Lawyers Seek Clemency for Murderer

Attorneys for triple murderer Keith Daniel Williams, who faces execution by lethal injection next week, asked Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday to grant him clemency, citing 600 pages of newly released documents showing that Williams suffered severe mental illness.

Wilson’s Board of Prison Terms heard from a series of people Monday who urged the board to recommend that the governor commute Williams’ death sentence, which is scheduled to be carried out at a minute past midnight May 3 at San Quentin prison.

But Merced County Sheriff Tom Sawyer, who testified at the board hearing, called the murders committed by Williams especially brutal and said, “It’s clear to me the sentence needs to be carried out.”

The Board of Prison Terms is expected to give Wilson its recommendation by Wednesday. The governor could make his decision as early as Friday.

“Based on our review to date, we find the evidence to be very compelling to allow the execution to proceed,” said Wilson’s press secretary, Sean Walsh, although Walsh added that the governor has yet to read the 600 pages.

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Williams’ execution would be the second in California this year, and the fourth since Robert Alton Harris was put to death in 1992, ending a 25-year moratorium on executions in this state. Williams, from the small Tehama County town of Corning, would be the second to die by lethal injection at San Quentin. William Bonin, the so-called “Freeway Killer,” was executed by injection in February.

Williams, 48, spent much of his juvenile and adult life in prison, but was released from federal prison a few months before he went on a crime rampage in the Central Valley in fall 1978.

He shot and killed farm workers Miguel Vargas and Salvador Meza at their home in Merced on Oct. 8, 1978, because he wanted their car. Williams also kidnapped Lourdes Meza (no relation to Salvador Meza) and raped and killed her in Tuolumne County. She was a mother of four, said Deputy Atty. Gen. Robert Jipson.

Williams was arrested the next month and confessed to the crimes. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in April 1979. Five other condemned inmates have been on San Quentin’s death row longer.

“This guy planned these murders for the purpose of robbery,” Jipson said. “He wanted their car and figured out a scheme to get it. He went down there and he executed these people.”

In their plea for clemency, Williams’ lawyers, Richard Mazer and Kathleen Kelly of San Francisco, said Williams is “profoundly remorseful,” and suffers from “serious mental illness.”

While Williams’ mental illness has been cited in court documents in the past, Kelly and Mazur obtained 638 pages of records from the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Friday. Those pages further document Williams’ problems, including epilepsy, brain damage and drug abuse.

Kelly said the federal government denied having the records in 1984 and again as recently as February. But she said the release of the records could help with new appeals to be filed in state and federal courts this week.