HELP SAVE STAN TOOKIE WILLIAMS

The office of California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer has announced December 13th, 2005, as the execution date for Stan Tookie Williams. The countdown to a legal lynching has begun, and the only thing that can stop it is a massive campaign by Stan's thousands of supporters around the state and around the world. (Read the rest of this article by Phil Gasper at http://www.counterpunch.org/gasper10122005.html )

The State of California is also going to set execution dates for two other death row prisoners: Clarence Ray Allen (January 17th) and Michales Morales (in February). They want to start up the racist execution machine in California, but we are going to halt it!

ACTION ALERT

1. If you are in the Bay Area, join us for a planning meeting of activists, community members and members of the faith community.
Monday, October 24th
6:30 pm, Northern CA ACLU office
1663 Mission Street, 4th floor, San Francisco.
Contact Crystal at the Campaign to End the Death Penalty for more info or to RSVP: 510-333-7966 or crystal@nodeathpenalty.org

2. Download petitions, fact sheets and other materials to get your organization, church or school involved. Go to http://www.savetookie.org

3. Contact the Save Tookie Committee at 510-235-9780 or tookie@tookie.com
to find out more ways to get involved.

4. Call/E-mail/Write/Fax Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and demand clemency
for Stan Tookie Williams:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-445-2841
Fax: 916-445-4633
To send e-mail: http://www.govmail.ca.gov

More About Stan Tookie Williams

- Redemption: Stan has made the remarkable transformation from co-founder of the Crips gang to leader of a movement for street peace. He has created this movement through his nine anti-gang books for children, a peace protocol, messages to incarcerated youth and other tools that have been used by teachers, parents, and kids around the world. This work has resulted in multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and a movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx: "Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story." From the tens of thousands of e-mails Stan has received we estimate that he has saved at least 150,000 lives .

- Civil Rights: Stanley Tookie Williams was the victim of racism at his original trial. The prosecutor kicked the African-Americans off
of his jury and made racist jungle-animal metaphors in his closing
arguements. The prosecutor compared Stan in the courtroom to a Bengal tiger in the zoo, and said that "in his environment" ( i.e., South Central LA) he would behave like the tiger in its "habitat." Despite the fact that this prosecutor was later censured twice by the California Supreme Court for his racist practices, which led to death sentences in two of the cases he prosecuted being overturned, and despite the fact that the ACLU, the NAACP,
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and numerous other groups filed an amicus brief on Stan's behalf, the Ninth Circuit has twice rejected the claim that his constitutional rights were violated.

- Innonence: Stanley Tookie Williams has apologized for co-founding the Crips gang, but he has always maintained his innocence of the crimes that sent him to death row. The main evidence against Stan was the testimony of jailhouse informants who claimed that he had confessed to them. All of these "witnesses" were facing serious felony charges and had strong
motivations to make a deal with the police to reduce their own sentences. Since the original trial, another prisoner has come forward to say that he witnessed one of the informants being given the file on Stan's case by members of the Sheriff's Department so that he could learn details about the murders. None of the physical evidence found at the two crime scenes, including fingerprints and a boot print, matched Stan. A witness's description of a person seen leaving the scene of one of the crimes did not fit him either. A shotgun shell supposedly matched a weapon he had bought several years earlier, but that gun was in the possession of a couple that was also facing serious felony charges including the murder of their crime partner. After they claimed that Stan had confessed to them, however, the murder investigation against them was dropped.