End the Death Penalty!

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campaign to stop executions after his personal redemption inspired countless articles, as well as a Hollywood SAN FRANCISCO—The insanity of the death penalty was exposed in September when the state of California “Big Tookie” authored a series of powerful children’s maneuvered to lift a nearly five-year ban on executions books that empowered young people to struggle against and delivered a death warrant to inmate Albert Green- the violence of poverty and embrace a movement towood Brown. The legal wrangling led death-house of- wards peace on the streets. Williams penned the Protoficials at San Quentin State Prison, which holds Califor- col for Peace, which was used in the early 1990s by Los nia’s only execution chamber, to jump into action with a Angeles gang members to negotiate a peace treaty, and flurry of media interviews and a PR campaign seeking he was a Nobel Prize nominee for peace and literature to promote their newly updated death chamber, which Supporters of Williams filled the streets around the Prison reps pointed out during a media open house world to protest the 2005 execution and gasped in horthat the new death chamber is roomier and brighter ror upon learning that executioners fumbled over a fully than the old chamber, which had been used for two ex- conscious Williams for nearly 15 minutes to find a vein ecutions by lethal gas and 11 by lethal injection since to inject the lethal cocktail. Death came for Williams capital punishment was restored in 1977. Prison of- approximately 35 excruciating minutes after he was ficials showed off the modernized witness section and explained that it now allows for segregated seating between the victim’s families and the loved ones of the liams, California botched another execution. On Jan. 16, condemned. The new execution chamber cost the state 2006, the state executed Clarence Ray Allen, an elderly deaf and blind Native American who was crippled from The temporary ban on California executions, which diabetes and had recently suffered a heart attack. Exeare carried out by a three-drug lethal injection, was the cutioners failed to inject a sufficient amount of the lethal result of the botched execution of Stanley Tookie Wil- cocktail into Allen’s veins and struggled with a second liams in December of 2005. Williams, a co-founder of injection, which eventually stopped his heart. Allen’s exthe Crips street gang, became the subject of a worldwide ecution fell on his 77th birthday and the national Martin they hope will meet new state regulations. over $800,000 and was built by inmate labor. movie. nine times over. strapped to the gurney. One month after the execution of Stanley Tookie WilPaul Beaty / AP time in a case filed by two other inmates.

not expect to obtain more until early 2011. new death-row facility at San Quentin.

If the state is not challenged, at least five men, includas soon as the state’s legal obstacles are removed.