Stanley Williams: Crips Co-Founder, Death Row, and Execution

Stanley Tookie Williams was a co-founder of the Crips street gang who spent 24 years on California’s death row for four murders committed in 1979, became a Nobel-nominated anti-gang author during his imprisonment, and was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin on December 13, 2005, after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied his clemency petition. His case drew international attention because it pressed a hard question: whether a condemned man’s apparent transformation should matter when he still refused to admit the crimes that put him on death row.

How He Co-Founded the Crips

In 1971, Williams, then 18, partnered with 15-year-old Raymond Washington to organize teenagers in South Los Angeles into a group meant to push back against existing neighborhood gangs. The name Crips reportedly came from newspaper descriptions of members as “crippled” because they carried canes as an affectation.¹ Williams ran the West Side faction; Washington led the East Side.

By the mid-1970s the two founders had split philosophically. Washington opposed firearms and favored fistfights. Williams embraced guns, purchasing a shotgun in 1975 and later writing in his autobiography about carrying weapons during that period.¹ After Washington was killed in an unsolved drive-by shooting in August 1979, the Crips splintered and the various factions turned on one another.²

The Four Murders in 1979

On February 28, 1979, Williams and three accomplices drove to a 7-Eleven in the Whittier area east of Los Angeles. Albert Lewis Owens, a 26-year-old clerk and father of two, was working the night shift. According to immunized witness Alfred “Blackie” Coward, Williams approached Owens with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, walked him into a back storeroom, ordered him to lie face down, and shot him twice in the back at close range.³ Williams later told his brother he killed Owens to eliminate a witness and reportedly bragged about committing the murder for $63.⁴

Eleven days later, on March 11, 1979, Williams and others robbed the Brookhaven Motel on South Vermont Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. The motel was owned by a Taiwanese immigrant family. The attackers broke through the office door and shot three people with a 12-gauge shotgun: 76-year-old Yen-I Yang and his 63-year-old wife Tsai-Shai Chen Yang each twice in the torso, and their 43-year-old daughter Yu-Chin Yang Lin in the face.⁴ The mother and daughter died shortly after reaching hospitals. The perpetrators picked up spent shells before fleeing. Trial testimony on the take varied: one witness said Williams reported $600, another said about $50.⁵

Trial and the Evidence Against Him

Williams was tried in Los Angeles Superior Court and convicted in 1981 on four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of robbery, with special circumstances of felony murder during a robbery and multiple murder.³ The jury returned a verdict of death.

For the Owens killing, Coward testified under a grant of immunity that he was there and saw Williams shoot the clerk. Accomplice Tony Sims also testified about the robbery; Sims was separately convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life.⁶

For the Brookhaven murders, prosecutors presented forensic evidence linking shell casings at the scene to a shotgun Williams had purchased in 1974.³ Several witnesses said Williams had confessed. Samuel Coleman testified Williams bragged about robbing and killing people on Vermont Street. James and Esther Garrett said Williams described the killings in detail and identified himself as the one who kicked the door and shot the family; they also turned over to police a shotgun they said Williams had hidden under their bed.⁶ A jailhouse informant, George “Gunner” Oglesby, testified that Williams admitted to the motel murders while both were in custody and described an elaborate escape plan, which prosecutors used to argue consciousness of guilt. Williams raised an alibi defense and attacked Oglesby’s credibility.

Why the Convictions Were Contested

Williams and his attorneys argued for decades that the case rested on unreliable witnesses and a tainted informant. Coward received full immunity. Coleman, also immunized, later alleged police had coerced his testimony, but a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel rejected that claim, pointing to the two-year gap between his interrogation and trial testimony and the fact that he had both counsel and immunity before taking the stand.⁵

Oglesby drew the sharpest scrutiny. In a 1989 declaration, inmate Leslie White said Oglesby had admitted fabricating his testimony and claimed investigators told him what to say. When the California Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing, White and other potential witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment. Oglesby died before the hearing. The referee appointed to run it found no evidence the government had deliberately used Oglesby to elicit the initial incriminating statements.⁷

Decades of Appeals

Williams took his case through every level of the system. On April 11, 1988, the California Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and death sentence and denied his habeas petition, holding that Oglesby was not acting as a government agent when Williams first disclosed details of the murders and that Miranda did not reach undercover jailhouse conversations.³

In federal court, District Judge Stephen V. Wilson denied Williams’ habeas petition after an evidentiary hearing on shackling and ineffective-counsel claims. On September 10, 2002, a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed, finding no evidence jurors had seen Williams in restraints and ruling that trial counsel’s “lingering doubt” strategy, rather than putting on mitigation, was a reasonable tactical choice because mitigation would have opened the door to damaging rebuttal about his gang activities.⁸

In the final days, the California Supreme Court rejected a last-minute stay request on December 11, 2005. A Ninth Circuit panel denied a further appeal based on a new affidavit alleging sheriff’s personnel had fed information to jailhouse informants to frame defendants. The U.S. Supreme Court refused a stay on December 12, 2005.⁹

Redemption on Death Row

Williams spent his first prison years violently, assaulting other inmates and drawing six years in solitary confinement.¹⁰ He later described a “redemptive transition” during that isolation, educating himself and reassessing his life. He was released from solitary in 1994, and prison officials characterized his conduct for the rest of his time on death row as exemplary.

In 1993, journalist and activist Barbara Becnel visited San Quentin while researching a book on gangs, and she became his editor, spokesperson, and strategist.¹¹ That same year, Williams recorded a videotaped message shown to roughly 400 gang members and helped broker a truce between the Crips and Bloods at the first Los Angeles gang summit.¹²

Williams wrote a series of children’s books warning young people about gang life, published as the Stanley Tookie Williams Street Peace Series. At least 65,000 copies were sold to schools and libraries, and one title was recognized by the American Library Association in its “Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Readers” category.¹¹ He also wrote Life in Prison for middle-school readers and authored a peace protocol designed to help rival gangs resolve disputes without violence.¹³ He donated book proceeds to anti-gang organizations and launched the Internet Project for Street Peace to connect counselors and young people in multiple countries.

Swiss Parliamentarian Mario Fehr nominated Williams for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was nominated for that award five times in all.¹² He also received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature.¹⁴ The Ninth Circuit noted the Nobel nomination in 2002 but said such accomplishments were “not matters that we in the federal judiciary are at liberty to take into consideration” when evaluating the legality of a death sentence.⁸

Why Schwarzenegger Denied Clemency

As the December 13, 2005, execution date approached, a high-profile campaign urged Governor Schwarzenegger to commute the death sentence to life without parole. Williams’ legal team argued he had been framed and that new witnesses could support his innocence. Supporters, including Snoop Dogg, Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover, Mike Farrell, Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, and Sister Helen Prejean, argued his anti-gang work from prison showed real redemption and that executing him would silence a uniquely effective voice.¹⁵ Foxx had played Williams in the 2004 cable film Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story.¹⁶ The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office opposed clemency, and Rebecca Owens, daughter of Albert Owens, spoke publicly for the victims’ families.¹⁷

On December 12, 2005, Schwarzenegger denied clemency. He wrote that he could “find no justification for sparing Tookie Williams’ life.”¹⁸ He pointed to Williams’ lack of remorse and continued refusal to apologize or confess, which he said undermined claims of redemption.¹⁹ He questioned the effectiveness of the anti-gang work, writing that “the continued pervasiveness of gang violence leads one to question the efficacy of Williams’ message,” noted that the dedication in Life in Prison referenced violent criminals, and cited Williams’ role in founding a gang that still contributed to “predatory and exploitative violence.”²⁰

Williams maintained his innocence. He said he would “never apologize for crimes I did not commit, even if death is the price I must pay for telling the truth.”¹⁸

The Execution

Williams was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison and pronounced dead at 12:35 a.m. Pacific time on December 13, 2005, roughly 36 minutes after entering the chamber. Witnesses reported complications: medical staff struggled for about 10 minutes to insert an intravenous line into his left arm. Reporters described him grimacing, shaking his head, lifting it repeatedly, and asking, “You doing that right?” He had given his final words to the warden hours earlier; during the procedure he mouthed “I love you. God bless you” to supporters in the gallery.²¹

What His Case Changed

After the execution, a cease-fire committee was formed by Crip leaders. NPR reported the group grew to roughly 250 factions pledging to stop killing one another.²² Becnel credited the public attention around Williams’ case with contributing to what became a de facto moratorium on executions in California as the state examined the constitutionality of its lethal injection procedures.

Williams’ memoir Blue Rage, Black Redemption was published posthumously in 2007 by Touchstone Books, with a foreword by Tavis Smiley and an epilogue by Becnel.²³ His children’s books were republished and received the 2007 Prevention for a Safer Society Award for Literature.²⁴ Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of him: “Tookie learned the hard way that belonging to a gang is not smart. I salute him for his courage and determination to overcome his circumstances.”

1
NPR. Tookie Williams and the History of the Crips
2
BlackPast. Raymond Lee Washington (1953–1979)
3
Stanford Law – Supreme Court of California. People v. Williams
4
Los Angeles Times. Tookie Williams Case Details
5
FindLaw. Williams v. Woodford
6
Daily News. Case Against Williams Rests With Witnesses
7
FindLaw. People v. Williams (Habeas)
8
Metropolitan News-Enterprise. Williams v. Woodford Ruling
9
CNN. Clemency for Williams Denied
10
Amnesty International. Stanley Williams Clemency Report
11
Los Angeles Times. Barbara Becnel Profile
12
ABC News. Stanley Williams Profile
13
CNN. Death Row Nobel Nominee
14
Simon & Schuster. Stanley Tookie Williams Author Page
15
NPR. Hollywood Elites Come to Tookie’s Aid
16
NBC News. Williams Executed
17
WBUR. Redemption and Stanley Tookie Williams
18
NPR. Clemency for Ex-Crips Leader Williams Denied
19
VOA News. Williams Clemency Denied
20
Daily News. Governor Denies Clemency for Tookie Williams
21
Democracy Now. Stanley Tookie Williams Executed at San Quentin
22
NPR. Rage, Redemption for Tookie Williams
23
Simon & Schuster. Blue Rage, Black Redemption
24
WBEZ. Creating Street Peace With Barbara Becnel