Case Draws Conflicting Views

With the condemned prisoner’s petition for clemency denied by the governor, one of Stanley Tookie Williams’ closest associates stood outside the forbidding iron gates of San Quentin Prison at nightfall Monday and lamented Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision.

“I was surprised, because I thought the governor would have mercy,” said Fred Jackson, 67, who runs the Internet Project for Street Peace, one of Williams’ programs to reduce gang violence. “I thought the governor would look within his own humanity and find compassion.”

Moments later, as the cold, damp dusk rolled in across San Francisco Bay, Jackson turned and walked through the gates for a final visit with Williams, set to be executed less than eight hours later for the murders of four people in two armed robberies.

A throng of news reporters and demonstrators protesting the execution grew throughout the evening as Williams’ final moments approached.

“This isn’t justice,” said Erika Blue, a local television host who was there Monday night as a protester. “Why does this man have to die?”

About 400 miles away, at sun-drenched Plummer Park in West Hollywood, elementary school teacher Paul Young thought he had the answer.

“The guy’s a thug and he murdered four people,” Young said. “These thugs have to know that you can’t just go around indiscriminately killing people. Look at all the lives this guy has ruined.”

Young, 54, scoffed at claims that Williams’ authorship of children’s books during more than two decades in prison showed atonement and merited mercy.

“You say we should forgive you, because you wrote a couple of books?” he asked rhetorically.

Williams’ pending execution elicited strong and conflicting feelings throughout the state about crime, punishment and mercy, exposing the deep fault lines that are part of California’s social landscape.

Hollywood luminaries, political liberals, groups opposed to capital punishment and African American leaders contended that Williams had redeemed himself by renouncing the gang violence of his youth in South Los Angeles.

But law enforcement officers and other opponents of clemency argued that Williams was a cold-blooded gangster who was justly found guilty of four murders and appropriately sentenced to die.

In San Francisco on Monday, death penalty critics reacted angrily to the governor’s denial of clemency. Actor Mike Farrell, president of a group called Death Penalty Focus, called Schwarzenegger’s decision “a shameful failure of leadership and a collapse of moral courage.”

Speaking at a news conference sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union, clemency advocates called for a moratorium on all executions until a commission looks into the fairness of the punishment.

“Rather than embrace this crucial commitment, Gov. Schwarzenegger washed his hands, Pilate-like, and ordered the extermination of a man who had become a force for good in our society,” Farrell said.

“He’s the tin man of politics,” the actor said. “A man without a heart.”

At the Clean King Wash and Dry laundry on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood, Leon Polk -- who’s been “in and out of jail” most of his life, including eight years in a penitentiary -- said he understood redemption and believed Williams deserved to be spared.

“People can change. I have changed. I believed that Tookie changed,” said Polk, 60, as he did a load of laundry. “Society made Tookie Williams the way he was.”

But Derek Harville, 53, whose 19-year-old son is in prison, disagreed.

“If I feel my own son is justly in prison and serving his debt to society,” Harville said on a central Los Angeles street corner, “how I can I feel Tookie’s punishment should be magically wiped away?”

With parts of the Hollywood community strongly backing clemency, some had hoped that would carry weight with the governor. It didn’t, and for at least one person in the film industry, it didn’t matter.

Speaking at the Santa Monica Pier, stagehand Robert Matthews, 51, said he was still a strong backer of Schwarzenegger despite the governor’s refusal to grant clemency.

Matthews said the fact that Williams was black intensified the dispute. “It’s kind of been turned into a racial thing,” he said. “If it was a white guy being put to death, no one would really care.”

Among the 20 African Americans chatting and playing cards at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Long Beach on Monday afternoon, many saw racism of a different sort.

Faye Joseph, 50, who said she had attended high school with Williams, said she felt numb when she learned that clemency was denied. She wondered aloud why Williams was being executed while mass murderer Charles Manson remains alive in prison. “It’s messed up,” she said. “It’s racist.”

Joseph’s son, a convicted murderer, is serving a life sentence in Louisiana.

Williams’ family won’t ever see him again, she said. “I can see my son.”

For Jennifer Perry, a customer at a beauty salon in Burbank, the forgotten issue was the victims.

“They never had a chance. They were taken away from their families,” said Perry, 35. “As a mother and a human being,” she said, she felt that Williams deserved to die.

The slogan at Homeboy Industries on East 1st Street in Los Angeles is “Jobs Not Jails,” and the program is aimed at rehabilitating youths who have been caught in the web of gangs and crime.

Father Gregory Boyle, the program’s executive director, opposed executing Williams. But on the work floor Monday, the mood was less charitable.

Eddie Zepeda, 20, said he believes a man can change in prison. He has proof: himself, after spending three years behind bars for attempting to kill a rival gang member.

But Williams killed four people, Zepeda said, and now had to pay his dues.

The name of the motel in South Los Angeles where three of the murders occurred has long since been changed from the Brookhaven Motel to the Western Motel, but Williams’ fate still elicited heartfelt sentiments from passersby Monday morning.

“He started one of the worst gangs the world has ever seen,” said Maria Sanchez, 36, as she walked sons Eddie, 7, and Jose, 5, to school.

“What would happen if one of my sons got into trouble with the gangs he helped create?” she asked. “A lot of blood has been spilled over what he has done.”

Williams, she said, deserved to die.

But Los Angeles resident Edwin White, 38 -- like Williams, an African American -- had wanted his life to be spared.

“The death penalty is OK in certain circumstances, but it doesn’t fit the bill here,” he said. “He’s shown reform and is an asset to the black community in general. Killing him isn’t going to accomplish anything but angering black folk.”

Outside the Burbank Media Center, Eric Goldfarb, 31, an editor on the television show “The Amazing Race,” said he’s from Arizona -- “a pretty conservative state” -- and tends to favor capital punishment.

“If the governor had granted clemency to Tookie, I would have disagreed with him,” Goldfarb said. “I believe that if someone in my family were to be killed, then the only punishment would be for that guilty person to be killed too.”

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Times staff writers Tanya Caldwell, Steve Chawkins, Stephen Clark, Cynthia Cho, Juliet Chung, Maura Dolan, Arin Gencer, John M. Glionna, Michelle Keller, Michael Muskal, Hemmy So and Kelly-Ann Suarez contributed to this report.