Barbara Becnel, spokesperson for Stanley Tookie Williams, speaks outside of San Quentin State prison in San Quentin, Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2005. Convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, the Crips gang co-founder whose case stirred a national debate about capital punishment and the possibility of redemption, was executed Tuesday morning. Williams, 51, died around 12:35 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison, officials said.

The San Francisco Chronicle has L.A. FUNERAL: Ashes will be taken to South Africa

Stanley Tookie Williams’ ashes will be scattered in South Africa after a large and public funeral planned for early next week in Los Angeles, the co-author of his anti-gang books said Tuesday.

Barbara Becnel said that Williams, who was executed early Tuesday, wanted his ashes to be scattered in Africa.

“He wanted to return to his ancestral home,” Becnel said. “We chose South Africa because I know some members of the Mandela family.”

So, now Barbara Becel is playing the race and apartheid card in Tookie’s death.

Flap can only imagine what a spectacle this funeral will be.

Williams and Becnel met Winnie Mandela in 1996, when she visited San Quentin State Prison to speak to them about the Internet Project for Street Peace, a computer program that links at-risk youths in Richmond with young people in Cape Town and Soweto.

The ex-wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela was one of numerous public figures who made unsuccessful appeals to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency to Williams, who turned anti-gang activist after being convicted of four 1979 shotgun murders in the Los Angeles area.

Didn’t Winnie Mandela murder Stompie Seipei Moketsi? But, she got off on a technicality……

Read about this here.

The body of the 51-year-old Williams was removed Tuesday from San Quentin and taken to an Oakland mortuary. Becnel said the body will be transported to Los Angeles for a memorial service that will probably be held Tuesday.

A site has not been picked, “but it will be a large venue that can hold more than 16,000 people,” Becnel said. Confirmed speakers include rapper Snoop Dogg, NAACP President Bruce Gordon and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, she said.

Stay tuned……

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The Execution of Stanley Tookie Williams: Tookie Saves Lives?

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Technorati Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stanley Tookie Williams, Crips

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This undated photograph courtesy of the California Department of Corrections shows the San Quentin Prison execution chamber.

The Los Angeles Times has Death Penalty Moratorium on the Table

State legislators in early January will consider what is likely to be a contentious proposal to postpone executions for as long as three years.

On Jan. 10, an Assembly committee plans to consider legislation that would place a moratorium on executions until a special commission finishes examining whether California’s criminal justice system allows innocent people to be convicted.

The bill, the first of its kind in Sacramento in more than a decade, faces substantial political and legal hurdles. Its hearing — scheduled long before convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams’ execution Tuesday — comes as the state is poised to perform a record number of executions in the coming year.

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, created by the state Senate last year, is studying the extent to which people have been wrongly convicted of crimes. The commission, composed of people on all sides of the issue, was charged with suggesting improvements to lawmakers by the end of 2007.

Among the topics the panel is set to look at are the frequency of police suppression of exculpatory evidence, and false testimony from witnesses and jailhouse informants.

“There’s a half a dozen issues that are recurring in exoneration cases,” said Jon Streeter, a San Francisco business trial lawyer who is chairman of the panel. “We see them time and time again. They tend to arise in death penalty cases, where the problems can be the most serious.”

Five Democrats have proposed the moratorium until either the Legislature “has fully considered” the panel’s suggestions or, if lawmakers take no action, Jan. 1, 2009.

NO WAY!

The people of California have time after time voted for the death penalty. Opponents of it are trying to wear down “ultimate penalty” advocates and through attrition gain what they otherwise would never win in an election.

Death penalty proponents, however, say they will vigorously oppose any delay.

“This is the most liberal Legislature in the country,” said Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks). “I would not be the least bit surprised if it adopted a moratorium or even attempted to rescind the death penalty entirely. But if they do, they’ll have a fight on their hands.”

And a FIGHT they will have…..

Stay tuned………

The Los Angeles Times has Oldest Inmate on Death Row Petitions Gov. for Clemency

The state’s oldest death row convict asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for clemency Tuesday, a day after the governor rejected a bid for mercy from Stanley Tookie Williams, allowing the Crips co-founder to die by lethal injection.

Clarence Ray Allen, 75, said he was too frail to be put to death Jan. 17 as scheduled. In 1980, while serving at Folsom State Prison for arranging the 1974 murder of his son’s girlfriend, Allen ordered the killings of eight witnesses against him in a related market burglary case in Fresno. His hit man killed a witness and two market employees.

n his petition, Allen claims that his physical infirmities, including a recent heart attack, have left him nearly deaf and blind and warrant a reprieve.

“He prays for that mercy because he is aged and infirm, suffering from chronic diseases that have been aggravated by the grossly inadequate medical treatment he has received at San Quentin and that have left him unable to walk, nearly blind, hard of hearing, and so physically incapacitated that his execution for the purpose of incapacitating him from the commission of further crime is manifestly unnecessary,” his attorney, Michael Satris, wrote to Schwarzenegger.

Although Satris also questions Allen’s guilt, the petition presents Schwarzenegger — who has rejected all three petitions for clemency that have come before him — with a far different claim: that physical infirmities are grounds for clemency.

Clarence Ray Allen’s crimes are summarized here.

The Los Angeles Times has Aging, Ill Inmate Is Next in Line for Execution

His situation is dramatically different from that of Williams, a co-founder of the Crips gang, who has been the subject of an unusual, highly visible clemency campaign. Full-page newspaper advertisements and speeches from clergymen, celebrities and activists proclaimed that Williams has redeemed himself through his anti-gang activities.

In contrast, Allen has not displayed any visible public support, and the last appeals court to review his case characterized his crimes as the very type the death penalty was designed to address.

But Allen’s attorneys have raised a question that is likely to recur, with the “graying” of death rows around the country and the concomitant health problems afflicting many elderly inmates: Is it appropriate to execute someone who is old and infirm?

There are now five condemned men in California who are over 70 and nearly three dozen in their 60s. Since California reinstated capital punishment, 31 men have died on death row of natural causes and 11 have been executed. The oldest person executed in California in the modern era was 62-year-old Donald Beardslee, who was killed earlier this year.

Though there has been sharp debate in recent years over the execution of individuals for crimes committed as juveniles, there is no law anywhere in the country setting an upper age limit for execution. And although governors and parole boards have occasionally granted clemency to condemned inmates because of mental illness, no death sentence has been commuted based solely on age or illness.

It is the moronic and idiotic delay in the legal process that has allowed this criminal to live all of these years so he could become infirm.

This is another NO-BRAINER for Governor Schwarzenegger.

Justice for Allen’s victims and carry out the law – BIG JAB – on January 17th.