Militant/Betsey Stone

SAN QUENTIN, California—On December 13, after California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused calls for clemency, Stanley “Tookie” Williams, 51, was executed. At protests around the world, including a November 30 rally in San Francisco (above), many had pressed to save his life. Williams, convicted in 1979 for four Los Angeles-area murders, had insisted that his convictions rested on coerced and fabricated testimony of informers, and that the prosecutor in his trial excluded Black jurors. Schwarzenegger refused a pardon because “Williams insists he is innocent,” citing also the dedication of Williams’s book Life In Prison to “Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, Ramona Africa, John Africa, Leonard Peltier, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal,” and others behind bars. The governor claimed most of these individuals “have violent pasts.”

—LEA SHERMAN  
 
 
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