Tookie Williams Seeks Stay of Execution

[j_shady]

LOS ANGELES - A lawyer for convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams asked the state Supreme Court to stay his execution, saying the Crips gang co-founder should have been allowed to argue that someone else killed one of his four alleged victims.

Attorney Verna Wefald filed a petition Saturday challenging the validity of the four convictions and death sentences given in 1981 to Williams, who is scheduled to die Tuesday at San Quentin State Prison. She also filed an emergency request seeking a stay, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Williams' lawyers also have asked Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency, saying Williams has redeemed himself as shown by his books urging children not to join gangs. Schwarzenegger's office said Saturday the governor had not made a decision.

Williams was convicted of killing a man during a robbery in February 1979 and of murdering a couple and their daughter at a South Los Angeles motel in March 1979.

Williams denies committing the murders but has apologized for co-founding the Crips, the gang blamed for numerous murders in Los Angeles and beyond.

Wefald's petition argues that prosecutors failed to disclose at trial that witness Alfred Coward was not a U.S. citizen and had a violent criminal history, depriving Williams of the opportunity to argue Coward was the killer in the February 1979 robbery.

Coward is now in prison in Canada for killing a man during a robbery.

"All of the witnesses who implicated Williams were criminals who were given significant incentives to testify against him and ongoing benefits for their testimony," Wefald wrote.

"This type of testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in murder and capital cases in the United States," she wrote, citing a study from Northwestern University Law School's Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Wefald declined to comment Saturday night.

The California Supreme Court, a federal court judge in Los Angeles, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the
U.S. Supreme Court have all upheld Williams' convictions.