Williams Execution - Governor decison tomorrow

Clemency hearings for Stanley Tookie Williams are happening today at 10:00 am Pacific time. Snoop Dog, Jamie Foxx and many others continue to devote a lot of time and energy on this case. If you are reading this and want to express your views to the governor, today and early tomorrow are the last chance. If clemency is denied, the state will kill him MONDAY at midnight; yes that is midnight Monday the 12th or specifically, as soon as it is legally Dec. 13th. I just signed the petition and called the governor's office using the information on save tookie web site. If you call, you will talk to a real person at the governor's office. I got through first try and spoke to a real polite attentive person in under 1 minute. Faxes also are very effective at getting attention. I worked in Canadian provincial governments for 10 years and handled letters from the public, and I can tell you that phone calls, letters, faxes and petitions always have a real impact, whatever the final result. The pro-execution forces in this case are mobilizing and the governor's office will be counting the for and against phone calls, so this is a rare time frame where individuals taking the trouble to express themselves makes a difference.

I got through on the first dial in under a minute told the polite attentive governor's rep (even answering the calls like this costs money; you can tell they are concerned because they have enough people answering) that, as a Canadian criminology researcher i have seen that rehab is not the only reason in this case for clemency. Several judges expressed doubts about the trial of WIlliams, even in the recent decisions which he lost. Pricipal figures in his case had other important convictions thrown out because of similar racially biased juror rejection and racist remarks. Rotten features of the conviction include at least 2 witnesses who received outright immunity and others who received reduced sentences. Cases like this take up to 50 years before the truth comes out. Ultimately, witnesses get older, they finally talk about what happened to somebody and the often surprising truth comes out. It is in the public interest for the truth to come out and for plea deals not to determine so often who takes a rap. In the David Milgaard case in Canada, Milgaard was convicted of a nurse's rape and murder in the early 70s. His lawyer asserted that a convicted offender who lived nearby might have done the crime. Even though I was a human rights advocate who supported Milgaard's clemency, I doubted his lawyer's argument, because he was an unsympathetic character who had admitted standing around the area where the murder was committed,looking for a women whose purse he could snatch. 25 years later, in the mid 1990s new DNA tests that worked on the tiny frozen sample from the crime scene proved that Fisher, the convicted offender the lawyer mentioned was the murderer. He was convicted but he had spent decades free and had committed other violent crimes against women.