, 47, died by lethal injection at 9:18 p.m. EST (0218 GMT) at the Maryland Diagnostic and Classification Center in Baltimore.

Baker shot Jane Tyson, a 49-year-old teacher's aide, in the head and stole her purse in 1991 outside a shopping mall as two of her grandchildren watched.

Last week, a federal judge rejected arguments on Baker's behalf that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Death penalty opponents also argued that capital punishment is racist in cases such as Baker's, in which the victim was white and the convicted murderer black.

Baker's case attracted the attention of Roman Catholic Cardinal William Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore, who met with Baker and said he would appeal to Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. to commute the sentence to life without parole.

Also in hopes of having Baker's sentence overturned or commuted, his attorneys had argued that the sentencing judge did not hear what they said could have been mitigating circumstances that could have led to a sentence of life without parole instead of death.

Baker's attorneys wanted to introduce details of his life -- his mother became pregnant with him when she was raped at age 12 or 13, he suffered physical and sexual abuse as a child and a drug overdose at age 12 -- but Baker refused to allow them to reveal the information in court.

He told his attorneys he did not want his mother humiliated publicly.

Last Friday, in North Carolina, double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to be brought back in 1976 after a nine-year unofficial moratorium.

Baker's execution was the fifth in Maryland since 1976.

Maryland executes killer of teacher's aide, R, 5.12.2005,http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-06T033826Z_01_KNE613039_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-MARYLAND.xml

Death Row inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams sits in a visiting cell at San Quentin prison
November 16, 2005,after granting Reuters a rare interview.
(Photograph taken by prison guard in accordance with San Quentin prison visitation regulations)
REUTERS/California Department of Corrections/Handout

Schwarzenegger clemency review has political risks R 4.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=
2005-12-04T143150Z_01_MOL359905_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Schwarzenegger clemency review has political risks

Sun Dec 4, 2005 9:32 AM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's clemency review this week to determine whether to execute Crips gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams could influence the governor's ability to rebound from political setbacks.

Convicted of four brutal killings a quarter century ago, Williams has generated a big public campaign calling for clemency because of his anti-gang books aimed at inner-city youth.

The Republican governor will hear from prosecutors and defense attorneys at the clemency hearing behind closed doors on Thursday. He will only have a few days if he wants to halt the December 13 execution by lethal injection at San Quentin prison north of San Francisco.

Some analysts say the former Hollywood action star risks further alienating his party base if he grants clemency.

"There are already a number of people that have already said that they are not going to vote for him, work for him," said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly. "If he granted clemency, based on the evidence that has been presented, it would be a disaster."

Weakened by a stinging loss on all his initiatives in a special election he called last month, Schwarzenegger angered some in his party this week by appointing an openly gay, longtime Democrat as his chief of staff.

Republican fiscal conservatives have also expressed concern about his interest in billions of dollars of new infrastructure bonds. Some analysts say such concerns could prompt another Republican, such as state Sen. Tom McClintock, to challenge Schwarzenegger in the June gubernatorial primary.

McClintock told Reuters he does not intend to run and said politics should not be considered in clemency reviews.

"Political issues should have no place in this discussion," he said. "It's totally irrelevant."

APPEALING TO THE INNER CITY

Williams' supporters -- such as Barbara Becnel, who edited his anti-gang books -- say Schwarzenegger could win over new voters by sparing the inmate's life.

"I think the political results will be positive because he, Schwarzenegger, will be seen as a hero in urban communities throughout the state of California and throughout the nation for helping the leaders of those communities to succeed ultimately with reducing youth gang violence," she said.

Williams' case is one of several that have drawn attention to U.S. use of the death penalty, as the execution toll passed a milestone on Friday of 1,000 since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976.

Schwarzenegger has seen his poll numbers fall sharply over the past year and is running for reelection in November 2006 in a state where Democrats are the largest party.

He has denied clemency to two death row inmates since coming to office in 2003; one man was later spared by a court ruling.

In a rare twist, the former Mr. Olympia apparently met Williams -- when both men were avid bodybuilders in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s. During a recent interview, Williams smiled as he recounted how he impressed Schwarzenegger when they met at Venice's Muscle Beach.

"I met Arnold in the gym on the boardwalk," he said. "He told some woman 'Those aren't arms, they are thighs.'"

The governor says he approaches each death row case with an open mind, but he appeared to express sympathy when a radio host complained Williams was still involved with prison gangs.

"First of all, I totally agree with you," Schwarzenegger told KOGO radio on Thursday. "I have looked through the files and pages for hours, and I have looked at his record in prison."

But "I want to have the open mind, sit down and then I make my decision."

Schwarzenegger takes pride in unconventional decisions and even supporters say that they are not sure what he will do.

Schwarzenegger clemency review has political risks, R, 4.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-04T143150Z_01_MOL359905_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Crips gang focus of Williams execution debate

Sat Dec 3, 2005 11:41 AM ET
The New York Times
By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A growing debate over the planned execution of Stanley Tookie Williams hinges partly on his claim that he founded the notorious Crips street gang then renounced a criminal life in a quest for redemption.

Williams is scheduled to die on December 13 unless granted clemency by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

His case is one of several that have drawn attention to U.S. use of the death penalty, as the execution toll passed a milestone on Friday of 1,000 since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976.

Though Williams maintains his innocence in the four 1979 murders that landed him on death row, he asserts credit for founding the Crips a decade earlier with another teenager, Raymond Washington, and says he now regrets his role. He has written a series of books urging children to reject violence.

Prosecutors question the 51-year-old Williams' sincerity in repudiating the Crips. Experts say the convicted killer and his supporters have also overstated his role in founding the gang -- which has a reputation for violent rivalries with other gangs -- as a way of emphasizing his claim of redemption.

"Actually, everybody but Tookie gives Raymond Washington credit for starting (the Crips)," said Malcolm Klein, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Southern California who has studied gangs since 1962.

"Instead of founding the gang, which is what Tookie claims, what you're really talking about is emerging as a dominant figure," Klein told Reuters.

"Because he is such a dominant, violent, articulate bad guy. Rather than leadership you're talking about influence."

Latino gangs first surfaced in Los Angeles after the turn of the century, historians say, and black gangs may have formed in the 1930s.

Blacks moved to Los Angeles in large numbers during World War II and those gangs gained strength until the mid-1960s, when youths were drawn to the civil-rights movement and radical political groups like the Black Panthers.

WILLIAMS AS ANTI-HERO

By the end of that decade, the Panthers had faded and 15-year-old Washington stepped into a power vacuum, creating a gang he initially called the Baby Avenues.

The origins of the name "Crips" are hazy, though one theory attributes it to a disabled member known as a "cripple" to his comrades.

"The Crips were already well established when Tookie came on the scene," said retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. and gang expert Wes McBride.

"(That he created the Crips) is part of his mystique that his supporters are using to try get him commuted. It gives him a stature as an anti-hero kind of person that has now turned his life around."

McBride says Williams, known by his middle name Tookie or the nickname "Big Took," helped build and solidify the Crips. The gang caught the imagination of the media after killing the son of a prominent black attorney and entering the popular culture through Hollywood films.

The Bloods emerged as rivals to the Crips in the early 1970s and the two gangs have feuded ever since.

McBride dismissed as "nonsense" claims by Williams that he started the Crips to defend his neighborhood against other gangs.

Williams has become a cause for anti-death penalty activists, including rapper and former Crips member Snoop Dogg and Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who starred in a sympathetic TV movie about the convicted murderer.

Washington was killed by a rival gang member in 1979.

McBride said there are now some 200 Crips gangs, though most are only loosely affiliated, with some 25,000 members in the Los Angeles area. Hundreds of people, mostly young black men, are killed each year in California by gangs.

"There's not a whole lot of difference between the Crips of today and the Crips of yesteryear, only there's more of them," McBride said. "They are more involved in narcotics trafficking than they used to be, but Crips will do whatever they can to make money. Bank robberies, armored car robberies."

"Their legacy is that they've helped destroy the black community," McBride said. "Gangs kill communities just as surely as they kill people."

Crips gang focus of Williams execution debate, R, 3.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-12-03T164051Z_01_MOL359905_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-TOOKIE.xml

Tense Moments In Court As Judge Resentences Golphin To Life In Prison

Kevin Golphin Convicted For Deaths Of Ed Lowry, David Hathcock

POSTED: 6:58 am EST December 2, 2005
UPDATED: 1:25 pm EST December 2, 2005
Wral.Com

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Emotions boiled over Friday in a courtroom after a judge changed the punishment for a convicted killer from death to life in prison.

In September 1997, Kevin Golphin, then 17, and his brother, Tilmon, shot and killed two North Carolina law enforcement officers -- Highway Patrol Trooper Ed Lowry and Deputy David Hathcock.

Both brothers were sentenced to death, but earlier in the year, an U.S. Supreme Court decision determined the death penalty was unconstitutional for people who were younger than 18 when they committed their crimes.

On Friday, the judge said the decision to change the sentence was beyond his control, so he resentenced Golphin to life. Families on both sides got to speak out in court.

"I wish the state would turn him loose so I can have him," said Al Lowry, the slain trooper's brother.

William McRae, Golphin's uncle, responded to those remarks.

A judge changed Kevin Golphin's sentence from death to life in prison for the deaths of two law enforcement officers.

"Those days for what you said, 'turn him loose that you can have him,' [those] days are over," he said.

At that point, Lowry's brother lunged toward McRae. Lowry had to be restrained by other courtroom observers. The outbreak was just the tip of emotion for Dixie Davis, Lowry's widow.

"They've been animals, just pure animals, and then the family gets up to talk about how they are Christians," she said. "I'm a Christian, an eye for an eye, justice for justice. They need to read the Bble a little bit more because I don't think it says that."

"He has told me on numerous occassions he is sorry that this has happened," said Richard McNeil, Golphin's attorney. "We must not forget that yes,he's going to live, but he's going to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. It's not like he's going to get out of jail ever."

Golphin's mother also got up and spoke in court. She said the ordeal has been difficult on both families and said she hopes other teenagers will learn from her sons' mistakes.

Tense Moments In Court As Judge Resentences Golphin To Life In Prison, Wral.Com, 2.12.2005, http://www.wral.com/news/5449910/detail.html

Death penalty opponents marched outside Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C.

Gerry Broome/Associated Press December 2, 2005

North Carolina Man Is 1,000th Executed NYT 2.11.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/national/01cnd-execution.html?hp&ex=
1133586000&en=4c6576664e69b9f8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

North Carolina Man Is 1,000th Executed

December 1, 2005
The New York Times
By BRENDA GOODMAN

Just after 2 a.m., a North Carolina man became the 1,000th person to be executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court upheld states' rights to order the death penalty in 1976. The somber moment drew a sizeable crowd to Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., to protest capital punishment.

Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, of Rockingham, N.C., died by lethal injection for the 1988 shootings of his estranged wife, Julie Curry Boyd, who was 36, and her father, Thomas Dillard Curry, 57. Members of both families had asked to be present.

Mr. Boyd's son, Kenneth Smith, 35, who visited his dad every day for the last two weeks, said in an interview on Thursday that he felt the attention paid to the milestone had hurt his father's chances for clemency.

Mr. Smith also said his dad was deeply troubled that he might only be remembered as a grim hash mark in the history books.

"He didn't want to be 999, and he didn't want to be 1001 if you know what I mean," said Mr. Smith. "He wanted to live."

Mr. Boyd's attorney, Thomas Maher, had hoped to win a stay for his client, who he said had an I.Q. of 77. The cutoff for mental retardation, a mitigating factor in some capital cases, is 75. He also hoped the U.S. Supreme Court and North Carolina Governor Mike Easley would consider that before these murders, Mr. Boyd had no history of violent crime, and that he had volunteered to go to war in Vietnam.

Belinda J. Foster, District Attorney for Rockingham, N.C., who prosecuted Mr. Boyd, said she felt confident that the death penalty was warranted in this case.

In March of 1988, Mr. Boyd shot his father-in-law twice with a .35 Magnum before turning the gun on his estranged wife. He shot her eight times. Christopher Boyd, their son, was pinned underneath his mother's body. Paramedics later found the boy hiding under a bed, covered in her blood, Ms. Foster said.

"There are cases that are so horrendous and the evidence so strong it just warrants a death sentence," Ms. Foster said.

Michael Paranzino, President of the pro-death penalty group Throw Away the Key, agreed.

"You'll never stop crimes of passion, but I do believe the death penalty is a general deterrent, and it expresses society's outrage," Mr. Paranzino said.

An October 2005 Gallup poll found that 64 percent of all Americans support capital punishment in murder cases.

Mr. Boyd never denied his guilt, but said he couldn't remember killing anyone and didn't know why he did it.

"We believe this occasion is the perfect time to reconsider the whole issue of execution," said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, a group that has sought to end the practice of using executions as a punishment for crime around the world.

"Since 1976, about one in eight prisoners on death row in the U.S. has been exonerated. That should raise serious questions about ending a person's life," Mr. Schulz said.

Others argue that the death penalty should be reconsidered because it is so arbitrarily applied.

The vast majority of those sentenced to death for their crimes are impoverished and live in the South, said Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and a long time advocate for death row inmates.

"Texas has put 355 people to death in the last 30 years, with just one county in Texas, Harris County, accounting for more executions than the entire states of Georgia or Alabama. Where is the justice in that?" asked Mr. Bright.

As to the provision of justice, Marie Curry, who lost her husband and her daughter when Mr. Boyd shot them 17 years ago, said she was at a loss to provide any answers.

"I really don't know, " she said.

Mrs. Curry raised Mr. Boyd's three sons, Christopher, Jamie, and Daniel, after their father was sent to prison for their mother's murder.

"It's just a sad day. The bible says to forgive anyone that asks you, and I did," she said, "But I can't ever forget."

North Carolina Man Is 1,000th Executed, NYT, 2.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/national/01cnd-execution.html?hp&ex=1133586000&en=4c6576664e69b9f8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Wral.com 2.12.2005
http://images.ibsys.com/2005/1202/5449790.jpg
http://www.wral.com/news/5449760/detail.html

US executions milestone spurs fresh debate

Fri Dec 2, 2005 12:12 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment when he was put to death by lethal injection on Friday.

The execution drew global attention because of its symbolism since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to be brought back in 1976 after a nine-year unofficial moratorium.

It helped spur renewed debate over U.S. capital punishment, and came on a day that executions in Singapore and Saudi Arabia also sparked international concerns.

"God bless everybody in here," Boyd said in his last words to witnesses from the death chamber at Central Prison in North Carolina's state capital, Raleigh.

Boyd, who was 57, was a Vietnam War veteran with a history of alcohol abuse. He was executed for killing his wife and father-in-law in 1988, in front of two of his children.

"This 1,000th execution is a milestone, a milestone we should all be ashamed of," his lawyer Thomas Maher said.

With polls showing that a declining majority of the American public backs the death penalty, the White House reiterated U.S. President George W. Bush's support.

"The president strongly supports the death penalty because he believes ultimately it helps save innocent lives," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

Bush is a former governor of Texas, which has accounted for 355 of the 1,000 executions -- more than three times as many as any other state.

Boyd was wheeled into the death chamber, strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal mix of three drugs.

He seemed "sort of resigned," said witness Elyse Ashburn.

Sheriff Sam Page of Rockingham County, which prosecuted Boyd, defended the execution. "Tonight justice has been served," he said, and he urged people to pray for the murder victims. Two of the victims' relatives witnessed the execution but did not speak after.

About 100 death-penalty opponents gathered on a sidewalk outside the prison. They held candles and read the names of the other 999 convicts who have been put to death.

DETAINED PROTESTERS

About 17 protesters were detained and charged with trespassing after stepping onto prison property, police said. Witnesses said many had been on their knees in prayer.

World reaction to Boyd's death was swift.

"It is a scandal that the death penalty still exists in a civilized country like the United States of America," said Petra Herrmann, chairwoman of the German group Alive e.V.

"How can a citizen realize that murder is wrong if the state is allowed to murder its own citizens?" she said.

Akiko Takada, of Japan's anti-capital punishment group Forum 90, said that despite frequent U.S. use of the death penalty "crime there shows no signs of diminishing, so ultimately the death of these people has no effect."

"This is one small step for humankind -- backwards," American campaigner Clive Stafford Smith told Reuters in London. "The death penalty makes us all far more barbaric."

Bush believed it was important that the death penalty be administered "fairly and swiftly and surely" with expanded DNA testing to make sure convictions were secure, McClellan said.

FALLING SUPPORT

Thirty-eight of the 50 U.S. states and the federal government permit capital punishment, and only China, Iran and Vietnam held more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.

A Gallup Poll in October showed 64 percent of Americans favored the death penalty -- the lowest level in 27 years and down from a high of 80 percent in 1994. Improved DNA testing that has led to several criminal convictions being overturned has fueled doubts about the fairness of capital punishment.

Singapore, with the world's highest execution rate relative to population, also carried out a death penalty on Friday, with the hanging of Australian drugs trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van despite Australian government pleas for clemency.

In Saudi Arabia, murderer Ahmad al-Shaater became at least the 78th person put to death this year in the conservative kingdom.

South Carolina was scheduled to execute another American, Shawn Paul Humphries, by lethal injection at 6 p.m. (2300 GMT) on Friday for the killing of a convenience store owner.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington)

US executions milestone spurs fresh debate, R, 2.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-02T171235Z_01_YUE154

Ed Stein The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado Cagle 2.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/stein.asp
http://cfapp.rockymountainnews.com/stein/index.cfm

Death row survivor assails executions

Fri Dec 2, 2005 5:26 AM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - As Kenneth Lee Boyd's death by lethal injection drew near late on Thursday, a man who spent six years with him on North Carolina's death row stood outside a Baptist church, clutching a candle against the biting wind.

"He was a praying man, always in the Bible," Alan Gell said of Boyd, who on Friday morning became the 1,000th inmate to be executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Gell faced execution as well, for the 1995 murder of a retired truck driver. But he was freed in 2004 when a second jury found that prosecutors had withheld witness statements showing that he was in prison when the murder occurred.

Prosecutors also withheld a recording of the star witness, saying she had to "make up a story" about the murder, the jury found.

These problems with Gell's case prompted the North Carolina legislature to require prosecutors to share their entire file with defense attorneys before felony trials.

The legislature nearly passed a moratorium on capital punishment this year, but opted to let executions continue while a committee studies the issue.

So Boyd on Thursday prepared to be strapped to a gurney and injected with a lethal mix of chemicals.

And Gell, 31, marched with other death penalty opponents to the prison where he once awaited execution with Boyd.

"I think that it's bad that this state has to be the one to set the milestone when it's a state that's riddled with flaws in its justice system," he told Reuters.

Death row survivor assails executions, R, 2.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-02T102622Z_01_KRA237559_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Rob Rogers The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pennsylvania Cagle 2.12.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/rogers.asp
http://www.robrogers.com/

1,000th person executed in U.S. since 1977

Posted 12/1/2005 7:43 PM Updated 12/2/2005 9:41 AM
USA Today

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A double murderer who said he didn't want to be known as a number became the 1,000th person executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed 28 years ago.

Kenneth Lee Boyd, who brazenly gunned down his estranged wife and father-in-law 17 years earlier, died at 2:15 a.m. Friday after receiving a lethal injection.

After watching Boyd die, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page said the victims should be remembered. "Tonight, justice has been served for Mr. Kenneth Boyd," Page said.

Boyd's death rallied death penalty opponents, and about 150 protesters gathered outside the prison.

"Maybe Kenneth Boyd won't have died in vain, in a way, because I believe the more people think about the death penalty and are exposed to it, the more they don't like it," said Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty.

"Any attention to the death penalty is good because it's a filthy, rotten system," he said.

Boyd, 57, did not deny killing Julie Curry Boyd, 36, and her father, 57-year-old Thomas Dillard Curry. But he said he thought he should be sentenced to life in prison, and he didn't like the milestone his death would mark.

"I'd hate to be remembered as that," Boyd told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I don't like the idea of being picked as a number."

The Supreme Court in 1976 ruled that capital punishment could resume after a 10-year moratorium. The first execution took place the following year, when Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah.

During the 1988 slayings, Boyd's son Christopher was pinned under his mother's body as Boyd unloaded a .357-caliber Magnum into her. The boy pushed his way under a bed to escape the barrage. Another son grabbed the pistol while Boyd tried to reload.

The evidence, said prosecutor Belinda Foster, clearly supported a death sentence.

"He went out and reloaded and came back and called 911 and said 'I've shot my wife and her father, come on and get me.' And then we heard more gunshots. It was on the 911 tape," Foster said.

In the execution chamber, Boyd smiled at daughter-in-law Kathy Smith — wife of a son from Boyd's first marriage — and a minister from his home county. He asked Smith to take care of his son and two grandchildren and she mouthed through the thick glass panes separating execution and witness rooms that her husband was waiting outside.

In his final words, Boyd said: "God bless everybody in here."

Boyd's attorney Thomas Maher, said the "execution of Kenneth Boyd has not made this a better or safer world. If this 1,000th execution is a milestone, it's a milestone we should all be ashamed of.

In Boyd's pleas for clemency, his attorneys said he served in Vietnam where he operated a bulldozer and was shot at by snipers daily, which contributed to his crimes.

Both Gov. Mike Easley and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.

Execution No. 1,001 was scheduled for Friday night at 6 p.m., when South Carolina planned to put Shawn Humphries to death for the 1994 murder of a store clerk.

1,000th person executed in U.S. since 1977, UT, 2.12.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-01-1000th-execution_x.htm

Death penalty foes slam U.S. over 1,000th execution

Fri Dec 2, 2005 5:03 AM ET
Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - Opponents of the death penalty around the world criticized the United States on Friday after double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed there since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

"This is one small step for humankind -- backwards," said veteran American campaigner Clive Stafford Smith.

"The death penalty makes us all far more barbaric. I have watched a lot of people die, and when you come out from watching someone being executed it certainly isn't a better world," he told Reuters in London.

Kenyan National Human Rights Commission Chairman Maina Kiai said it was "a great pity that the U.S. can keep on executing people" when much of the developed world was moving toward ending the death penalty.

"Also, the fact that in the U.S. a lot of death sentences that are carried out invariably affect people of color and poor people, it's an issue of great concern," Kiai said.

In Singapore, where a 25-year-old Australian drug courier was hanged just hours before Boyd's execution, Sinapan Samydorai, president of the think tank Think Center, said there was no justice without life.

"The U.S. is supposed to be a champion of human rights and democracy, yet they do not recognize the right to life," he said.

Singapore has a mandatory death sentence for crimes such as murder, firearms offences and drug trafficking, and has hanged some 420 people since 1991, mainly for drug trafficking.

"It is a scandal that the death penalty still exists in a civilized country like the United States of America," said Petra Herrmann, chairwoman of the German group Alive e.V.

"How can a citizen realize that murder is wrong if the state is allowed to murder its own citizens?" she said.

Dr. Hans Joachim Meyer, president of the central committee of the German Catholics Association, said: "We are utterly against the death penalty. There is no reason for it to exist in a society based upon human rights."

DEATH "HAS NO EFFECT"

In Japan, where the death penalty is widely supported, Akiko Takada of anti-capital punishment group Forum 90 said that despite frequent use of the death penalty in the United States, "crime there shows no signs of diminishing, so ultimately the death of these people has no effect".

Boyd, who was 57, died at 2:15 a.m. (0715 GMT) in the death chamber of Central Prison in North Carolina's state capital, Raleigh, spokeswoman Pamela Walker of the Department of Corrections said. Boyd was strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal mix of three drugs.

The Vietnam war veteran with a history of alcohol abuse was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder of his wife and father-in-law. The crimes were committed in front of two of his children.

The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the United States in 1976 and the first execution was carried out a year later.

Thirty-eight of the 50 U.S. states and the federal government permit capital punishment and only China, Iran and Vietnam held more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.

(Reporting by correspondents in Nairobi, Berlin, Singapore, London, Tokyo)

Death penalty foes slam U.S. over 1,000th execution, R, 2.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/News/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-02T100257Z_01_KRA230816_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

White House: Death Penalty Deters Crime

December 2, 2005
Filed at 11:25 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush strongly supports the death penalty in the belief that ''ultimately it helps save innocent lives,'' his spokesman said Friday as the United States marked its 1,000th execution since capital punishment resumed in 1977.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said it was important that the death penalty ''be administered fairly and swiftly and surely, and that helps it serve as a deterrent.'' He noted that Bush promoted an initiative to expand the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful convictions.

As governor of Texas, a state that executes more inmates than any other, Bush commuted one death sentence and allowed 152 executions during his six years in office.

The 1,000th execution took place in Raleigh, N.C., early Friday, where Kenneth Lee Boyd received a lethal injection. He was convicted of killing his estranged wife and father-in-law in 1988.

White House: Death Penalty Deters Crime, NYT, 2.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Death-Penalty.html

After 24 Years on Death Row, Clemency Is Killer's Final Appeal

December 2, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

SAN QUENTIN, Calif., Nov. 30 - Stanley Tookie Williams, once a leader of a notorious street gang and now perhaps the nation's most prominent death row inmate, leaned over a small wooden table in a cramped visiting cell here and tried to explain what he used to be and what he has become.

"I have a despicable background," Mr. Williams said. "I was a criminal. I was a co-founder of the Crips. I was a nihilist."

"But people forget," he added, chewing on a turkey sandwich, "that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched."

All that stands between Mr. Williams and his execution, set for Dec. 13, is the possibility that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will commute his sentence to life in prison after a clemency hearing next week.

Such commutations used to be common in the United States, granted in 20 percent to 25 percent of all death sentences reviewed by governors in the first half of the last century. With the exception of a few cases in which departing governors with misgivings about the death penalty granted wholesale clemency to condemned inmates, commutations have become rare. No condemned prisoner has been spared in California since 1967.

Governors once considered the commutation of a death sentence to be an act of mercy or grace. In recent years, though, they have tended to act only to correct errors in the judicial system and, occasionally, to take account of mental illness or retardation.

When Gov. Mark R. Warner of Virginia spared Robin Lovitt's life on Tuesday, for instance, he said that he was acting "to reaffirm public confidence in our justice system." The execution could not proceed, he said, because potentially exculpatory DNA evidence had been destroyed.

Mr. Williams's basic claim is different. Although he says he is innocent of the four 1979 murders that sent him to death row in 1981, his lawyers base their request for clemency on the good that Mr. Williams has done during his years in prison.

He is an author of children's books, a memoir and the Tookie Peace Protocol, a set of fill-in the-blanks forms for rival gangs wishing to declare a truce. He gives lectures to youth groups by telephone. His supporters have nominated him for the Nobel Prize, for both literature and peace.

Mr. Schwarzenegger must decide in Mr. Williams's case whether clemency means something more than additional scrutiny of the evidence presented in court or whether it should also take account of the progress of a prisoner's life in the years following a death sentence.

His answer will have a broad impact, as the pace of executions in California is about to quicken. The state, which has the nation's largest death row but seldom executes anyone, faces the possibility of three executions before the end of February.

Mr. Williams, 51, is a large, deliberate black man with more salt than pepper in his beard. He wears his hair in a short ponytail, and his round rimless glasses give him an intellectual air. A proud autodidact, he chooses his words with care, preferring the bigger ones.

Mr. Williams acknowledged that his story, which has attracted the support of rappers and Hollywood celebrities and has been made into a television movie, is a jumble of contradictions that will not be easy for the governor to untangle.

Prosecutors and victims rights groups say Mr. Williams's crimes must outweigh whatever he has done since.

"This is a guy who blew away four people with his shotgun and laughed about it," said Michael Rushford, the president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. "Guys like him were your worst nightmare in L.A. in the 70's. They'd blow you away for your shoes. For nothing. For sport."

Mr. Williams was convicted of four murders, those of Albert Owens, a shop clerk killed during the robbery of a convenience store in February 1979, and of Tsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang and Yee-Chen Lin, killed during the robbery of their family-run motel the next month.

Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, told Mr. Schwarzenegger in a submission this month opposing clemency, that Mr. Williams's failure to "take any responsibility for the brutal, destructive and murderous acts he committed" means that "there can be no redemption, there can be no atonement, and there should be no mercy."

In a long interview here, Mr. Williams countered, "How can a person express contrition if he's not guilty?" He added: "They want me executed. Period. I exemplify something they don't want to see happen - a redemptive transformation."

He said he had a bit of history with the man who would decide his fate, based on a shared passion for bodybuilding. Mr. Williams said he used to work out at the Gold's Gym on the Santa Monica beach in the 1970's.

"I was pretty enormous back then," Mr. Williams said, "and exceptionally strong."

Mr. Schwarzenegger passed Mr. Williams on the Santa Monica boardwalk one day and told a companion, according to Mr. Williams: "Look, that man doesn't have arms. He has legs."

The governor has said he does not recall the incident, and he has declined to say what standards he will use in deciding whether Mr. Williams or any other California inmate should live. "I really don't have any guidelines set for that," Mr. Schwarzenegger told reporters in November. "It's a case-by-case situation."

"This is kind of the toughest thing to do when you're governor," he added. "And so I dread that situation, but it's something that's part of the job, and I have to do it." A spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

Asked what he would tell the governor were they to meet again, Mr. Williams said: "First and foremost, I would say that I'm innocent. Second, I believe that if I'm allowed to get a clemency or an indefinite stay, it would allow me to continue to proliferate my positive message, including a collaboration with the N.A.A.C.P., to create a violence-prevention message for at-risk youth."

Other governors in recent years have focused on only the type of argument that Mr. Williams makes first, that he is innocent. They have acted as a sort of backstop to the judicial system, driven in part, perhaps, by a fear of seeming soft on crime.

"In every case," George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, wrote in "A Charge to Keep," his 1999 memoir, "I would ask: Is there any doubt about this individual's guilt or innocence? And, have the courts had ample opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?"

Bill Clinton said much the same thing as governor of Arkansas, expressing a reluctance to take decisions away from the courts.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has twice denied clemency, to Kevin Cooper, whose execution was stayed by the courts last year, and to Donald Beardslee, who was executed in January.

In the Beardslee case, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed to discount the possibility that a prisoner's actions in prison should figure in the clemency determination.

"While I commend Beardslee for his prison record and his ability to conform his behavior to meet or exceed expected prison norms," Mr. Schwarzenegger said, "I am not moved to mercy by the fact that Beardslee has been a model prisoner. I expect no less."

Mr. Williams's main lawyers for his clemency application, from the New York law firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, say Mr. Schwarzenegger should think more broadly about his power to be merciful.

"We seek clemency for the man Stanley Williams has become," they wrote in their clemency petition, "for the good work he has done, and for the good work he will continue to do."

The traditional definition of clemency, said Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and author of "Mercy on Trial," a study of capital clemency, was concerned with neither justice nor redemption, the two arguments Mr. Williams has pressed.

"The idea of clemency was the reduction of a deserved punishment," he said. "It wasn't thought of as justice. You couldn't earn or deserve clemency. It was an act of mercy or an act of grace."

In "Against Mercy," an article in The Minnesota Law Review last year, Dan Markel, a law professor at Florida State University, argued that mercy in that sense was problematic. It not only fails to deliver warranted punishment, Professor Markel wrote, but also flies in the face of a societal commitment to equal justice under the law.

A narrow conception of clemency limited to correcting errors in the judicial system helps explain recent trends. In the last decade, putting aside Gov. George Ryan's emptying of Illinois's death row in 2003, there have been about two executive clemencies in capital cases each year.

In California, Gov. Edmund G. Brown commuted 23 death sentences from 1959 to 1967, while allowing 36 executions to proceed. In "Public Justice, Private Mercy," a 1989 book about how he made those decisions, Mr. Brown said he acted when there were questions about the inmate's guilt, when new evidence had come to light and when the punishment seemed disproportionate to that received by others.

Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Mr. Brown, granted the last capital commutation in California, in 1967, to a brain-damaged man.

There are almost 650 people on death row here, compared with slightly more than 400 in Texas. But Texas has executed 355 people since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. California has executed 11.

"We don't want to churn them out the way some of the states in the South do," Ronald M. George, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, said in an interview on Monday. "But it can drag on for 20 years, which does not reflect well on the system."

Mr. Williams stands at the head of a growing line, as California now seems on the verge of a spate of executions. Another one is scheduled for January and a third is likely in February.

Mr. Williams said he had given some thought to his last day should things not work out with the governor.

"They have," he said of prison officials, his voice rising, "the audacity to ask, 'Do I want a last meal?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want anyone present?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want a preacher?' Absolutely not. I want nothing from this institution."

But he did want something, he said later.

"I want to live," he said.

After 24 Years on Death Row, Clemency Is Killer's Final Appeal, NYT, 2.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/national/02prison.html?hp&ex=1133499600&en=1714ded9cb19efbe&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Death penalty recommended for 11-year-old's killer

Posted 12/1/2005 4:59 PM Updated 12/1/2005 8:55 PM
USA Today

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — Jurors recommended the death penalty Thursday for a mechanic convicted of abducting and killing an 11-year-old girl in an attack that was taped by a surveillance camera and broadcast worldwide.

Joseph Smith wipes away tears during closing arguments of the penalty phase of his trial on Thursday.
By Chip Litherland, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Jurors deliberated five hours before arriving at their recommendation, voting 10-2 for the death penalty for Joseph Smith.

Circuit Judge Andrew Owens ultimately will issue the sentence, as early as next month. Under the law, he must give great weight to the jury's decision before imposing a sentence of death or life in prison without parole.

Joseph Smith was convicted last month on charges of kidnapping, sexual battery and first-degree murder in the slaying of Carlie Brucia.

Smith, 39, showed no reaction as the recommendation was read. Carlie's mother, Susan Schorpen, let out deep sobs and hugged relatives after the verdict was read. Patricia Davis, Smith's mother, left the courtroom crying.

In closing arguments earlier, prosecutor Debra Riva sought the death penalty, saying Smith was clear-headed enough to get rid of evidence and recount his crimes to his brother, which she said showed he was not impaired by a mental disorder or drugs.

"He chose to prey upon a child for sexual gratification," Riva said. "... He was under the influence of his urges, not under the influence of a mental disorder."

Defense attorney Adam Tebrugge argued for a sentence of life in prison without parole, saying it would punish Smith, protect society and provide "a fitting conclusion to this horrific case."

"The Joe Smith on Feb. 1, 2004, was a man in pain, ravaged by drug abuse and out of control," Tebrugge said. "The Joe Smith, the drug addict who was out of control, will never exist again because he will be kept away from drugs."

Carlie's mother, Susan Schorpen, walked out of the courtroom as Tebrugge made his case.

Smith, 39, has admitted in taped conversations recorded in jail that he used either heroin or cocaine at the time he kidnapped Carlie.

The jury then began considering which sentence to recommend in the case, which became known worldwide because Carlie's Feb. 1, 2004, abduction from a car wash parking lot was taped by a surveillance camera and broadcast repeatedly.

Also Thursday, Owens decided Smith could not read a statement in front of jurors about his crimes. The judge said the statement could be made in front of jurors only if prosecutors were allowed to cross-examine Smith, something defense attorneys did not want.

Instead, Owens said, the statement could be made during a subsequent hearing when he considers the jury's recommendation.

Death penalty recommended for 11-year-old's killer, UT, 1.1.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-01-killersentencing_x.htm

Scott Langley, who is the Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator
for Amnesty International in North Carolina,
participates in a protest against the scheduled execution of Kenneth Lee Boyd
in front of Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina December 1, 2005.
REUTERS/Ellen Ozier

N. Carolina awaits 1,000th modern U.S. execution R 1.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=
2005-12-02T041540Z_01_YUE154769_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

N. Carolina awaits 1,000th modern U.S. execution

Thu Dec 1, 2005 11:15 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Death penalty opponents marched by candlelight to a North Carolina prison on Thursday as the state prepared to execute the 1,000th prisoner in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated nearly 30 years ago.

Less than four hours before Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, was scheduled to die by lethal injection for shooting his wife and father-in-law in 1988 in front of two of his children, state Gov. Mike Easley announced he was denying clemency. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected a final appeal earlier on Thursday.

"Having carefully reviewed the facts and circumstances of these crimes and convictions, I find no compelling reason to grant clemency and overturn the unanimous jury verdict affirmed by the state and federal courts," Easley said in a statement.

Clemency from the governor had been Boyd's last chance to avoid execution. He will be strapped to a gurney at 2 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Friday and given an opportunity to make a last statement.

He will then be injected with three drugs -- sodium pentothal to put him to sleep, pancuronium bromide to paralyze him, and potassium chloride to stop his heart. Five minutes after his heart stops, he will officially be declared dead.

Boyd's lawyer Thomas Maher, who spoke to his client earlier in the day, said he was calm as he prepared to die.

"His concern is that who he is will get lost in a bizarre coincidence that he's number 1,000," Maher told Reuters. "He said it best: 'I'm a person, not a statistic.'"

SYSTEM QUESTIONED

Outside Raleigh's Central Prison, opponents of capital punishment gathered after an interfaith prayer service to protest against the pending execution.

"What we are doing in the name of our government is in all of our names, and we do not want our names to be attached to this injustice," Rabbi Lucy Dinner said at the service, attended by about 100 people.

The Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976, and 38 of the 50 American states and the federal government now permit capital punishment.

Only China, Iran and Vietnam held more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.

Alan Gell, who sat on death row with Boyd before he was retried and acquitted in 2004, said his case had showed the state's justice system was flawed.

"I think that it's a bad thing that this state has to be the one to set the milestone when it's a state that's riddled with flaws in its justice system," he said after attending the service.

Gell was retried and acquitted after a judge ruled prosecutors had withheld evidence in his first trial.

North Carolina Department of Corrections spokeswoman Pamela Walker said Boyd was spending his final hours with his family.

About 5 p.m. (2200 GMT), he received his requested final meal of New York strip steak, a baked potato with sour cream, salad with ranch dressing and cola, no dessert.

Boyd, a Vietnam veteran with a history of alcohol abuse, worked in a cotton mill and as a truck driver before he went to prison. Maher said he did not have a violent record before he committed the double murder.

Rockingham County District Attorney Belinda Foster, who won his conviction, said Boyd carried out the murders in a deliberate manner, returning to his truck to reload at one point and calling emergency workers to report the crime as he was still shooting.

Although the death penalty remains favored by a clear majority of Americans, the number of executions has fallen sharply in recent years.

Neighboring South Carolina is scheduled next to execute Shawn Paul Humphries at 6 p.m. (2300 GMT) on Friday, also by lethal injection, for the killing of a convenience store owner in a robbery.

N. Carolina awaits 1,000th modern U.S. execution, R, 1.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaunches&storyID=2005-12-02T041540Z_01_YUE154769_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

US set for 1,000th execution

Thu Dec 1, 2005 12:02 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Barring an unlikely intervention, a convicted killer will die by lethal injection in the dead of night on Friday in the 1,000th execution in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated three decades ago.

Kenneth Boyd, 57, was scheduled to die at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina at 2 a.m. EST (0700 GMT) for killing his estranged wife and her father in 1988 in front of his children.

His execution has attracted worldwide attention not because of the nature of the crime, but because it will mark a symbolic milestone in the history of the death penalty.

Experts on the issue said state Gov. Mike Easley was unlikely to commute his sentence as happened in Virginia on Tuesday when a convict was spared becoming the 1,000th execution thanks to a last minute decision by the governor.

"He's not one to limit these sorts of things," That Beyle, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina, said of Easley.

Death penalty opponents were expected to gather near the prison late on Thursday to protest Boyd's execution. On Wednesday, about 100 people demonstrated outside the U.S. embassy in Rome as part of worldwide vigils and rallies organized by a Catholic Church group against judicial killing.

TWO TO DIE ON FRIDAY

Even if there is a last minute change in Raleigh, 16 hours later on Friday at 6 p.m. EST (2300 GMT), Shawn Paul Humphries was due to die in South Carolina, also by lethal injection, for the killing of a convenience store owner in a robbery.

A spokesman for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said the governor's legal team was not going to recommend clemency. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976 and 38 of the 50 American states and the federal government now permit capital punishment.

Though the number of executions carried out has fallen sharply in recent years and public support is waning, the death penalty remains favored by a clear majority of Americans.

Only China, Iran and Vietnam held more executions in 2004 than the United States, according to rights group Amnesty International.

Easley, a former state attorney general, has commuted only two death penalty sentences since taking office in 2001 and allowed 22 to be carried out, including one two weeks ago.

That man, like Boyd, was convicted of killing his wife and Easley allowed the execution to go ahead despite pleas for mercy from the prisoner's children.

"He chose not to grant clemency, which makes it very unlikely in this case that he would grant clemency," said Scott Langley, North Carolina coordinator for Amnesty International. Cari Boyce, the governor's spokeswoman, said on Wednesday Easley has not decided whether to pardon Boyd or commute his sentence to life in prison.

US set for 1,000th execution, R, 1.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-01T170229Z_01_YUE154769_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

Convicted murderer Kenneth Boyd is seen in an undated photo.
The Governor of North Carolina could spare 57-year-old Boyd,
who is scheduled for lethal injection on Friday morning
for killing his estranged wife and her father in 1988 in front of his children.
REUTERS/North Carolina Department of Correction/Handout

US set to carry out 1,000th execution this week R 30.11.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=
2005-11-30T222229Z_01_YUE068764_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

The death chamber at the Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina,
is pictured in this undated file photograph.
Barring an unlikely intervention, a convicted killer will die by lethal injection
in the dead of night on Friday in the 1,000th execution in the United States
since the death penalty was reinstated three decades ago.
REUTERS/North Carolina Department of Correction/Handout

US set for 1,000th execution R 1.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=
2005-12-01T170229Z_01_YUE154769_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

US set to carry out 1,000th execution this week

Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:22 PM ET
The New York Times
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is virtually certain this week to execute its 1,000th prisoner since 1977 with two inmates scheduled to die by lethal injection in North Carolina and South Carolina, where they are unlikely to be granted clemency, experts said on Wednesday.

Death-penalty experts said North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley is unlikely to spare Kenneth Boyd, who is scheduled to die at 2 a.m. (/0700 GMT) on Friday for killing his estranged wife and her father in 1988 in front of his children.

"He's not one to limit these sorts of things," said University of North Carolina political science professor Thad Beyle.

A spokesman for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said the governor's legal team is not going to recommend clemency for Shawn Paul Humphries, convicted of killing a convenience store owner in a robbery. Humphries is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. (/2300 GMT) local time.

If they proceed the executions will mark the 1,000th and 1,001st since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty almost 30 years ago.

That distinction would have fallen on Virginia prisoner Robin Lovitt, but Gov. Mark Warner on Tuesday commuted his sentence to life in prison because a court clerk violated state law by destroying DNA evidence that might have proved Lovitt innocent.

In North Carolina, Easley, a former state attorney general, has declined to intervene in cases like Lovitt's that raised procedural questions, said Ken Rose of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which helps defend capital cases.

"We have a governor that has not considered fairness of the trials in his consideration for clemency," Rose said.

Easley has commuted two death-penalty sentences since taking office in 2001 and allowed 22 to be carried out.

His spokeswoman, Cari Boyce, said Easley has not decided whether to pardon Boyd or commute his sentence to life in prison. "The governor gives every clemency case careful and thorough review and this case is no exception," she said in an e-mail.

Easley allowed the execution two weeks ago of a man who, like Boyd, was convicted of killing his wife, despite pleas for mercy from the prisoner's children, noted Scott Langley, North Carolina coordinator for Amnesty International.

"He chose not to grant clemency, which makes it very unlikely in this case that he would grant clemency," said Langley.

Boyd, a high-school dropout and Vietnam War veteran with a history of alcohol abuse, had no record of violent crime before he killed his wife and stepfather, his lawyer said.

"Even if one were to have the death penalty, it truly should be reserved for the worst of the worst and Kenneth Boyd just is not that," said attorney Thomas Maher.

The district attorney who won Boyd's conviction said his background did not matter. "He's being punished for what he did, not for what he didn't do," said Rockingham County District Attorney Belinda Foster.

A Gallup poll last month showed 64 percent of Americans supported the death penalty, the lowest level in 27 years, compared with a high of 80 percent in 1994.

(Additional reporting by Harriet McLeod in Charleston, South Carolina)

US set to carry out 1,000th execution this week, R, 30.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-30T222229Z_01_YUE068764_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

N.C. inmate hopes he's not number 1,000

Posted 11/30/2005 3:18 PM
USA Today

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — An inmate set to become the 1,000th person executed in the U.S. since capital punishment was reinstated said Wednesday he doesn't think he deserves death for murdering his estranged wife and her father.

Kenneth Lee Boyd talks during an interview at central prison in Raleigh, N.C.
By Gerry Broome, AP

"I don't like the idea of being picked as a number," Kenneth Lee Boyd told The Associated Press in a prison interview. "I feel like I should be in prison for the rest of my life."

Boyd, scheduled to die by injection at 2 a.m. Friday, could have been the 1,001st inmate put to death since 1977 had outgoing Virginia Gov. Mark Warner not granted clemency to another inmate Tuesday. Warner, considered a contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, said destroyed DNA evidence led him to reduce Robin Lovitt's sentence to life in prison without parole.

Boyd is seeking clemency from North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley. A federal appeals court also could block his execution, but a U.S. district court judge wrote in an order Tuesday that Boyd "has a nearly non-existent likelihood of success" in his arguments.

Boyd does not deny killing Julie Curry Boyd and Thomas Dillard Curry, but said he remembered little about the 1988 shootings at Curry's home in Rockingham County on the Virginia state line. The Boyds had separated and Julie Boyd was living with her father when Kenneth Boyd killed them.

"I remember sitting in my house, nobody there," Boyd said. "I blinked my eyes and I'd done shot my father-in-law. When they told me how many times I shot her, I couldn't believe it.

"It's just a thing that happened, just snapped."

Boyd's attorney, Thomas Maher, said Wednesday he plans to file appeals with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

But after the decision in Virginia put Boyd on schedule to become the 1,000th person executed since 1977, Maher said he also hoped the attention would lead Easley to take the clemency petition seriously.

"But I hope that would be true regardless of whether this is case 999, 1000 or 1001," Maher said.

A spokeswoman for Easley, Cari Boyce, said the governor will treat the execution like others he has considered.

Easley has granted clemency twice since 2001, but both times there were extenuating circumstances not seen in Boyd's case.

One case was marked by accusations that the jury was racially biased against the defendant, a black man convicted of killing the husband of a white woman with whom he had been having an affair.

The other case involved lost DNA evidence, like the Virginia case in which Warner granted clemency to Lovitt.

In 2001, a court clerk destroyed much of the evidence in Lovitt's case, including a pair of scissors used to stab a man to death in a 1998 robbery at an Arlington, Va., pool hall. Just a few weeks earlier, Virginia implemented a law requiring the preservation of DNA evidence in death row cases.

Lovitt, 42, admitted grabbing the cash box in the robbery but denied killing Clayton Dicks.

Initial DNA tests on the scissors were inconclusive, but Lovitt's lawyers, who include former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, argued that more sophisticated DNA tests available today could have cleared their client.

Warner, who has allowed 11 executions over nearly four years in office, had never before granted clemency to a death row inmate.

"The commonwealth must ensure that every time this ultimate sanction is carried out, it is done fairly," he said.

Warner's clemency decision could boost his national prospects, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Democratic party activists in Iowa, which has an early caucus, and New Hampshire, which has an early primary, are vehemently anti-death penalty, he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that state laws to reform capital punishment were valid, ending a 10-year moratorium on the death penalty.

N.C. inmate hopes he's not number 1,000, NYT, 30.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-30-1000th-execution_x.htm

FACTBOX-Five facts about US capital punishment

Wed Nov 30, 2005 2:18 PM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - Convicted murderer Kenneth Boyd, whose execution is scheduled for early Friday morning in North Carolina, would be the 1,000th person put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Here are five facts about capital punishment in the United States.

* The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that crimes committed by juveniles could not be punished by death. That resulted in 71 people being taken off death row and followed a Supreme Court decision in 2002 that it was unconstitutional to execute criminals who are mentally retarded.

* A Gallup poll last month showed 64 percent of Americans favored the death penalty -- the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.

* Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma account for more than half of the executions performed since 1977. Texas alone has carried out 355.

* Republicans in the U.S. Congress said recently they were moving ahead with legislation that would speed up executions in the United States by limiting the ability of those sentenced to death to appeal to federal courts.

* The number of people sentenced to death and put to death in the United States has been falling in recent years. Last year, 59 prisoners were executed, six fewer than in 2003, according to the Justice Department.

FACTBOX-Five facts about US capital punishment, R, 30.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-30T191845Z_01_YUE069455_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

FACTBOX-Five facts about executions globally

Wed Nov 30, 2005 2:19 PM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - Convicted murderer Kenneth Boyd, who is scheduled to be executed early on Friday in North Carolina, would be the 1,000th person put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Here are some facts about capital punishment worldwide.

* More than 3,797 people were executed in 2004, according to Amnesty International's report, "The death penalty worldwide: developments in 2004." That was the second-highest figure the organization has recorded since its monitoring began 25 years ago. In 1996, 4,272 were executed, Amnesty said.

* Five countries -- Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal and Turkey -- abolished the death penalty last year, taking the total number to 120, the human-rights organization said earlier this year.

* China accounted for at least 3,400 executions last year -- about nine out of 10 cases. Iran was second, executing at least 159 people. Three were children, including a 16-year-old girl hanged for "acts incompatible with chastity," it said. China also executed at least one person under 18 when he committed his crime. The United States executed 59 people last year, while Vietnam executed at least 64.

* Amnesty said at least 7,395 people received fresh death sentences in 64 countries last year -- the highest rate since 1996.

FACTBOX-Five facts about executions globally, R, 30.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-30T191937Z_01_YUE069567_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Rallies held statewide to urge gang founder's clemency

Posted 11/30/2005 7:48 PM Updated 11/30/2005 11:22 PM
USA Today

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Death penalty opponents rallied around the state Wednesday to urge Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to save the life of convicted killer-turned-gang peace activist Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

The demonstrations came as the California Supreme Court refused a request by lawyers for Williams to reopen the case.

The co-founder of the Crips street gang is scheduled to die Dec. 13 by lethal injection after being convicted of murdering four people in 1979.

Schwarzenegger plans a meeting on Dec. 8 with prosecutors and lawyers for Williams who are seeking clemency.

"What I want to do is make sure we make the right decisions, because we're dealing here with a person's life," Schwarzenegger said, echoing comments he made earlier this month while on a trip to China.

Eleven rallies on behalf of Williams were scheduled throughout the day from San Diego to Sacramento to coincide with hundreds of demonstrations around the globe for "World Cities Against the Death Penalty Day."

In Sacramento, about 30 people, mostly religious leaders and activists, turned out for a chilly protest outside City Hall.

Amanda Wilcox, whose 19-year-old daughter Laura was gunned down in 2001, said she doesn't support the death penalty.

"If killing is so wrong, how can it be right to kill?" Wilcox asked.

Gail Erlandson, a retired theology teacher at a private girls high school, told the crowd she and three students met Williams at San Quentin prison several years ago.

Other inmates "stood in respect and called out a word which in Swahili means leader," she said.

Williams, 51, was convicted of murdering a Whittier convenience store clerk and three people at a Pico Rivera motel less than two weeks later. He denies committing the crimes.

Some people are convinced Williams should die, including a former acquaintance.

"Tookie really murdered those people," Jimel Barnes, 52, of Compton said at Los Angeles City Hall before a rally there.

Williams "went around South-Central bragging about it," said Barnes, who is also cited by some as a co-founder of the Crips.

The Los Angeles rally attracted about 40 people, including clergy, death penalty opponents and the Black Riders, a group of youths in black clothing and camouflage outfits who raised the clenched-fist black power salute and chanted "Let Tookie live!"

"We're all remaining optimistic, we're all remaining prayerful," said Bonnie Williams-Taylor, Williams' ex-wife and mother of one of his sons. She said her ex-husband was convicted to be a "fall guy" for out-of-control gang violence.

Rapper Snoop Dogg, actor Jamie Foxx and others who have publicly supported clemency met Wednesday night at the downtown Los Angeles library where selections were read from books written by Williams urging youngsters to avoid gangs.

In San Francisco, more than 50 people lined the steps of City Hall to denounce the death penalty and urge the governor to spare Williams.

"We need to save him not only for himself but for all of us and what he can teach us," said Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union.

Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, urged passage of legislation that would temporarily suspend the death penalty until a state commission completes a two-year study of capital punishment.

"There's so many children from my neighborhood ... they have no hope," Cheryl Denson, 40, said in Los Angeles. "They need light, and Tookie Williams is their light."

It's important "to see a man who's 10 times worse than they are telling them to put the guns down," she said.

Rallies held statewide to urge gang founder's clemency, UT, 30.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-30-williams-execution_x.htm

Texas judge delays execution, waits for DNA testing

Wed Nov 30, 2005 4:20 PM ET
Reuters

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas judge on Wednesday delayed what would have been the state's last execution of the year, ordering DNA testing on evidence in a 14-year-old case.

The stay means Texas, the most active death penalty state, will finish 2005 with 19 executions, the lowest total since 2001 and the second-lowest figure in nine years.

Tony Ford, 32, was scheduled to die by lethal injection on December 7 for the murder of 17-year-old Armando Murillo in El Paso.

Ford's attorney, Richard Burr, acknowledges his client drove two men to a house on December 18, 1991, to collect a drug-related debt. Ford contends the other men entered the house and shot Murillo, his mother and his sister.

The women survived.

One of the men, Van Belton, has been sentenced to 60 years for aggravated robbery.

Clothing belonging to the other man will be tested to determine if possible bloodstains belong to any of the victims. That man was not charged with involvement in the attack.

"If the clothing was somehow exposed to blood during the crime, then the blood on there ought to be from one of the victims who was shot," Burr said.

Ford received a 90-day stay, which Burr said should be enough time to test the stain. If the test does not match blood from the crime scene, or if results are inconclusive, Burr said a new execution date likely will be set.

If new evidence results in a commutation, Burr said Ford could still be liable for a lesser conviction because of his admitted involvement as driver.

Texas has executed 355 of the 999 convicted killers put to death since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977 after a hiatus caused by a U.S. Supreme Court review.

The United States' 1,000th execution since 1977 is expected to take place this week in North or South Carolina.

Texas judge delays execution, waits for DNA testing, R, 30.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-30T222229Z_01_YUE068764_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION.xml

US taste for executions fed by crime

Wed Nov 30, 2005 2:19 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - One of the highest murder rates in the world, a tradition of frontier justice and unwavering faith in biblical retribution have helped keep the death penalty alive in the United States even as much of the modern world has rejected it, experts on the subject say.

In the face of international scorn and a trend that has seen a record 105 countries halt capital punishment, America has continued to embrace it, accounting along with China, Iran and Vietnam, for most of the world's known executions.

Early on Friday, a death sentence is expected to be imposed in North Carolina. If that happens, it will mark the 1,000th execution since the country re-legalized the process in 1976 after a 10-year hiatus. Before then, starting from 1608 in colonial days, the land that became the United States recorded more than 14,000 legal executions -- and unknown additional numbers at the hands of vigilantes.

"The first thing is that compared to Europe, we have a much higher homicide rate," said Tom Smith of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Polls have clearly demonstrated that popular support for capital punishment rises and falls as homicide rates do, he said.

While the U.S. rate is down from recent years, it is still among the highest in the world, behind a number of countries that include Russia, South Africa, Colombia and Mexico.

Other factors are harder to quantify, Smith said, but one seems to be that the country has the largest concentration of evangelistic Christians "who believe in sin and the punishment of sin, and that capital punishment is biblically ordained."

"That tradition is stronger in the United States than any European country," he said, and it accompanies a frontier tradition of "swift and sure justice to deal with criminals ... You catch a cattle rustler, you string him up."

That fits with a strong sense of individualism -- that people themselves and not society are to blame for the bad things they do, he added.

It is much harder to prove that racism is involved, Smith said, though statistics show blacks are on death row in numbers far disproportionate to the nearly 14 percent of U.S. society they make up.

RACISM AN INFLUENCE

But Deanne Bonner, clinical professor of social work at Boston University, said the country's "history of racism" is a strong influence.

"There are many people who believe that capital punishment has replaced lynching ... the vast majority of those executed are African-American males," she said.

"It's not just racism but our failure to deal with the institutionalization of racism," as seen in education and poverty, she said. "It leads to seeing people who commit crimes as ... less human" and immigration history has also "left us with a more fragmented sense of our common humanity."

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson agrees, telling Reuters the U.S. system is "stacked against people who are poor or black or brown ... Jesus was a victim of capital punishment. A flawed system killed an innocent man. Let's make every Christian think."

Rick Garnett of the University of Notre Dame Law School said the United States has experienced more murders than other Western countries and "We simply don't know what these other countries would have done had they experienced similar murder rates -- and similarly media-sensationalized homicides."

"In many of these other countries the rejection of capital punishment has not happened via democratic decision. That is, it is not clear that citizens in other countries -- as opposed to other countries' governments -- have views on capital punishment that depart all that radically from ours," he said.

The U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, leaders of the single largest faith in the United States, have been on record against capital punishment for the past 25 years. They recently called it "deeply flawed" and something that has left the United States "standing almost alone" among democratic and developed countries in its regular use.

The biblical call of "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" should not be seen as a call for capital punishment but an attempt to "limit the retribution that could be exacted for an offense," the bishops said.

But historically churches have backed the right of the state to take a life in the name of justice, notes Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Fordham University Jesuit who agrees with the U.S. bishops' opposition to capital punishment.

"Many governments in Europe and elsewhere have eliminated the death penalty in the 20th century, often against the protest of religious believers," he said in a 2003 essay.

"While this change may be viewed as moral progress, it is probably due in part to the evaporation of a sense of sin, guilt and retributive justice."

US taste for executions fed by crime, R, 30.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-30T191845Z_01_YUE069492_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Clemency Stops an Execution in Virginia

November 30, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia granted clemency Tuesday to a convicted killer, declaring that the loss of a crucial piece of evidence had persuaded him that the man should not be put to death as scheduled on Wednesday.

Mr. Warner's decision, in the case of Robin Lovitt, blocked what would have been the 1,000th execution in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The case has been closely watched, because of the milestone Mr. Lovitt's execution would have marked, because the former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr worked on Mr. Lovitt's behalf and because the case was viewed as having possible political implications for Mr. Warner, a Democrat who is believed to be weighing a run for the presidency in 2008.

"I believe clemency should only be exercised in the most extraordinary circumstances," Mr. Warner said. "Among these are circumstances in which the normal and honored processes of our judicial system do not provide adequate relief - circumstances that, in fact, require executive intervention to reaffirm public confidence in our justice system."

The improper discarding of evidence - the pair of scissors that Mr. Lovitt was convicted of using to kill a pool hall manager in Arlington in 1998 - was just such a circumstance, said Mr. Warner, who had never before granted clemency in his four years in office, a period in which 11 men have been executed.

Mr. Warner said before the announcement Tuesday that he had agonized over the Lovitt case like no other. "The commonwealth must ensure that every time this ultimate sanction is carried out, it is done fairly," he said in his clemency statement. "After a thorough review, it is my decision that Robin Lovitt should spend the rest of his life in prison with no eligibility for parole."

Clemency was the last hope for Mr. Lovitt, 42, after the Supreme Court declined on Oct. 3 to hear his latest appeal despite having granted a stay of execution three months before.

The scissors were thrown out by a Virginia court clerk, after Mr. Lovitt's conviction had been affirmed by the Virginia Supreme Court but before he filed a federal court petition. Mr. Lovitt was accused of using them to pry open a cash register drawer and to stab the pool hall manager, Clayton Dicks, who caught him in the act.

The DNA testing available at the time showed the blood on the scissors to be that of the victim but was inconclusive for the DNA of anyone else. Nor were Mr. Lovitt's fingerprints on the scissors. His lawyers argued that a more modern test of the scissors could show that he was innocent, and that losing the weapon had resulted in "profound unfairness."

Mr. Starr also tried to persuade the Supreme Court that Mr. Lovitt's original lawyer had failed to present evidence of severe childhood abuse by a stepfather. "The jury cannot reliably impose the death sentence without considering the petitioner's individual life history," Mr. Starr said in a brief.

Mr. Starr had sought to overturn a ruling last April by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, which concluded that the conviction should stand, despite the discarding of the scissors.

The court noted that two witnesses testified they were almost certain Mr. Lovitt was the man they saw stabbing and kicking; that Mr. Lovitt's cousin testified that the defendant had showed up at the cousin's house in the middle of the night with a cash drawer, and that a fellow inmate testified that Mr. Lovitt had confided to killing Mr. Dicks.

Mr. Lovitt, who had previously worked at the pool hall, has said that he was in the bathroom at the time of the killing, and that he took the cash drawer only after finding Mr. Dicks already dead.

The Fourth Circuit held that Mr. Lovitt's trial lawyers had defended him competently, and under difficult circumstances: had they chosen to have Mr. Lovitt's relatives testify about his background they would have invited cross-examination about the relatives' criminal records, and, most likely, Mr. Lovitt's own convictions for assault, attempted robbery, larceny and other crimes.

Mr. Warner, who made a fortune in the telecommunications industry, has been mentioned as the kind of Democrat who could appeal to business-minded conservatives, especially in the South, if he runs for president. Commuting the death sentence of a convicted murderer could leave Mr. Warner open to being attacked as soft on crime in a general election. But in Democratic primaries in which Mr. Warner would probably be among the more conservative candidates, granting clemency to Mr. Lovitt might be viewed as a plus by the party's powerful liberal wing.

This year's Virginia governor's race may have provided evidence that the death penalty has faded as an electoral issue. The race was won handily by Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, even though his opponent hammered him as soft on crime. Analysts believe the popularity of Mr. Warner, prohibited by term limits from running again, helped negate the attacks.

Clemency Stops an Execution in Virginia, NYT, 30.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/national/30execution.html

Milestone execution stopped

Tue Nov 29, 2005 6:35 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Virginia Gov. Mark Warner on Tuesday halted the execution of a convicted murderer who would have been the 1,000th person put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Warner said he commuted Robin Lovitt's sentence to life in prison without parole because a court clerk had destroyed evidence during the appeals process in violation of state law.

Virginia "must ensure that every time this ultimate sanction is carried out it is done fairly," Warner said in a statement.

Warner, a Democrat considering a run for the U.S. presidency in 2008, had denied all 11 previous clemency petitions that came before him as governor. The death penalty has proven a divisive issue in past presidential campaigns.

"No case has been more troubling," Warner told WTOP radio earlier on Tuesday. "Rest assured there is no case I have spent more time thinking about, praying about and reflecting on than this case."

Lovitt had been scheduled to die by lethal injection in a state prison on Wednesday evening.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty almost 30 years ago, 999 people have been executed in the United States, most recently earlier on Tuesday in Ohio.

Lovitt's case has attracted worldwide attention. A Warner spokesman said the governor had received roughly 1,500 phone calls, letters and e-mails from across the United States and several foreign countries, almost all urging clemency.

Prominent conservatives have said the case could undermine public support for the death penalty. Former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who investigated then-President Bill Clinton's extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, argued Lovitt's case at an appeals-court hearing in February.

POOL HALL MURDER

Lovitt was sentenced to death in 1999 for killing a night manager in a pool hall the previous year. He claimed another man committed the murder and his lawyers argued he could have proved his innocence if a pair of bloody scissors submitted as evidence at his trial had not been illegally destroyed.

Since Lovitt will not be executed, Kenneth Boyd, scheduled to die early on Friday in North Carolina and Shawn Humphries later on the same day in South Carolina, could be the 1,000th and 1,001st executions since the end of what amounted to a decade-long moratorium on executions by the states as the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue.

One activist who had led efforts to protest the execution said he was relieved by Warner's decision.

"We knew this execution shouldn't go ahead, but we knew clemency issues are frequently dictated by politics," said Jack Payden-Travers of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

The death penalty has loomed large for Democratic presidential candidates. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was widely criticized as "soft on crime" in the 1988 election after he said during a debate that he would not support the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife.

Clinton interrupted his campaign in 1992 to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded man in Arkansas, where he served as governor.

The death penalty also was a major issue in the recent election to succeed Warner as Virginia governor. Democrat Tim Kaine won that race despite charges from Republican opponent Jerry Kilgore that he would commute executions.

Milestone execution stopped, R, 29.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-29T233510Z_01_SPI983419_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-VIRGINIA-EXECUTION.xml

Virginia governor weighs milestone execution

Tue Nov 29, 2005 12:49 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Virginia Gov. Mark Warner said on Tuesday he would announce soon whether he will stop the execution of a convicted murderer who would be the 1,000th person put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Robin Lovitt is scheduled to die by lethal injection in a state prison on Wednesday evening. Warner is a Democrat considering a run for the presidency, and facing an issue that has figured prominently in many past campaigns.

"No case has been more troubling," Warner said in an interview on radio station WTOP. "I will have something to say about this case at the appropriate time."

"Rest assured there is no case I have spent more time thinking about, praying about and reflecting on than this case," he added.

Warner declined to say when and where he would announce his decision.

On Tuesday, Ohio executed a man convicted of suffocating his 5-year-old stepdaughter. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and executions resumed in 1977, 999 people have been executed in the United States.

Lovitt would be the 1,000 defendant to die, unless Warner commutes his sentence to life in prison.

Lovitt's case has attracted worldwide attention, and his legal team includes former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who investigated then-President Bill Clinton's extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Lovitt was sentenced to death in 1999 for killing a night manager in a pool hall the previous year. He claims another man committed the murder and his lawyers argued he could have proved his innocence if DNA evidence used at his trial had not been illegally destroyed.

Warner singled out the destruction of the evidence as a significant factor.

"There is a series of issues around this case. Of particular significance is prior to the full adjudication of the case, DNA evidence was destroyed," he said.

Warner has denied each of the 11 previous clemency petitions that have come before him as governor.

The death penalty has loomed large for Democratic presidential candidates. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis was widely criticized as "soft on crime" in the 1988 election after he said during a debate that he would not support the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife.

Bill Clinton interrupted his campaign in 1992 to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded man in Arkansas, where he served as governor.

The death penalty also was a major issue in the recent election to succeed Warner in the Virginia governor's mansion. Democrat Tim Kaine won that race despite charges from Republican Jerry Kilgore that he would commute executions.

If Lovitt is not executed, Kenneth Boyd, scheduled to die Friday in North Carolina and Shawn Humphries on the same day in South Carolina, could be the 1,000th and 1,001st executions since the end of what amounted to a decade-long moratorium on executions by the states as the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue.

Virginia governor weighs milestone execution, R, 29.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-29T174849Z_01_SIB962850_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-VIRGINIA.xml

Ohio execution is 999th since '76

Tue Nov 29, 2005 12:59 PM ET
Reuters
By Jim Lekrone

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - A man who killed his mother-in-law and 5-year-old stepdaughter after a cocaine binge 20 years ago was executed by the state of Ohio on Tuesday, the 999th person put to death since United States reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

John Hicks, 49, died at 10:20 a.m. EST (1520 GMT) after an injection of lethal chemicals, officials at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville said.

Just before his execution, Hicks told those present he was sorry for the pain he caused, saying he loved both of the people he killed and wished he could bring them back.

"It began with a syringe in my arm," he said, "and today I have a needle in my arm. I have come full circle and am at peace with it."

Hicks was sentenced to a jail term for killing his mother-in-law, Maxine Armstrong, and ordered executed for killing his step-daughter, Brandy Green.

He confessed to the slayings a few days after the bodies were found in Cincinnati, saying he tried to rob Armstrong because he needed more money for drugs, and smothered the little girl as she slept because she had seen him earlier and could identify him.

Hicks asked for clemency but Gov. Bob Taft said he had offered no reason to justify it.

"There is overwhelming evidence of guilt in this case. ... (He) confessed to the authorities on two separate occasions, and he fully admits he committed these crimes," Taft said.

Hicks was the 18th person executed in Ohio since the state resumed capital punishment in 1999.

Granted a special meal of his choice the evening before his execution, he asked for two steaks, a baked potato, salad, bread, apple pie, a soft drink and potato chips.

Ohio execution is 999th since '76, R, 29.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-29T175840Z_01_SIB961108_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-EXECUTION-OHIO.xml

Top court rules against Ohio death row inmate

Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:21 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a lower court was wrong to overturn the murder conviction and death sentence for a man who set a fire that killed a 2-year-old girl in Ohio.

The justices set aside the ruling by a federal appeals court, which held that Kenneth Richey's attorneys had been constitutionally deficient at his 1987 trial and that the evidence of intent was insufficient to support a conviction.

In a six-page ruling, the justices ordered further proceedings before the appeals court in the case involving Richey, who grew up in Scotland before coming to the United States to live with his American father.

Prosecutors said Richey set fire in 1986 to the apartment of his neighbor in an attempt to kill his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, who were spending the night together in the apartment below. They escaped unharmed, but the blaze killed her 2-year-old daughter.

The Supreme Court said the Cincinnati-based appeals court in its decision in January had misinterpreted state law in ruling for Richey on the question of intent.

The justices also ruled for the state in holding that there must be further review of Richey's claims of ineffective assistance of counsel at trial.

Top court rules against Ohio death row inmate, R, 28.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-28T232055Z_01_SPI884039_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Arkansas man executed after three late stays

Mon Nov 28, 2005 11:57 PM ET
Reuters

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) - An Arkansas man convicted of murdering a teen-age girl in 1993 was executed on Monday, but only after Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court delayed the lethal injection three times to consider last-minute appeals.

After dismissing arguments by defense attorneys that Eric Nance was mentally handicapped and thus ineligible for capital punishment and that DNA analysis could prove him innocent, Thomas allowed the execution to proceed at 9:24 p.m. CST (10:24 p.m. EST/0324 GMT), almost 90 minutes after it was scheduled.

Vance declined to make a final statement before the lethal injection was administered at a state prison in Arkansas. He was pronounced dead at 9:30 p.m. CST by the Lincoln County, Arkansas, coroner.

Nance, 45, was convicted of kidnapping and capital murder and sentenced by a jury to death for the slaying of Julie Heath, 18, whose throat was slashed with a box cutter. A week after her disappearance, her body was found near Malvern, Arkansas, about 45 miles southwest of Little Rock.

Nance's death brought to 998 the number of executions in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court authorized the resumption of capital punishment.

Condemned inmates in four other states are scheduled to die this week, virtually ensuring that the number of executions carried out in the United States since 1976 will reach the one-thousand mark.

Several eleventh-hour appeals by Vance's attorneys were rejected by lower courts, and Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican, declined a petition for executive clemency hours before the sentence was to be carried out.

"It brings closure that he is gone, but it will never bring back Julie - what he's done to our family," said Belinda Crites, a cousin of Heath's, following Nance's death.

At mid-afternoon, prison authorities served Vance his requested last meal of two bacon cheeseburgers, French fries, two pints of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and two cans of Coca-Cola.

Vance was the 27th person executed in Arkansas since 1976. Thirty-seven other prisoners are on the state's Death Row, but no additional executions are scheduled.

Arkansas man executed after three late stays, R, 28.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-11-29T045703Z_01_SPI917780_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Virginia death row inmate Robin Lovitt is seen in this undated booking photo.
The United States is scheduled this week to witness its 1,000th execution
since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
Lovitt, scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, could be the 1,000th.
REUTERS/Greensville Correctional Facility/Handout

US to hold 1,000th execution this week R 28.11.2005

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID
=2005-11-28T182441Z_01_MOL865844_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-DEATH.xml

US to hold 1,000th execution this week

Mon Nov 28, 2005 1:18 PM ET
Reuters
By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is scheduled this week to witness its 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, but even as it reaches this milestone opponents said capital punishment may be falling out of favor.

Some 997 people have been put to death since the Supreme Court ended a 10-year moratorium on capital punishment that ran from 1967-1977. With five people scheduled for execution in five different states this week, it seems almost certain that the landmark of 1,000 will be passed.

"This is a time for somber and sober reflection but the United States is slowly turning away from the death penalty," said David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

"Death sentences are down 50 percent since the late 1990s to around 150 a year. Executions are down 40 percent from the high of 98 in 1999," he said.

The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that crimes committed by juveniles could not be punished by death. That resulted in 71 people being taken off death row and followed another Supreme Court decision in 2002 declaring that it was unconstitutional to execute criminals who are mentally retarded.

A Gallup poll last month showed 64 percent of Americans favored the death penalty -- the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.

"There's now considerable public skepticism about whether all those being executed are really guilty and that has cast doubt on the whole system," said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma account for more than half of the 997 executions performed since 1977. Texas alone has carried out 355.

'MEDIA BIAS'

Death penalty proponents argue that biased media coverage has eroded support but that Americans still fundamentally support capital punishment.

"Defense lawyers and appeals courts have made it so expensive and burdensome that prosecutors think twice before filing," said Steven Stewart, prosecuting attorney for Clark County, Indiana.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress are trying to pass legislation to speed up executions, complaining that the time between conviction and execution, which usually exceeds 10 years, is too long.

Stewart has tried four capital cases; twice the jury was hung during the penalty phase, once the judge set aside the sentence and one sentence was overturned during the lengthy appeals process. But Stewart remains committed to the idea of capital punishment.

"There are some defendants who have earned the ultimate punishment our society has to offer by committing murder with aggravating circumstances present," he said. "I believe that life is sacred. It cheapens the life of an innocent murder victim to say that society has no right to keep the murderer from ever killing again."

Among the individuals facing execution this week are Eric Nance in Arkansas, who was convicted of the 1993 murder of an 18-year-old woman, and John Hicks in Ohio, who was convicted of suffocating his 5-year-old stepdaughter in 1985.

If both of these are executed, the 1,000th defendant to die could be Robin Lovitt, scheduled to be executed in Virginia on Wednesday. His case has attracted worldwide attention with several prominent conservatives, including former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr who investigated then-President Bill Clinton's extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, urging Gov. Mark Warner to commute the sentence.

Lovitt was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of a night manager in a pool hall the previous year. He claims another man committed the murder and his lawyers argued he could have proved his innocence if DNA evidence used at his trial had not been illegally destroyed.

Warner, a popular Democrat, is widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2008 and his decision will be closely watched. He has denied each of the 11 previous clemency petitions that have come before him as governor.

If Lovitt is not executed, Kenneth Boyd, scheduled to die Friday in North Carolina and Shawn Humphries on the same day in South Carolina, could be the 1,000th and 1,001st executions since the end of what amounted to a voluntary, decade-long moratorium on executions by the states as the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue.

US to hold 1,000th execution this week, R, 28.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-28T181810Z_01_MOL865844_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-DEATH.xml&archived=False

USA likely will execute 1,000th inmate since '77

Posted 11/24/2005 9:09 PM
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — "Let's do it."

With those last words, convicted killer Gary Gilmore ushered in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States, an age of busy death chambers that will likely see its 1,000th execution in the coming days.

After a 10-year moratorium, Gilmore in 1977 became the first person to be executed following a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed, and next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.

Robin Lovitt, 41, will likely be the one to earn that macabre distinction next Wednesday. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.

Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled to be executed Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Ohio. Both executions appear likely to proceed.

Gilmore was executed before a Utah firing squad, after a record of petty crime, killing of a motel manager and suicide attempts in prison. His life was the basis for Norman Mailer's book The Executioner's Song and a TV miniseries.

While his case was well-known, most today could probably not name even one of the more than 3,400 prisoners — including 118 foreign nationals — on death row in the U.S. In the last 28 years, the U.S. has executed on average one person every 10 days.

The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once the question of whether it served as a deterrent to crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person.

Thomas Hill, an attorney for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay of execution, thinks the answer is obvious.

"We have a criminal system that makes mistakes. If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit," said Hill.

But advocates of the death penalty argue that its opponents are elitist liberals who are ignoring the real victims.

"Since 1999 we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed," said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty.

Race is also is a key question in the debate. Since 1976, 58% of those executed in the U.S. were white while 34% were black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But non-Latino whites make up 75% of the U.S. population, while non-Latino blacks comprise just over 12%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims.

"Increasingly violent crime is primarily for the working class folks, poor people and people of color," Paranzino said.

Opponents of capital punishment also point to the unfair role of class and race in death penalty cases. "There is tremendous arbitrariness to the death penalty. ... the race of the victims has a lot to do with who winds up getting executed," said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, a legal clinic that seeks to exonerate inmates through DNA testing.

Death sentences nationwide have dropped by 50% since the late 1990s, with executions carried out down by 40%, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Twelve states do not have the death penalty, and at least two states — Illinois and New Jersey — have formal moratoriums on capital punishment, according to the center.

An October Gallup poll showed 64% of Americans support use of the death penalty. But that is the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80% in 1994.

Still, some powerful political forces are looking to speed up the trying and executing of prisoners. Both houses of the U.S. Congress are considering bills that would lessen the ability of defendants in capital cases to appeal to federal courts.

Proponents of the legislation say such appeals add up to 15 years to the process of executing a prisoner. Detractors say the law will not allow federal courts to review most cases and will result in innocent people being put to death.

Since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row. The vast majority of those cases came during the last 15 years, since the use of DNA evidence became widespread. While there is no official proof an innocent person has been executed, opponents of the death penalty say the number of prisoners whose convictions have been reversed should fuel skepticism.

"I don't think any rational person seriously examining the evidence can have any confidence that an innocent hasn't already been executed," said Scheck.

Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped in more than half of the 163 cases vacated — 14 of which were from death row. "We've demonstrated that there are too many innocent people on death row," Scheck said.

But that argument does not impress Charles Rosenthal, district attorney for Harris County, Texas, which has sent more prisoners to the death chamber — 85 — than any other U.S. county and all but two states, Texas and Virginia, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice statistics.

"I don't know about every death penalty case in Texas, but I feel quite sure that no one that this office has had anything to do with was factually innocent," Rosenthal said.

Scheck believes Rosenthal's claim is based "more on faith than fact." He noted that the police DNA lab in Houston has been shut down since 2002 because an investigation found problems with poor training and contaminated evidence.

"What kind of confidence can you have when the jurisdiction that executes more people than any other is fraught with unreliable testing results?" Scheck said.

In at least two cases, questions are being raised about whether an innocent person was put to death. In St. Louis, Larry Griffin was convicted for the 1980 fatal shooting of a 19-year-old drug dealer, Quintin Moss. He was executed in 1995. His conviction largely rested on the testimony of a career criminal who was in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Now, a policeman whose testimony backed up the criminal's story says the man was lying, and Moss' own family thinks Griffin was innocent.

In Texas, the case of Ruben Cantu, who was executed in 1993, is receiving attention. Cantu was convicted in 1985 of killing a man and wounding another during a robbery attempt that happened the previous year, when he was 17. A decade after his execution, however, the only witness in the case and Cantu's co-defendant have both come forward to say he was innocent.

In St. Louis, City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has led a review of 1,400 cases to see if DNA evidence can prove the guilt or innocence of those convicted. With only 12 cases left to review, evidence led to the exoneration of just three men, none of whom were on death row.

"Most of the time there is testing, it confirms the guilt of the defendant," Joyce said.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner is examining Lovitt's case, and could decide whether or not to grant clemency over the weekend. It would be the only likely way Lovitt could avoid execution. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider the case.

DNA tests on the scissors used in the stabbing were inconclusive, and the scissors were later thrown away because of a lack of storage space. One of his lawyers, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, said though he supports the death penalty in principle, it should not apply to Lovitt for reasons "including above all right now the destruction of the DNA evidence."

USA likely will execute 1,000th inmate since '77, UT, 24.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-24-executions_x.htm

Death Row Inmate Captured in Louisiana

November 6, 2005
Filed at 11:49 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- A death row inmate who slipped out of a Texas jail last week wearing street clothes was captured Sunday as he talked on a pay phone in Shreveport, La., about 200 miles away, authorities said.

Charles Victor Thompson had a bicycle with him when Shreveport police, acting on a tip, approached him around 8 p.m. Sunday, Harris County Sheriff's Lt. John Martin said.

''He was standing in front of a liquor store and appeared to be intoxicated,'' Martin said.

When the officers asked his name, he said ''You know who I am,'' then he identified himself as Charles Thompson, Martin said.

Martin wouldn't discuss the tip that lead to Thompson's arrest and said authorities were still trying to determine exactly how Thompson got from Houston to Louisiana and if he had help in his escape. A $10,000 reward had been offered for information leading to his capture.

Thompson, 35, is scheduled to be in court Monday in Shreveport, and if he waives extradition, he will be returned to Texas immediately, Martin said.

Thompson was convicted in 1999 for the shooting deaths a year earlier of his ex-girlfriend, Dennise Hayslip and her new boyfriend, Darren Keith Cain. An appeals court threw out his sentence, but on Oct. 28, another jury sentenced him to death.

On Thursday, Thompson was in the Harris County Jail awaiting transfer to a state prison when he was taken to a room for a meeting with an attorney, though not his attorney of record, authorities said.

After the attorney left, Thompson was alone. Somehow, he removed his handcuffs, changed out of his bright orange prison jumpsuit into the clothes he wore during his sentencing, and got out of the prisoner's booth in the visiting room, authorities said.

Using a falsified ID badge, he got past at least four jail employees and walked out of the building.

Martin had said Friday that Thompson's escape resulted from ''multiple errors'' by jail personnel. He said the attorney who had met with Thompson was not believed to have been involved in the escape.

The escape frightened his victim's relatives, who were notified by authorities and given police protection. Prosecutors had earlier accused Thompson of trying to hire hit men to kill witnesses against him, as well as members of Hayslip's family.

Hayslip's mother, Wynona Donaghy, said Sunday night that she was extremely relieved after hearing of the arrest and finally felt safe returning to her home again.

Death Row Inmate Captured in Louisiana, NYT, 6.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Death-Row-Escape.html

Texas Death Row Inmate Escapes From Jail

November 4, 2005
Filed at 7:26 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HOUSTON (AP) -- A death row inmate escaped from a county jail after he obtained civilian clothing and a fake ID badge, authorities said.

Charles Victor Thompson, 35, of Tomball, was being held Thursday in the Harris County Jail after he was resentenced last week in the 1998 shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend.

''He had changed out of the orange jumpsuit that inmates ordinarily wear,'' Harris County sheriff's Lt. John Martin said in the online edition of the Houston Chronicle. ''He may have been taken out of the cell block and put in the attorney booth in the guise of having an attorney visit.''

Thompson had an ID card suggesting he worked for the Texas Attorney General's office.

''It was convincing enough that the deputy let him out of the facility,'' Martin said.

Thompson remained at large Friday and investigators were questioning jail employees.

Thompson was to be returned to the state prison system within 45 days, according to Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had ordered the new sentencing hearing. A new jury sentenced Thompson Oct. 28 to death.

Texas Death Row Inmate Escapes From Jail, NYT, 4.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Convicted-Killer-Escape.html

Los Angeles dispatch

Judgment day

Only Arnold Schwarzenegger can now stop the execution of a repentant prisoner who has served 24 years in jail, writes Dan Glaister

Friday October 28, 2005
Guardian Unlimited
Dan Glaister

Another week, another challenge for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - but the latest challenge, unlike his declining poll ratings and his support for imperilled ballot propositions, is more serious: this one involves death and darkness in the sunny, liberal state of California.

Should he accept this challenge the film star, who was elected a politician on the promise of making a difference, has an opportunity to deliver on his pledge; should he fail California will have taken a further step towards permanently forfeiting its place among the 12 civilised states of the union that do not have the death penalty.

For the third time since he became governor a year ago, Schwarzenegger will consider a request for clemency from a prisoner facing execution.

The last time clemency was granted to a murderer in California was by that other Hollywood Republican Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967. But this is a case like no other: it has a gangster-turned-educator, a 51-year-old man who has already served 24 years in prison; it involves a flawed trial and a questionable conviction; the man behind bars has been nominated for Nobel prizes and is the subject of a Hollywood movie; and he also recently received a commendation from President Bush.

That the case of Stanley "Tookie" Williams has come to Governor Schwarzenegger's desk is the result of one of the first acts of the US supreme court under Chief Justice John Roberts. In mid-October, the court refused to consider an appeal from Williams against his death sentence for the 1981 murder of a convenience store worker. He was also convicted of the murders of three other people.

This week, a judge set December 13 as the date for Williams' execution, at San Quentin prison. The California superior court judge, William Pounders, was perhaps trying to sound humane when explaining his decision to proceed immediately to an execution date, but he only succeeded in sounding macabre. "This case has taken over 24 years to get to this point," he noted. "That is a long delay in itself, and I would hate to add to that delay."

The timing gives Williams' lawyers until November 8 - coincidentally, the day of voting on the ballot propositions - to submit a request for clemency to Schwarzenegger.

Williams' case is an unusual one: in 1971, at the age of 17, Williams co-founded the Crips gang in Los Angeles, a fraternity that, together with its rivals the Bloods, now boasts 150,000 members in LA and outposts as far afield as South Africa.

At his trial, Williams was found guilty of the "execution-style" murder of a worker at a 7-Eleven convenience store in February 1979 and of the owners of an LA motel and their daughter two weeks later.

He has always maintained his innocence, arguing that the physical evidence found at the scene could not be connected to him and that the prosecution relied on the testimony of police informers whose credibility was questionable.

The conduct of the trial itself raised other questions: the prosecution successfully argued for the removal of African-American jurors, meaning that Williams - who is African-American - was not tried by a jury of his peers.

And in his closing arguments, the prosecutor compared Williams to a Bengal tiger in a zoo, likening the black community of South Central Los Angeles to the natural habitat of a Bengal tiger. Williams received the death sentence.

In jail, however, something happened: in a classic tale of redemption, Williams saw the error of his ways and started to work to stop others following him. "I no longer participate in the so-called gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did," he wrote in 1997. "I vow to spend the rest of my life working toward solutions."

He co-wrote a series of lauded children's books entitled Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence. He mentored and counselled young gang members and troubled youths from his prison cell. He drew up and has promoted a Protocol for Peace, a formula to help gangs reach a truce, based on the coexistence of gangs inside prisons. It has been successfully implemented in New Jersey.

His work - and his plight - started to be recognised. He was nominated (five times) for the Nobel peace prize and even for the Nobel prize for literature. A TV movie titled Redemption - based on Williams' own memoir - was made, with Jamie Foxx playing Williams.

In August this year he received a President's Call to Service award commending his work on death row, complete with a letter from President Bush praising him for demonstrating the "outstanding character of America". The White House, apparently, had no idea who he was.

And then came the supreme court decision, one of three this month that have raised the possibility of a series of executions in California in the months to come.

Earlier this year, after Governor Schwarzenegger rejected his plea for clemency, Donald Jay Beardslee was executed by the state of California. He was the first prisoner to be killed since 2002 and the 11th since California re-enacted the death penalty in 1977. "This is a big sea change for California," says Lance Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus. "It's coming to look a lot more like Texas, with regular executions."

Lindsey hopes Schwarzenegger will live up to his rhetoric. "We're encouraged," he says. "Governor Schwarzenegger was the one who said he wanted the criminal justice system to focus on rehabilitation. This is a classic case for clemency. It's what it was designed for: to recognise extra-legally that someone has turned their life around, has shown remorse, has given back."

The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up Williams' cause, as have others. And there are hopes that Governor Schwarzenegger may see a hint in the words of a judge on the ninth US circuit court of appeals who in 2002 ruled against Williams' appeal. At that time, Judge Proctor Hug said: "We are aware of Williams' laudable efforts opposing gang violence from his prison cell ... [but] they are not matters that we in the federal judiciary are at liberty to take into consideration."

For Williams' supporters, these words suggest that the governor, the only person who can take such matters into consideration, should do so. Should he choose not to, California will have killed another person.

Judgment day > Only Arnold Schwarzenegger can now stop the execution of a repentant prisoner who has served 24 years in jail, writes Dan Glaister, G, 28.10.2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1602823,00.html

Bill Would Allow Second Attempts at Federal Death Sentence

Published: October 26, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

If all 12 members of a jury in a capital case in federal court cannot agree on whether to impose the death penalty, a convicted defendant is automatically sentenced to life in prison.

But that may be about to change. A little-noticed provision in the House bill that reauthorized the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act would allow federal prosecutors further attempts at a death sentence if a capital jury deadlocks on the punishment. So long as at least one juror voted for death, prosecutors could empanel a new sentencing jury and argue again that execution was warranted.

The Senate bill does not contain the provision, and representatives of both chambers will soon meet to discuss the differences between the two measures and potential compromises.

Sentencing deadlocks in federal capital trials are not unusual. In a federal terrorism trial in New York in 2001, for instance, the government sought the death penalty against two operatives of Al Qaeda for their roles in the deadly bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. The jury deadlocked 9 to 3 in favor of death in both cases, interviews conducted by The New York Times later revealed.

Mary Jo White, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time, said the experience was frustrating. "I respectfully disagreed with that jury," she said.

But Ms. White said she opposed the provision in the House bill.

"I don't think the government should have two bites at that apple," said Ms. White, who is now in private practice at Debevoise & Plimpton. "There's something untoward about giving the impression that you're jury shopping for the death penalty."

California and a handful of other states already allow new capital sentencing hearings.

The federal government should follow suit, said Michael Rushford, the president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the rights of crime victims.

"You can have a jury of 12 and have one juror overrule the other 11 in the sentencing phase of a capital case," Mr. Rushford said. "You're not really allowing the process to go through."

Jesselyn McCurdy, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, disagreed. "If there is one person who has a doubt about whether someone should be put to death," she said, "that should be doubt enough."

The jury provision is probably constitutional, people on both sides of the death penalty debate said. "It's one of the many situations where the Supreme Court leaves us to our folly," said David I. Bruck, a lawyer with the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, a group that assists lawyers defending federal capital cases.

The provision was introduced as part of an amendment to the bill in July by Representative John Carter, Republican of Texas. Mr. Carter, a former Texas trial judge, called it a "common-sense clarification to the federal death penalty" and said it was supported by the Justice Department.

Federal prosecutors have obtained relatively few death sentences in recent cases. In the past year, according to statistics compiled by the counsel project, 5 of the 22 juries that heard federal capital cases imposed death sentences. During John Ashcroft's term as attorney general, from 2001 to 2005, 18 of the 63 juries that heard capital cases imposed death sentences.

Though the number of federal crimes eligible for the death penalty continues to rise, the federal government prosecutes relatively few capital cases. There have been three executions in the federal system since 1988, when the first modern federal death penalty law was enacted. There were almost 900 executions in the states in the same period.

Mr. Ashcroft was a proponent of the aggressive use of the federal death penalty law, sometimes overriding the recommendations of local prosecutors. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's approach in this area is less clear, legal experts said. None of the cases in which he has authorized capital charges have reached trial, they said.

State prosecutors said the federal jury provision could start a welcome trend.

"It sounds pretty even-handed," said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore. Just as juries must generally reach unanimous verdicts for conviction or acquittal, he said, they should be required to reach a unanimous decision on life or death.

Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, disagreed.

"It's not supposed to be a level playing field," he said. "It's supposed to be a penalty available when nothing else will do."

Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch in Washington, said the requirement that jurors in capital cases be open to imposing the death penalty already favored prosecutors. The possibility of repeated attempts to obtain death sentences from such "death qualified" juries, she said, would only heighten the advantages prosecutors have.

Mr. Bruck said the provision in the House bill, if it became law, could embolden prosecutors to keep trying until they found a jury willing to sentence the defendant to death.

"Flip a coin enough times," he said, "and it will land on its edge once."

Bill Would Allow Second Attempts at Federal Death Sentence, NYT, 26.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/national/26sentence.html

US court denies appeal by Calif. death row inmate

Tue Oct 11, 2005 11:04 AM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to review the case of a California death-row inmate whose attorneys argued that the prosecutor had engaged in racial discrimination in selecting the jury for his trial.

Without comment or recorded dissent, the justices denied the appeal of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the black founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles who was convicted on four counts of robbery-murder arising from two separate incidents in 1979.

An all-white jury convicted Williams in 1981 and imposed the death penalty. In one incident, Williams was convicted of killing a white convenience store clerk while in the other one he was convicted of killing three Asian-American members of a family that owned a hotel in Los Angeles.

Attorneys for Williams argued that the prosecutor deliberately removed all potential jurors who were black. But a U.S. appeals court in California has rejected his appeal, and he asked the Supreme Court to review his case in a request supported by civil rights and other groups.

While in prison, Williams has renounced his gang past and has written a series of books urging youth not to get involved with gangs. He has always maintained that he is innocent.

US court denies appeal by Calif. death row inmate, R, 11.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-10-11T150409Z_01_SCH154176_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-COURT-EXECUTION.xml

Justices Refuse to Hear Case of Condemned Virginia Man

October 4, 2005
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 - Three months ago, the Supreme Court granted a last-minute stay of execution to a Virginia inmate who argued that the state's loss of crucial evidence had deprived him of the right to prove, by DNA testing, his innocence of the murder for which he was sentenced to death in 1999.

The purpose of the stay, granted less than five hours before the scheduled execution, was to permit lawyers for the condemned man, Robin Lovitt, to file a full-scale Supreme Court appeal.

On Monday, the first day of its new term, the court rejected that appeal without comment.

The stay of execution will now automatically dissolve, leaving a grant of clemency by Virginia's governor, Mark Warner, the only way for Mr. Lovitt, 41, to avoid execution.

The court's action, in which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not participate, runs counter to the impression created by several recent death penalty rulings that the Supreme Court is becoming more receptive to arguments raised on behalf of death row inmates.

Mr. Lovitt's appeal, filed by Kenneth W. Starr, the former solicitor general and independent counsel, contained 10 references to the most recent such ruling, Rompilla v. Beard, which the court issued in June.

In that case, the justices overturned a death sentence after concluding that the defendant's lawyer, in failing to search his background for facts that might persuade a jury to spare his life, had fallen below minimum constitutional standards for legal representation.

One argument in the case on Monday, Lovitt v. True, No. 05-5044, was that Mr. Lovitt's original defense lawyer had failed to present evidence of childhood abuse at the hands of a stepfather who gave the boy alcohol and narcotics before he was 10.

"By now, there can be no question," Mr. Starr asserted in Mr. Lovitt's Supreme Court brief. "Any competent counsel must conduct a thorough investigation of the defendant's background because the jury cannot reliably impose the death sentence without considering the petitioner's individual life history."

The brief added, "But that is not the law of the land as applied in the Fourth Circuit."

In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond rejected Mr. Lovitt's petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

The other principal argument in the case concerned the destruction of evidence by a Virginia court clerk, after Mr. Lovitt's conviction had become final in state court but before he had filed a federal court petition.

The evidence was a pair of scissors that had been used in the fatal stabbing of the manager of a pool hall in Arlington, Va., during a robbery there.

The prosecution's theory was that Mr. Lovitt had used the scissors to pry open the cash register drawer and to stab the manager, Clayton Dicks, who caught him in the act. Mr. Lovitt's fingerprints were not on the scissors. DNA testing at the time showed the blood on the scissors to be that of the victim. The testing was inconclusive for the DNA of anyone else.

Mr. Lovitt's lawyers wanted a new, more modern test that they said would exclude him, and the appeal argued that discarding the scissors had resulted in "profound unfairness."

The brief said: "The commonwealth's wanton conduct has forever deprived Lovitt of a right, safeguarded under Virginia law, to test DNA evidence that had the potential to establish that he was wrongfully convicted."

Ordinarily, courts require a showing of bad faith before hearing an appeal based on loss of evidence by the officials responsible for maintaining it. There was no such showing in this case.

Just as the Supreme Court did not explain, on July 11, its reasons for granting a stay of execution, the court gave no reason on Monday for rejecting the appeal.

For the new term, the court has accepted five cases that deal with death penalty issues. One, House v. Bell, No. 04-8990, presents the question of what standard a death row inmate must meet for a federal court to hear a claim of innocence based on new DNA evidence. That case will be argued in January.

The Lovitt appeal was one of hundreds of cases the court turned down on Monday as it began the new term. Because Chief Justice Roberts had not yet been confirmed when the justices held their conference on these cases a week ago, he was listed as not having participated in any of the actions.

Justices Refuse to Hear Case of Condemned Virginia Man, NYT, 4.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/politics/politicsspecial1/04scotus.html?ex=1133499600&en=0a6493fc565a28ec&ei=5070

Indiana executes killer who was on prison furlough

Wed Sep 28, 2005 3:01 AM ET
Reuters
By Karen Murphy

MICHIGAN CITY, Indiana (Reuters) - The state of Indiana on Wednesday executed a man who bludgeoned his ex-wife to death while on temporary furlough from prison, where he was serving a sentence for nearly killing her.

Officials at the Indiana State Prison said Alan Matheney, 54, was pronounced dead at 1:27 a.m. EDT (0527 GMT) after an injection of lethal chemicals.

"I love my family and my children. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused them. I thank my friends who stood by me ... I'm sure my grandchildren will grow up happy and healthy in the care of their wonderful parents," Matheney said in a final statement read by his lawyer, Steven Schutte.

For his last meal he had chicken wings, a fried chicken dinner, large wedges of potatoes, corn on the cob, biscuits and a chocolate shake.

Given an eight-hour furlough from an Indianapolis prison in 1989, Matheney drove to the northern Indiana home of his ex-wife, Lisa Bianco, broke in, chased her down in the street and beat her with the butt of a stolen shotgun until the weapon broke into pieces.

Pieces of wood were found embedded in Bianco's skull.

The murder led then-Gov. Evan Bayh to suspend prisoner furloughs and fire two prison employees who neglected to inform Bianco that Matheney was temporarily free. Furloughs were designed to reward good behavior and aid inmates' readjustment to society.

At the time of the murder, Matheney was serving an eight-year sentence for a 1987 assault in which he raped and beat Bianco. A month after the couple's 1985 divorce, he had kidnapped their two daughters.

When he was furloughed, Matheney's mother picked him up for what was supposed to be a day together in Indianapolis, near the prison. But he commandeered the car and stole a friend's unloaded shotgun, searching in vain for ammunition.

Bianco was coming out of the shower when Matheney broke in and she was wearing underwear and a towel when he caught up with her as she reached a neighbor's door. One of their daughters witnessed her mother being beaten to death.

Bianco had been working at a shelter for battered women.

At his murder trial and in subsequent appeals, Matheney's attorneys said he was delusional, thinking Bianco was having an affair with a local prosecutor and that the two were conspiring to keep him in prison. A jury rejected Matheney's insanity defense.

He was the 41st person put to death this year in the United States, and the 985th since capital punishment was restored in 1976. It was Indiana's fifth execution this year, the most since 1938 when the state put eight people to death.

Indiana executes killer who was on prison furlough, R, 28.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-28T070144Z_01_MOL825272_RTRUKOC_0_US-EXECUTION-INDIANA.xml

Texas Gov. Rick Perry granted a rare stay of execution to a Houston woman just hours before
she was scheduled to die on December 1, 2004 by lethal injection for the 1987 murder of her husband and two children.
Frances Newton has protested her innocence since she was charged in the shooting deaths
of her husband Adrian, 23, son Alton, 7, and daughter Farrah, 21 months, in what prosecutors said was
an attempt to collect $100,000 from life insurance policies on her family.
Newton is seen in this undated prison photo. Photo by TDCJ/Reuters.
Governor Stays Texas Woman's Wednesday Execution
R Wed Dec 1 2004 06:35 PM ET.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=
L0RJGJTLY4NXKCRBAEKSFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=6971566

http://www.amarillo.com/images/031805/30293_512.jpg
photo copiée 10.9.2005

http://www.freefrances.org/
http://www.iacenter.org/francesnewtoncampaign.shtml
http://www.texasmoratorium.org/
http://www.indybay.org/archives/archive_by_id.php?id=3563&category_id=13
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511322005
http://www.amnesty.ie/user/content/view/full/4370/
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-09-09/pols_feature3.html
http://www.indybay.org/archives/archive_by_id.php?id=3563&category_id=13
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1556667,00.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/08/25/female.execution.ap/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1364104,00.html
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TX_FEMALE_EXECUTION_TXOL-?
SITE=TXODE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/ncadp/news.jsp?key=936&t=
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/crimelab/3057952
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/2929494
http://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=697
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/01/female.execution/
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/29/usdom9736.htm
http://www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenalty.cfm?ID=17057&c=192

Iva Jewel Nelms and Bee Henry Nelms Jr., Frances Newton's parents,
wipe away tears after witnessing the death of their daughter in Huntsville.
Newton was convicted of killing her husband and children.
AP
Newton is executed for slaying her family :
She is the first black woman put to death in Texas since Civil War
HC, Sept. 15, 2005, 6:04 AM, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/front/3354665

Newton is executed for slaying her family

She is the first black woman put to death in Texas since Civil War

Sept. 15, 2005, 6:04 AM
The Houston Chronicle
By ALLAN TURNER and CYNTHIA LEONOR GARZA

HUNTSVILLE - Frances Newton, convicted of killing her husband and two children to gain $100,000 in insurance benefits, was executed Wednesday as dozens of death house protesters fervently prayed for her deliverance and chanted their opposition to the state's death penalty.

After weeks of intense legal wrangling, Newton's execution went ahead after the U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Rick Perry refused to intervene. She was the 349th killer put to death in Texas since executions were resumed in 1982, and the first black woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.

Sentenced to die for the 1987 murders of her husband, Adrian, 23, and the couple's children, Alton, 7, and Farrah, 21 months, Newton offered no final statement. Seemingly nervous, she stared blankly at the ceiling, then turned toward the witness rooms to mouth inaudible words.

In the witness room reserved for her relatives, Newton's sister, Pamela Nelms, cradled her head in her arms, which she had thrust against a rear wall. In the room occupied by her husband's family, a cousin, Tamika Craft-Demming, began to weep when it became apparent the drugs had been administered.

"It's OK. It's over with now," another relative whispered, placing an arm around her shoulder. "Eighteen years. It's over with now."

As Craft-Demming's weeping grew into sobs, the relative whispered, "Pray, pray, pray. Just pray."

"Jesus," Craft-Demming began before her voice dissolved into weeping. "Those poor babies."

Protesters call it murder

Later at a news conference, Craft-Demming said, "I had a rough go in that room, but not one tear was for Frances. They were for the kids."

Craft-Demming described Newton as a "mean and evil-spirited person. ... None of these things have been talked about."

Craft-Demming said that without a confession, Newton's death did not constitute justice. A confession, she said, "would have put to rest the lies told about our family."

Outside, protesters, most of whom arrived an hour before the execution, chanted "Frances! Frances! Frances!" for several minutes as the execution was set to begin. They said she was "murdered" or "lynched" because she was poor and black.

Protesters repeatedly chanted, "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!" Some sang Amazing Grace .

Newton's supporters said that the grass-roots focus on helping the Hurricane Katrina victims hindered the Free Frances movement and contributed to the low turnout for protesters. About 75 protesters appeared — a fraction of the hundreds who turned out at Karla Faye Tucker's execution in 1998.

Tucker, a pickax killer, was the first woman executed in Texas since executions were reinstated.

"I pray that God will forgive us for not being organized to help our sister Frances," said Houston activist Quanell X.

As the execution took place, protesters hoisted an effigy of Newton — a stuffed orange jumpsuit with a painted face — from a rope.

Always claimed innocence

Newton, 40, consistently proclaimed her innocence, contending her family was killed by drug dealers to whom her husband owed money. Adrian Newton, she has said, used and sold drugs, and often was in fear of his suppliers.

For death penalty opponents, Newton's case seemed to embody everything they found wrong with capital punishment. In her initial trial, she was represented by an attorney who acknowledged he had done little to research the case and later was suspended by the State Bar of Texas.

When Newton received a stay to, in part, retest incriminating stains on the dress she wore the night of the killings, defense attorneys were stunned to learn earlier testing had destroyed the evidence.

Although defense attorneys crafted appeals based on claims that two, possibly three, pistols were seized as evidence — calling into question assertions that a gun Newton admitted hiding had been the murder weapon — their efforts got nowhere.

Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson repeatedly insisted that only one pistol had been recovered, and recanted as a slip of the tongue a videotaped statement in which she had confirmed a second gun's existence.

Newton's supporters warned that executing a possibly innocent woman risked drawing the wrath of God.

Even the parents of Newton's dead husband, Tom and Virginia Louis, were marshaled to plead with the pardons board.

"All my prayers and hopes are that she won't get executed," Virginia Louis said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

But in the end, efforts in and out of court accomplished little.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that defense attorney Ron Mock had provided adequate representation and that the defense's multiple-gun theory was just a previously weighed and rejected argument in new clothes.

Her final hours

In the past week, petitions on Newton's behalf were rejected by the appeals court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

On Tuesday, Newton was escorted from the women's death row at Gatesville to the Goree Unit in Huntsville. By early afternoon, she was at the Walls Unit, home of the state's death house. Perry rejected Newton's petition for a 30-day stay at 5:50 p.m. The poisons were administered at 6:09 p.m.

Newton was declared dead eight minutes later.

Newton is executed for slaying her family : She is the first black woman put to death in Texas since Civil War, HC, Sept. 15, 2005, 6:04 AM, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/front/3354665 allan.turner@chron.com cynthia.garza@chron.com

Frances Newton in an undated photo with her husband, Adrian, and her son, Alton. Family photo.

Newton is executed for slaying her family : She is the first black woman put to death in Texas since Civil War
HC, Sept. 15, 2005, 6:04 AM, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/front/3354665

Texas executes black woman for murdering family

Wed Sep 14, 2005 8:41 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Babineck

HOUSTON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - A woman convicted of killing her family became the first black female on Wednesday to be executed in Texas since before the U.S. Civil War after last-minute legal and political pleas to save her failed.

Frances Newton, 40, died by lethal injection for the April 1987 shooting deaths of her husband and two children. Prosecutors said the motive was $100,000 in life insurance but Newton blamed the killings on an unknown drug dealer.

The main evidence against Newton was repeated ballistics testing of a pistol she hid under a house that showed the gun was used to kill her family. Gunpowder residue was also found on her skirt.

Newton's lawyers disputed the gunpowder tests, saying the residue also could have come from common garden fertilizer. They also claimed police found another weapon in the abandoned house, clouding whether the one she hid was the murder weapon.

Prosecutors say there was only one gun.

The lawyers also blamed her former court-appointed attorney, saying he conducted no investigation, had little contact with her and had not subpoenaed any witnesses for the defense by the time her trial began.

Newton was the 13th person executed in Texas this year. She declined to make a final statement or a last meal request. The state has nine more executions scheduled so far for 2005, including six in November.

NO MORE REPRIEVES

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, granted Newton a rare reprieve two hours before her last execution date in December so more investigation could be conducted, but the evidence was determined to be sound and the courts declined to intervene.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied two late appeals on Wednesday, clearing the way for the lethal injection.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Amnesty International and several local black leaders appealed for the Houston woman to be spared. The execution drew a larger-than-usual gathering of protesters outside the death house in Huntsville, Texas.

Newton is the fifth woman known to have been executed in Texas. A black slave named Lucy is thought to have been the first in 1858. Two female murderers, both white, have been put to death since Texas resumed executions in 1982 after a brief national ban on capital punishment imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"For a long time I believed in the death penalty. But now I know that the system can't be trusted to be right. I've been wrongly accused, wrongly convicted," Newton told the Houston Chronicle in an interview.

Texas executes black woman for murdering family, R, 14.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=18788+15-Sep-2005+RTRS&srch=frances+newton

Newton executed for 1987 slayings

Sept. 14, 2005, 8:46PM
Associated Press
Associated Press file

Frances Newton has been on death row since she was convicted of killing her husband and two children in 1987.
HUNTSVILLE — Frances Newton was executed today for the fatal shootings of her husband and two children 18 years ago, becoming the third woman, and first black woman, to be put to death in the state since executions resumed in 1982.

Strapped to the death chamber gurney and with her parents among the people watching, she declined to make a final statement, quietly saying "no" and shaking her head when the warden asked if she would like to speak.

Newton, 40, briefly turned her head to make eye contact with her family as the drugs began flowing. She appeared to attempt to mouth something to her relatives, but the drugs took effect. She coughed once and gasped as her eyes closed and her mouth remained slightly open. Eight minutes later at 6:17 p.m. CDT, she was pronounced dead.

One of her sisters stood flat against a wall at the rear of the death house, her arms raised against the wall and her head buried in her arms, refusing to watch. Her parents held hands and her mother brushed away a tear before they walked to the back of the chamber to console their other daughter.

About 50 demonstrators chanted outside but the crowd paled in comparison to the group of hundreds that assembled in 1998 to protest the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who was the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.

"She's back with her family, in her mind," said John LaGrappe, one of her attorneys, who met with Newton less than two hours before she was executed and described her as "strong and optimistic."

"It's her faith in God," LaGrappe said.

He characterized her as the victim of a set of statutes that denied her access to the Supreme Court and blamed state-appointed lawyers early in her appeals process for missing deadlines that barred Newton from raising legal claims.

"It's a sad statement about the judicial process," he said. "To me, this is outrageous."

Two cousins of Newton's slain husband, who also watched the execution, complained that too much attention had been focused on Newton, and not enough on the three murder victims.

"I wanted her to apologize, just to confess," Tamika Craft-Demming said. "I don't know if you can get any satisfaction.

"Justice is not to me served. If we saw some kind of apology, that would have been justice."

Craft-Demming, who sobbed loudly in the death chamber, described Newton as a "mean and kind of evil-spirited person. I knew she was vindictive. None of these things have been talked about.

"I did have a rough go in that room," she said of her experience in the death chamber, where she broke down in tears. "I'd like to say not one tear was for Frances. They were for the kids."

Without dissent, the high court declined a pair of appeals about an hour before Newton was scheduled to be taken to the Texas death chamber.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which last year paved the way for Gov. Rick Perry to issue a reprieve about two hours before Newton was set to die, on Monday unanimously rejected a request that her death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Perry rejected another delay in the execution Wednesday afternoon.

She also lost appeals in state and lower federal courts. Her execution was the 13th this year in Texas. She was the 11th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the death penalty to resume.

Newton didn't deny putting a gun in her 7-year-old son's knapsack and stashing the bag at an abandoned house. But she and her lawyers argued the .25-caliber blue steel revolver she hid was not the one used to fatally shoot her son, Alton; her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah; and her husband, Adrian, 23, at their Houston apartment.

Newton insisted she was innocent, and the claim about the gun was among several in her appeal to the Supreme Court. She also contended her trial attorneys were incompetent and evidence at her trial improperly was destroyed.

"I know I did not murder my kids and my family," she told The Associated Press in a death row interview. "It's frustrating ... nobody's had to answer for that."

Prosecutors called Newton's appeals meritless, noting that a second gun never was recovered, that repeated ballistics tests confirmed the gun she hid was the murder weapon, and that any destruction of evidence was not improper.

"The unbroken chain of custody directly links Newton to the murder weapon," the Texas Attorney General's Office said in its filing to the Supreme Court.

Newton, accompanied by a cousin, found the bodies April 7, 1987. Her husband had been shot in the head, the two children in the chest, all with a .25-caliber pistol.

Three weeks before the slayings, Newton took out $50,000 life insurance policies on herself, her husband and her daughter. She named herself as beneficiary and said she signed her husband's name to prevent him from discovering she had set aside money to pay for the premiums.

Prosecutors said the insurance payoff was the motive for the slayings.

The reprieve last year was granted to allow for additional ballistics testing on the weapon. In March, the new ballistics tests confirmed earlier findings and Harris County officials then rescheduled her execution.

Newton believed the real killer is or may be related to a drug dealer she knew only as "Charlie," who she said was upset with her husband for not repaying a $500 debt.

Newton executed for 1987 slayings, HC > AP, Sept. 14, 2005, 8:46PM, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory2/3354357

Texas executes woman for killing family

Wednesday, September 14, 2005; Posted: 8:17 p.m. EDT (00:17 GMT)

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- Frances Newton was executed Wednesday for the fatal shootings of her husband and two children 18 years ago, becoming the third woman, and first black woman, to be put to death in Texas since executions resumed in 1982.

Strapped to the death chamber gurney and with her parents among the people watching, she declined to make a final statement, quietly saying "no" and shaking her head when the warden asked if she would like to speak.

Newton, 40, briefly turned her head to look at her family as the drugs began flowing. She appeared to try to mouth something to her relatives, but the drugs took effect and prevented her. She coughed once and gasped as her eyes closed. She was pronounced dead eight minutes later.

One of her sisters stood against a wall at the rear of the death house, her head buried in her arms. Her parents held hands and her mother brushed away a tear before they walked to the back of the chamber to console their other daughter.

About three dozen demonstrators chanted outside, but the crowd paled in comparison to the hundreds who gathered in 1998 to protest the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution earlier Wednesday. Without dissent, the high court declined a pair of appeals about an hour before Newton was scheduled to be taken to the Texas death chamber.

Newton was convicted of shooting to death her husband and their two children some 18 years ago. She was moved late Tuesday from death row at a prison in Gatesville to a prison south of Huntsville, where she spent the morning with relatives.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons described Newton as calm but emotional as officials moved her to the Huntsville Unit, where the punishment was carried out.

"She's doing pretty bad," said one of her lawyers, David Dow. "I think she was really expecting to win in the clemency board."

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which last year paved the way for Gov. Rick Perry to issue a reprieve about two hours before Newton was set to die, on Monday unanimously rejected a request that her death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Perry rejected another delay in the execution Wednesday afternoon.

She also lost appeals in state and federal courts. Her execution was the 13th this year in Texas, and she was the 11th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the death penalty to resume.

Newton didn't deny putting a gun in her 7-year-old son's knapsack and stashing the bag at an abandoned house. But she and her lawyers argued the .25-caliber blue steel revolver she hid was not the one used to fatally shoot her son, Alton; her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah; and her husband, Adrian, 23, at their Houston apartment.

Newton all along insisted she was innocent, and the claim about the gun was among several in her appeal to the Supreme Court. She also contended her trial attorneys were incompetent and evidence at her trial was improperly destroyed.

"I know I did not murder my kids and my family," she told The Associated Press in a death row interview. "It's frustrating. ... Nobody's had to answer for that."

Prosecutors called Newton's appeals meritless, noting that a second gun never was recovered, that repeated ballistics tests confirmed the gun she hid was the murder weapon, and that any destruction of evidence was not improper.

"The unbroken chain of custody directly links Newton to the murder weapon," the Texas Attorney General's Office said in its filing to the Supreme Court.

Three weeks before the slayings, Newton took out $50,000 life insurance policies on herself, her husband and her daughter. She named herself as beneficiary and said she signed her husband's name to prevent him from discovering she had set aside money to pay for the premiums.

Prosecutors said the insurance payoff was the motive for the slayings.

Texas executes woman for killing family, CNN > The Associated Press, Wednesday, September 14, 2005; Posted: 8:17 p.m. EDT (00:17 GMT), http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/14/texas.execution.ap/index.html

Without Evidence: Executing Frances Newton

Another Texas death row case marked by official carelessness, negligence, and intransigence

BY JORDAN SMITH
Austin Chronicle
9.9.2005

Unless the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Rick Perry act to stop it, on Sept. 14 Frances Newton will become only the third woman executed by the state of Texas since 1982, and the first black woman executed since the Civil War.

Unique in that historical sense, in other ways the Frances Newton case is painfully unexceptional. For there is no incontrovertible evidence against Newton, and the paltry evidence that does exist has been completely compromised. Moreover, her story is one more in a long line of Texas death row cases in which the prosecutions were sloppy or dishonest, the defenses incompetent or negligent, and the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial was honored only in name.

As Harris Co. prosecutors tell the story, the now 40-year-old Newton is a cold-blooded killer who murdered her husband and two young children inside the family's apartment outside Houston on April 7, 1987, by shooting each of them, execution-style, in order to collect life insurance. Newton had the opportunity, they argued during her 1988 trial, and a motive – a troubled relationship with her husband, Adrian, and the promise of $100,000 in insurance money from policies she'd recently taken out on his life and on the life of their 21-month-old daughter Farrah. And she had the means, they say: a .25-caliber Raven Arms pistol she had allegedly stolen from a boyfriend's house.

To the state, it is a simple, open-and-shut case, which requires no further review. "Her case has been reviewed by every possible court," Harris Co. Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson told the Los Angeles Times in November. "She killed her two children and her husband. There is very, very strong evidence of that."

Yet despite Wilson's insistence, Newton's case isn't simple at all – and such "evidence" as there is, is far from strong. "The State's theory is simple, and it is superficially compelling," attorney David Dow, head of the Texas Innocence Network at the University of Houston Law Center, argued in Newton's clemency petition, currently pending before the Board of Pardons and Paroles. "As we will see, however, appearances can be misleading."

From the beginning, Frances Newton has maintained her innocence. She has also offered a plausible alternative theory of the crime – a theory that neither police, prosecutors, nor Newton's own trial attorney, the infamous and now suspended Ronald Mock, have ever investigated. Newton and her defenders contend that Adrian, Farrah, and 7-year-old Alton were likely murdered by someone connected to a drug dealer to whom Adrian owed $1,500. The alternative theory has much to say for it – among other things, it explains the lack of physical evidence connecting Newton to the bloody murders.

Lingering questions about the physical evidence against Newton prompted the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend, and Gov. Rick Perry to grant, a 120-day reprieve for Newton on Dec. 1, 2004 – the day she was last scheduled for execution. Although Perry said he saw no "evidence of innocence" – legally, an oxymoron – he granted the four-month stay to allow for retesting of evidence contested by Newton's defense, including nitrite residue on the hem of her skirt and gun ballistics evidence.

But testing on the skirt proved impossible, because the 1987 tests had destroyed the nitrite particles, and Harris Co. court officials had stored the skirt by sealing it inside a bag together with items of the victims' bloody clothing – thereby rendering it worthless as evidence. The second round of ballistics testing, on the other hand, supposedly confirmed a match between the gun prosecutors say Newton used and the bullets that killed her family. However, that match may be fundamentally undermined – because there is no certain connection between the gun and Newton. According to Dow, it appears that police actually recovered at least two, and perhaps three, .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols during their investigation of the murders – conflicting evidence that neither the police nor the prosecutors ever revealed to Newton's defense. Dow argues that it is virtually impossible to know whether prosecutors have been truthful in claiming that the gun that Newton admits to hiding on April 7, 1987, was the murder weapon. "How many firearms were recovered and investigated in this case and who owned them?" Dow asks in a supplemental petition filed with the BPP on Aug. 25. "How many records have been withheld from Newton's attorneys throughout this case?"

In short, there is now even more doubt about Newton's guilt than there was when she was granted the stay – distressing Newton's many defenders, among them Adrian's parents, two former prison officials, and at least one of the jurors who heard Newton's case. "We never wanted to see Frances get executed," Adrian's parents Tom and Virginia Louis wrote to the BPP on Aug. 25. "When the trial occurred, nobody from the [DA's] Office ever asked ... our opinion. We were willing to testify on Frances' behalf, but Frances' defense lawyer never approached us," they continued. "We do not wish to suffer the loss of another family member."

A Bloody Crime

In the months before the murders, Frances and Adrian Newton were having marital problems. They were each involved in extramarital relationships, and Adrian was using drugs. In an Aug. 30 Gatesville prison interview, Newton told me that in addition to smoking marijuana, Adrian had developed a cocaine habit. "He had told me he was using cocaine, but I'd never seen that, but I saw the effects of it," she recalled. "He was home later, he was irritable, less responsible."

But she and Adrian had been together since she was a girl, and she was determined to work things out. That was on her mind on the afternoon of April 7, 1987, when she and Adrian sat down and talked. "We had decided that we were going to get through this together," she said. Adrian insisted that he wasn't using anymore, so when they were done talking and Adrian went into the living room "to watch TV ... I decided to be nosy and see if he was being honest," she recalled. Quietly, she opened the cabinet where he kept his stash.

"That's when I found the gun," she said. Newton said she immediately recalled a conversation she'd heard earlier that day, between Adrian and his brother, Sterling, who'd been staying with the family. "I couldn't hear real close, but it sounded like they'd been in some trouble," she said. "I thought I'd better take [the gun] out of there because I didn't want it to be in the house ... I didn't want him to get into any trouble." She removed the gun, placed it in a duffel bag and took it with her when she left the apartment around 6pm to run some errands, she says.

Newton says it was the last time she saw her family alive.

At 7pm, after a couple of errands, Newton arrived at her cousin Sondra Nelms' house, where the two chatted and decided to return to Newton's apartment. As Newton backed out of the drive, she saw the duffel on the back seat and realized she needed to hide it. With Nelms watching, Newton retrieved the bag and walked next door into a burned and abandoned house owned by her parents, and there (as both women later confirmed), she left the bag.

The women arrived at the apartment around 8pm, and didn't immediately realize that anything was wrong. Newton thought Adrian was napping – until she saw the blood. "As Frances walked around the couch and saw his upper torso, she immediately screamed and bolted to the children's bedroom," Nelms said in an affidavit. "Frances began to frantically scream uncontrollably. I could not calm her down enough to elicit the apartment's address."

Newton says she was shocked and dazed, but gave police as much information as possible – including the fact that she'd just removed a gun from the house. She told police about Adrian's drug habit, and that he owed some money to a dealer – which Adrian's brother, Terrence, corroborated, telling police he knew where the dealer lived. Police never pursued the lead. "To your knowledge, was the alleged drug dealer ever interviewed by anyone in connection with this case?" Newton's attorney asked Sheriff's Officer Frank Pratt at trial. "No," Pratt replied.

A bullet remained lodged in Adrian's head, meaning that the blood and brain matter would have blown back onto the gun and shooter – confirmed by a trail of blood found in the hallway. Police found no trace of residual nitrites (gunshot residue) on Newton's hands, nor on the long sleeves of the sweater she was wearing. They collected the clothing she'd worn that day. There was no blood, nor any trace of blood, on any of the items.

Which Gun?

The next day, April 8, according to trial records, police supposedly confirmed that the gun they had retrieved from Newton's duffel bag in the abandoned building – at her direction – matched the murder bullets. Yet Newton was not arrested until more than two weeks later. Newton says that Harris Co. Sheriff's Sgt. J.J. Freeze told her that police had actually recovered two guns; in a sworn affidavit, Newton's father Bee Henry Nelms says Freeze told him the same thing and added that Newton would "eventually be released." Nonetheless, Newton was arrested two weeks later – after she filed a claim on Adrian and Farrah's life insurance policies – and charged with the capital murder of her 21-month-old daughter.

The state's primary evidence against her was elementary: Newton had filed for insurance benefits, and the Department of Public Safety forensic technicians had detected nitrite traces near the hem of Newton's long skirt – although they couldn't say with certainty that the nitrites were not her father's garden fertilizer transferred earlier that day from the hands of her toddler daughter. For physical evidence, the state relied primarily on the supposed ballistics match to the gun Newton had hidden.

Yet in court Freeze was somewhat vague: "I believe we talked about two pistols," he testified. "I know of one for sure, and there was mention of a second one that Ms. Newton had purchased earlier."

There are serious questions about the prosecutors' timeline, which would have required Newton somehow to murder her family, clean herself of any and all blood traces and gunshot residue, and drive to her cousin's house – all in less than 30 minutes. And since her 1988 conviction, the question of a second gun has haunted Newton's case. The ballistics evidence was increasingly suspect in any case because of the recent history of the Houston PD crime lab, which has been repeatedly charged with incompetent, shoddy work, resulting in a number of exonerations and the wholesale discrediting of the lab, which remains under investigation. The lab's clouded reputation was one factor that prompted Gov. Perry to accept the BPP's recommendation to grant Newton a reprieve last winter.

Although subsequent testing supposedly confirmed the ballistics match, the search for the second gun continued. And in June, Dow argued in Newton's clemency petition, the truth finally began to leak out, and from the most unlikely place: the Harris Co. District Attorney's Office. During a brief videotaped interview with a Dutch reporter, Assistant DA Roe Wilson inadvertently confirmed the existence of a second gun. "Police recovered a gun from the apartment that belonged to the husband," Wilson acknowledged. "[It] had not been fired, it had not been involved in the offense, " she continued. "It was simply a gun [Adrian] had there; so there is no second-gun theory."

Wilson and her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal, quickly retracted her admission. Wilson told the Houston Chronicle that she'd simply "misspoken," and Rosenthal accused Dow of fabricating the idea of a second gun "out of whole cloth." "I'm very clear," Rosenthal told The New York Times. "One gun was recovered in the case." On Aug. 24, the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, dismissing Newton's most recent appeal. "The evidence in this case was more than sufficient to establish [Newton's] guilt," Judge Cathy Cochran wrote. "The various details that [Newton] suggests her trial counsel should have investigated in greater detail do not detract ... from the single crucial piece of evidence that concerns her: she disposed of the murder weapon immediately after the killing."

Dow and his University of Houston law students persisted, and late last month may have succeeded. In August, Harris Co. investigators provided testimony that police may have recovered at least two identical .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols. In separate affidavits, two police investigators recall tracing firearms recovered in connection with the murders. Officer Frank Pratt told one of Dow's students that he was assigned a gun found in the abandoned house, which he traced to a purchase by Newton's boyfriend's cousin at a local Montgomery Ward. He also discovered, he told student Frances Zeon, that the purchaser had also bought a "second, identical gun"; but he didn't follow up on the second gun, because "he felt there was no need to do so." Pratt said he'd written up a report on the gun – a report Newton's attorneys have never seen.

However, Newton's attorneys do have a police report written by Detective M. Parinello, who reported he had traced yet another firearm recovered in connection with the case to a purchase from Rebel Distributors in Humble, Texas, which he said also ended up with Newton's boyfriend. "The question arises: what recovered firearm was ... Pratt investigating?" asks the clemency petition. "Counsel does not have access to the Harris Co. Sheriff's Department's records in this case. A request made directly to that institution for all records in connection to its investigation of this offense was rejected."

From all this conflicting yet incomplete gun evidence, it seems reasonable to surmise that there is no way to know which gun was in fact the murder weapon, or which gun was delivered for ballistics tests in 1987 or this year. Since the prosecution relied so heavily on a weapon that Newton herself had delivered to them, the new evidence discovered by her attorneys completely undermines her conviction.

At press time, Harris Co. Sheriff's Office spokesman Lt. John Martin was not able to reach Parinello or Pratt for comment but said that a captain who worked the Newton case had said there was only one gun recovered during the investigation. Harris Co. DA Chuck Rosenthal reiterated that, "as far as I know" there was only one gun recovered in the case. However, he said that even if investigators had recovered multiple firearms, and even if each were the same brand and caliber, the fact remains that the weapon investigators recovered from the abandoned house, which was immediately "tagged" and "tested," matched the bullets recovered from the victims. "Let's say, for conjecture's sake, that you ran down 50 or 100 guns, all associated with the case," he said. "The fact [is] that only one fired the bullets and that we know where that gun came from."

Criminal Defense

As in many Texas capital cases, a large part of the problem with Newton's appeals is that her court-appointed trial attorney, Ron Mock, never actually investigated her case. If he had, perhaps he would've followed up the drug dealer lead or Freeze's reported comments about a second gun. Newton and her parents implored the trial judge to allow her to change attorneys, and Mock admitted to the judge that he hadn't talked to any prosecution witnesses, nor had he subpoenaed any defense witness. The judge granted the motion to remove Mock but he declined a continuance, leaving Newton little choice but to go to trial with Mock. "It was stunning," she told me. "[Mock gets on the stand and] says, 'I don't know anything,' and for the judge to just dismiss it ... it was stunning." (Mock has since been brought before the State Bar's disciplinary board at least five times on various charges of professional misconduct, for which he has been fined and sometimes suspended; he is currently suspended from practicing law until late 2007.)

The Harris Co. prosecutors' defense of the conviction has also worn thin, especially given Roe Wilson's supposed "misstatement" about the second gun. To Newton's mother, Jewel Nelms, Wilson's admission is no mistake. "I've known all the time that there was a second gun," she told Houston's KPFT radio last month. "So I want to say again, to Roe Wilson, I thank you ... very much for letting us know, indeed, that there's somebody down there that knows about the second gun and was willing to talk about it – even though I know it wasn't her intention to do it."

Newton's clemency petition is still pending before the Board of Pardons and Paroles. On Monday, Sept. 6, her attorneys filed a petition with the state district court in Houston and the Court of Criminal Appeals, claiming that the state's failure to disclose evidence of a second gun violated her right to due process. At press time, Gov. Perry's office had received more than 4,000 letters, faxes, e-mails, and postcards regarding Newton's impending execution – most imploring Perry to commute her death sentence to life in prison. Letters about Newton's bid should be addressed to: The Honorable Rick Perry, Office of the Governor, PO Box 12428, Austin, 78711-2428; and to Chairwoman Rissie Owens, Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Executive Clemency Unit, PO Box 13401, Austin, 78711.

Without Evidence: Executing Frances Newton, AC, 9.9.2005, http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-09-09/pols_feature3.html

Fight to stop Texas woman's execution

Friday August 26, 2005
The Guardian
Richard Luscombe in Miami

Texas is preparing to execute the first black woman in the state since the American civil war - drawing protests from her supporters and opponents of the US death penalty.

Frances Newton, 40, was convicted of murdering her husband and two children in 1987 for a $100,000 (£55,000) insurance payout. Her campaigners say she is innocent, but supporters of capital punishment point out that she has lost several appeals.

If she is given a lethal injection next month as planned, she will be the first African-American woman to be executed in Texas since the civil war ended in 1865, and only the second in the country since capital punishment resumed in 1977.

"What this will do is make it easier to execute more innocent women," said Gloria Rubac, a Houston-based activist for the abolition of the death penalty. "If they murder her, they will be able to murder anybody who is innocent."

Newton's case has put the spotlight back on the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, and the state's record on capital punishment. Of the 979 executions in the US over the past 28 years, 347 have been in Texas. Of these, 152 took place during George Bush's 1995-2000 state governorship.

"We're cautiously optimistic of a reprieve because of the strength of the new evidence, but we live in Texas and we know what goes on here," said Ms Rubac.

Newton is one of five black people among nine women on death row at the Mountain View women's jail in Gatesville. She was convicted of shooting her estranged husband, Adrian, 23, son, Alton, seven, and 21-month-old daughter, Farrah, a month after taking out insurance policies on their lives.

Her lawyer, David Dow, of the University of Houston's Law Centre Innocence Network, said the state had covered up the existence of a second gun found at the family's apartment, and that no jury would have convicted Newton if she had had a competent lawyer at her trial. Newton's original court-appointed attorney, Ronald Mock, admitted he had not read key papers or interviewed witnesses. The state bar of Texas recently suspended him for 35 months for unrelated disciplinary reasons.

"It's rare, if not unheard of, for a woman to be executed for killing her children," said Professor Dow. "This case is unusual for several reasons, but the evidence that points away from her is more compelling than that which points to her."

Newton's fate rests with the Texas appeal court, which is reviewing a writ of habeas corpus submitted by Prof Dow. Any response might not come until the planned execution date of September 14.

Hundreds of supporters, meanwhile, are planning a march to the Texas governor's mansion in Austin tomorrow. Ms Rubac said: "We're getting up to 100 emails a day. The response shows that people don't want to see an innocent person killed even if they believe in the death penalty."

Fight to stop Texas woman's execution, G, 26.8.2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1556667,00.html

Death row inmates' moms join lab protest

Both contend mistakes resulted in convictions

Feb. 25, 2005, 11:17PM
The Houston Chronicle
By ANNE MARIE KILDAY

The mothers of two death row inmates were among about a dozen protesters Friday afternoon, in a small but noisy demonstration against the Houston Police Department's crime lab.

Several protesters carried signs reading, "Jail the HPD Crime Lab" as they walked a picket line in front of HPD's headquarters at 1200 Travis.

The lab has been at the center of controversy since 2002, when officials shuttered the DNA section after an audit that revealed widespread problems and prompted the retesting of evidence from nearly 400 cases.

The retesting has raised questions in dozens of convictions and resulted in the freeing of one man. A second man was released from prison after flaws were found in serology work by the lab. That case is on appeal.

Questions also have been raised about the quality of ballistic work in some HPD cases.

Jewel Nelms, the mother of Frances Newton, and Lee Bolton, the mother of Nanon Williams, contended crime lab mistakes resulted in their children's murder convictions.

Newton's scheduled execution was delayed in early December by Gov. Rick Perry, who issued a 120-day reprieve to allow her lawyer to retest critical evidence. Newton was convicted in the 1987 slayings of her husband and their two children.

Bolton said her son, Nanon Williams, 30, has been in prison since he was 17. His 1992 murder conviction, which was based on ballistics evidence, is on appeal in the federal courts.

The two mothers were joined by representatives of the National Black United Front, the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement and the Harris County Green Party.

Death row inmates' moms join lab protest, HC, 25.2.2005, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/crimelab/3057952 , anne.kilday@chron.com

A black woman executed in 1945 for the murder of a white man
she claimed held her as a slave and threatened to kill her if she left will receive a pardon, officials in Georgia said on Tuesday.
Georgia's Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to grant the rare posthumous pardon to Lena Baker,
who worked as a maid for Ernest Knight, after reviewing her case, which has been described by some historians as a legal lynching.
She was the only woman to die in the southern state's electric chair.
REUTERS/Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles

U.S. state pardoning black woman executed in 1945

Tue Aug 16, 2005 11:13 AM ET
Reuters

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A black woman executed in 1945 for the murder of a white man she claimed held her as a slave and threatened to kill her if she left will receive a pardon, officials in Georgia said on Tuesday.

Georgia's Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to grant the rare posthumous pardon to Lena Baker, who worked as a maid for Ernest Knight, after reviewing her case, which has been described by some historians as a legal lynching.

She was the only woman to die in the southern state's electric chair.

"This was a case that cried out for mercy," said Garland Hunt, a board member. Hunt said Baker should have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and that the state made a "grievous error" when it did not commute her sentence.

An all-white jury sentenced Baker for killing Knight in 1944 in rural southwest Georgia, despite hearing testimony from Baker that the 67-year-old had held her against her will and tried to rape her.

Baker, 44, claimed she grabbed Knight's gun and shot him in the head as she resisted his advances. Neighbors, however, had told authorities that the two often drank together and had a consensual sexual relationship.

Baker was put to death in Georgia's electric chair on March 5, 1945, after the then-segregated state's pardons board refused to grant clemency.

The state plans to make her pardon official in a proclamation at a ceremony on August 30 in Atlanta. Some of Baker's descendants, who had requested the pardon, will attend, Hunt said.

U.S. state pardoning black woman executed in 1945, R, Tue Aug 16, 2005 11:13 AM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-08-16T151254Z_01_SCH654751_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-RIGHTS-EXECUTION-DC.XML

Executed Woman to Get Pardon in Georgia

August 16, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBANY, Ga., Aug. 15 (AP) - The only woman ever executed in Georgia's electric chair, Lena Baker, is being granted a posthumous pardon, 60 years after she was put to death for killing a man she said had held her in slavery and threatened her life.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles plans to make the pardon official by presenting a proclamation to Ms. Baker's descendants at a meeting on Aug. 30 in Atlanta, a board spokeswoman, Scheree Lipscomb, said Monday.

The board did not find that Ms. Baker was not guilty of the crime, but it did find that the decision to deny her clemency in 1945 "was a grievous error, as this case called out for mercy," Ms. Lipscomb said.

In her one-day trial, Ms. Baker, who was black, testified that E. B. Knight, a white man she had been hired to care for, had held her against her will and threatened to shoot her. She said she grabbed a gun and shot him when he raised a metal bar to strike her. She was convicted by an all-white, all-male jury.

Ms. Baker's grandnephew, Roosevelt Curry, has led the family's effort to clear her name.

Executed Woman to Get Pardon in Georgia, NYT > By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 16, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/national/16pardon.html

Review of executed man's conviction boosts anti-death penalty lobby

Wednesday July 20, 2005
The Guardian
Gary Younge in New York

A convicted murderer executed 20 years ago, could be the first person put to death to be declared innocent since capital punishment was reintroduced in the United States.

Jennifer Joyce, a St Louis district attorney, has decided to reopen the case of Larry Griffin, who was convicted in 1981 of the murder of Quintin Moss, a 19-year-old drug dealer who was shot dead. Griffin maintained his innocence to the end, but was put to death in 1995, aged 40, by lethal injection.

Since then the first police officer at the scene, another witness to the shooting and the victim's family have all raised doubts that Griffin was guilty.

The principlal witness for the prosecution, a convicted drug dealer, changed his account shortly before the execution but has since died.

There have been dozens of cases of prisoners on death row having their convictions overturned, but the innocence of someone who has been executed has not been proved since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976.

If Ms Joyce were to overturn the conviction posthumously it would provide a huge boost to anti-death penalty campaigners.

"What I have heard recently is very troubling and leads me to believe an innocent man was executed for this murder, while the real killers have not been brought to justice," said Missouri congressman William Clay.

Pressure to reopen the case came from America's oldest civil rights organisation, the NAACP, following a report by the University of Michigan Law School.

"If they prove he was innocent, that would be the gold standard," Joshua Marquis, an advocate of the death penalty, told the New York Times.

"I'm not sure opponents of the death penalty would start prevailing, but they'd be able to say to people like me, 'What about Mr Griffin?'"

The murder took place on June 26 1980 when Moss was shot dead from a slow-moving car.

Central to the push to establish Griffin's innocence are accusations of flawed credibility and testimony of the only eyewitness involved in the trial.

Robert Fitzgerald, a career criminal from Boston who said he got a good look at the gunman, remembered his licence plate numbers and later identified Griffin in photographs as well as the abandoned car.

Shortly after Griffin was convicted, Fitzgerald was released and cleared on felony and fraud charges.

Fitzgerald later changed his story saying that he had only been shown one picture and told: "We happen to know who did it."

Moreover, nobody else who was on or near the scene remembers Fitzgerald being there - a strange oversight since he was white and this was a black area.

The first police officer at the scene says he never saw a white man, although testified otherwise at the trial.

A man who was struck by a stray bullet but never called upon to testify at the trial says Fitzgerald was not there.

"Fitzgerald was the entire case and now there's very strong eyewitness evidence that Fitzgerald was not there and what's more, Larry Griffin was not there," said Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan who conducted the NAACP's investigation.

However, the original prosecutor in the case, Gordon Ankney, cites other facts as proof that he got the right man.

Mr Ankney claims an off-duty officer said Griffin got in the car that was used in the shooting on the day of the murder and that the murder weapon was found in the car.

"I believe the jury did the right thing, and nothing's happened that's led me to believe otherwise," Mr Ankney told Associated Press.

Review of executed man's conviction boosts anti-death penalty lobby, G, Wednesday July 20, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1532150,00.html

Chief Justice Stays Execution for Death Row Inmate in Virginia

July 12, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

RICHMOND, Va., July 11 (AP) - The Supreme Court granted a last-minute stay of execution on Monday for a man convicted of fatally stabbing the manager of a pool hall with a pair of scissors.

The convict, Robin Lovitt, 41, had been scheduled for execution at 9 p.m.; his lawyers learned of the stay around 4:30 p.m. The stay, issued by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, will remain in place until the full court reconvenes in October. The court will then either hear Mr. Lovitt's appeal or allow Virginia to execute him.

Mr. Lovitt's lawyers and opponents of capital punishment have argued that the conviction should be reviewed because of questions about the evidence.

Initial DNA tests of the bloody scissors could not conclusively link Mr. Lovitt to the 1998 slaying of Clayton Dicks, 44, during a pool hall robbery in Arlington.

A court clerk destroyed most of the evidence, including the scissors, making additional DNA testing impossible. The scissors were among items discarded in 2001 to free up space in the Arlington County Circuit Court's evidence room.

The Virginia attorney general's office has maintained that DNA evidence was not critical to the conviction because of "very compelling, strong evidence," including eyewitness testimony.

"He was found guilty by 12 jurors, two trial judges, seven state justices, one federal district judge and three federal appellate judges," said Emily Lucier, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general's office.

Lawyers for Mr. Lovitt, who maintains his innocence, sought a last-minute appeal from the Supreme Court and clemency from Gov. Mark Warner. Among those fighting the execution is Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel.

Chief Justice Stays Execution for Death Row Inmate in Virginia, NYT, 12.7.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/national/12virginia.html?ex=1133499600&en=f7b7a70dd995bd61&ei=5070

After a Mostly Silent Execution, Some Questions Remain

May 14, 2005
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

HARTFORD, May 13 - Michael Bruce Ross went to his death early Friday morning with his eyes closed and his mouth shut.

Strapped to a table inside a state prison in Somers, in northern Connecticut, Mr. Ross gasped and shuddered as the chemicals entered his arm intravenously, according to five news media witnesses. At 2:25 a.m., he became the first person executed in New England in 45 years.

Over the last year, the serial killer who murdered eight teenage girls and young women, raping most of them, had abandoned his appeals and fought to be put to death. He dismissed those who would save him and said frequently that he wanted to bring peace to the families of his victims.

In the end, however, when he was asked whether he wanted to make a final statement before the 21 people who came to witness his death, he said, "No thank you."

"It was just a cowardly exit on his behalf in that he couldn't even face the families," said Edwin Shelley, whose daughter Leslie was 14 when Mr. Ross strangled her in 1984. "There was no, 'I'm sorry,' no remorse shown at all."

While his silence frustrated some, it also added to the mysteries that had surrounded his motive: Had he truly acted out of sympathy for the victims? Had he been driven to suicide by his years of solitary confinement? Or, as psychiatrists suggested, had he gone stoically to death in a grand act of vanity, a narcissist with a need to appear noble?

Or did it matter?

"To be honest, I didn't care what his motives were," Mr. Shelley said. "He had made the comment that he wished to die. His wish is my wish, regardless of how he dies."

Mr. Ross apparently never wavered on his final day.

"By the afternoon, he was - I don't want to say giddy - but by the time he knew that no court was going to change anything, he became upbeat and started joking around," said Martha R. H. Elliott, a writer who has interviewed Mr. Ross extensively and spent more than six hours with him before he died.

Six inmates remain on death row in Connecticut and several lawyers and death penalty experts said that Mr. Ross's execution was not likely to speed their path to execution. The death penalty has little support in the Northeast, where only Pennsylvania and now Connecticut have carried out executions in the last 40 years. The four inmates executed in the two states since the 1960's all abandoned appeals.

Given the rarity of capital punishment in the region, the distinctive case of Mr. Ross led Connecticut and its courts on a strange psychological journey that concluded on an uncommonly cold morning in May, Friday the 13th.

The case, drawn out over two decades, was replayed - and amplified - in a few frantic months this year. Against the wishes of Mr. Ross, other people, including his sister and father, tried to stop the execution. Some claimed that Mr. Ross was incompetent, that his decisions were driven by mental illness.

They seemed to have succeeded in January, after intervention by a federal judge halted Mr. Ross's initial execution date that month. But a new execution date, in May, was scheduled almost immediately, and a new round of legal challenges began.

Judges reviewed testimony that "sexual sadism" controlled Mr. Ross's crimes and that "malignant narcissism" controlled his desire to die. In court, Mr. Ross sneered at his doubters and sobbed in despair. On television, he smiled. Death penalty opponents accused the state, in one of the nation's most liberal regions, of reverting to barbarism. And families of the victims wondered if the execution would ever go forward - or if Mr. Ross would change his mind.

And then he was dead.

"The odd thing about the whole thing," said Kenton Robinson, a reporter for The Day of New London who witnessed the execution, "was just the silence." The state's first execution by lethal injection was carried out at Osborn Correctional Institution, hidden behind a grassy slope in Somers, about a mile from a development of new luxury homes and the Massachusetts border.

About 1 a.m., John Stamm was among 300 protesters walking quietly along a two-lane rural road in the dark toward the prison entrance.

Mr. Stamm, 86, said his views against capital punishment were rooted in his childhood in Germany, where he "saw the Nazis kill people."

Asked whether Mr. Ross's was a life worth saving, he said, "I think everyone is capable of redemption; it doesn't mean they'll all make it."

Mr. Ross spent his final day in a holding cell, reading the Bible and praying with several spiritual advisers. His last meal was turkey a la king. He received last rites from a prison chaplain shortly before he was escorted to the execution chamber about 1:30 a.m.

"He was at peace and he was ready," said Kathy Jaeger, who described herself as a spiritual advocate and who met with him about 10 p.m. "He was in as good a place as he could be."

Nine relatives of Mr. Ross's victims witnessed the execution. They stood in the middle of a witness room with a victims' advocate, and the two detectives who had arrested Mr. Ross. On either side of them, separated by heavy gray curtains, were four people there at Mr. Ross's request and five news media witnesses with notepads and pens.

At 2:08 a.m., another curtain that had blocked the execution chamber opened and revealed Mr. Ross strapped to a padded table, his arms outstretched.

A microphone was mounted near the table but Mr. Ross chose not to make a statement. Ms. Jaeger said Mr. Ross considered making an apology but "just didn't know if he was going to be able to deliver it, from wherever he was spiritually, emotionally."

"When he said, 'No thank you,' I was disappointed," she said. "But I understood. I mean, my God, this guy's about to die, and knowingly."

A warden placed a call from the chamber to receive the execution order.

"Is there any legal impediment preventing me from issuing this order?" Theresa C. Lantz, commissioner of the Department of Correction, asked the chief state's attorney, Christopher L. Morano.

Over a web of open phone lines, lawyers and court clerks made a final round of checks to see whether any stays of execution had been ordered. None had been.

The injection began at 2:13 a.m.

"He definitely gasped and shuddered," said Shelly Sindland, a reporter for WTIC-TV.

Ms. Jaeger, who witnessed the execution at Mr. Ross's request, said, "It almost looked involuntary. It was like he winced."

Some heard a family member say, sarcastically, "Uh, feeling some pain?"

And then, after the color appeared to fade from Mr. Ross's face, another family member said, "It was too peaceful."

The execution had been scheduled for 2:01 a.m., "or as soon thereafter as possible," according to a Correction Department directive. As the clock neared 2:30 a.m., Christine Whidden, the warden of Robinson Correctional Institution, addressed reporters gathered at the facility just down the road from Osborn.

"Death occurred at 2:25 a.m. on this day," she said.

Debbie Dupuis, the sister of Robin Stavinsky, who Mr. Ross murdered in 1983 when she was 19, told reporters, "I thought I would feel closure, but I felt anger just watching him lay there and just sleep after what he did to these women."

Brian Garnett, a Correction Department spokesman, said later that the execution occurred slightly later than scheduled because "we were ensuring that everything was done appropriately."

"There were no issues with the procedure last night," he said. "It went totally according to plan."

Stacey Stowe contributed reporting for this article.

After a Mostly Silent Execution, Some Questions Remain, NYT, May 14, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/14/nyregion/14death.html

Connecticut Carries Out Its First Execution in 45 Years

May, 13, 2005
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
and STACEY STOWE

SOMERS, Conn., May 13 - Connecticut carried out its first execution in 45 years early today, administering a lethal injection to Michael Bruce Ross, a convicted serial killer who abandoned his appeals and died willingly after 18 years on death row.

About 300 death penalty opponents held vigil in the cold and dark outside the rural complex of state prisons where a warden led Mr. Ross to the execution chamber and an unidentified executioner began administering a lethal injection into his arm shortly after the scheduled 2:01 a.m. execution time.

"Death occurred at 2:25 a.m. on this day," Christine Whidden, the warden of one of the prisons, Robinson Correctional Institution, announced five minutes afterwards.

Mr. Ross, 45, had sought that fatal moment for nearly a year.

In defiance of public defenders and others who wanted to save him, he chose to forgo further appeals of his death sentence last year. He said he wanted to ease the pain of the families of the eight teenage girls and young women he strangled in the early 1980's. He raped most of his victims.

A graduate of Cornell University and a former life insurance salesman, Mr. Ross convinced judges he was competent, smirked at psychiatrists who said he was suicidal and often seemed exasperated by his inability to reshape his image.

"I am not an animal," he once wrote.

In the final moments before his execution on Friday morning, however, he did not attempt to explain himself. He kept his eyes closed and never looked through the glass at those witnessing his death.

His execution, at Osborn Correctional Institution, atop a grassy slope about a mile from the Massachusetts border, was witnessed by more than 20 people. Nine family members of Mr. Ross's victims witnessed the execution, as did the two detectives who first arrested him and a victims' advocate. They shared the witness room with four people who were there at Mr. Ross's request, as well as five news media witnesses who were allowed to document the event with notepads and pens. Heavy gray curtains separated each group.

Media witnesses said the curtain blocking the execution chamber opened at 2:08 a.m. and revealed Mr. Ross strapped to a padded table, his arms outstretched. Asked if he wanted to make a final statement, he said, "No, thank you."

A warden then placed a call from the chamber that lasted five minutes. It was unclear why the call lasted that long, though the execution procedure required a final check to see whether any stays of execution had been ordered.

Several media witnesses said the injection began at about 2:13, after the warden hung up the phone. They said Mr. Ross clearly reacted to the flow of chemicals.

"He definitely gasped and shuddered," said Shelly Sindland, a reporter for WTIC-TV. She and others said they did not know whether Mr. Ross felt pain

Ms. Sindland noted that a family member near her said aloud sarcastically, "Uh, feeling some pain?"

After the color appeared to fade from Mr. Ross's face, another family member, a man, said, "It was too peaceful."

Family members expressed a range of emotions after witnessing the execution. Some expressed sympathy for Mr. Ross's family, none of whom witnessed the execution.

"I thought I would feel closure but I felt anger just watching him lay there and sleep after what he did to these women," said Debbie Dupuis, the sister of Robin Stavinsky, who Mr. Ross murdered in 1983 when she was 19.

Lan Manh Tu, whose younger sister Dzung Ngoc Tu, 25, was raped and murdered by Mr. Ross in 1981, traveled to Connecticut from Maryland on Thursday for the execution. Mr. Ross was never prosecuted for her murder, though he confessed to it. Mr. Tu was allowed inside the prison but he was not allowed to witness the execution.

"I'm glad that we will never have to hear about him again," Mr. Tu said.

Lera Shelley, whose daughter Leslie was 14 when Mr. Ross strangled her in 1984, said, "My daughter and the other victims finally have the justice they deserve and now they can all rest in peace."

Outside the prison, in the first moments after the execution, the approximately 300 people who had sung hymns and talked quietly became silent.

"I feel regret that this state has just killed somebody," James Russell, 23, a teacher from Longmeadow, Mass., said shortly after the execution was announced. "It's a barbaric act that shouldn't happen in a democratic society."

Because of his status as a so-called volunteer, Mr. Ross held the right to change his mind up until the moment of the lethal injection and to say he wanted to appeal.

"All he has to do is say so and the machinery of death will stop," Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said during an afternoon news conference at a prison just down from the prison where Mr. Ross was to die.

The execution had seemed imminent before.

In January, Mr. Ross came within hours of death before his lawyer, T.R. Paulding, unexpectedly requested a delay. Mr. Paulding, who has helped Mr. Ross seek execution, cited a potential conflict of interest after a federal judge threatened earlier that day to suspend his law license for not questioning Mr. Ross's competency more thoroughly.

A new six-day evaluation in April led to another finding of competency and a series of court rulings affirming the finding. One expert said this week that he believed that the execution would go forward because the state effectively has had a legal "dress-rehearsal."

"I think last time cleared a lot of the underbrush out of the way," said Michael A. Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School and a former capital defense lawyer.

Before the execution, on the rural two-lane road that runs past the prison compl