Arnold Schwarzenegger is a tough guy. He killed bad guys in Predator, he was a villain turned good guy in the Terminator movies, and reigned supreme in the classroom for Kindergarten Cop. Such roles, however, could not have prepared him for the strange case that was Tookie Williams.

This is an odd unfolding tale readers, of murder, public repentance, and the aftermath of the death penalty.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (DVDs) replaced Gray Davis as California’s Governor
on Oct. 7, 2003. That’s over two decades from the time Stanley
"Tookie" Williams was convicted and imprisoned for the murders of four
separate people. The victims’ names are hard to find. hecklerspray had
to look a good thirty minutes before any of them turned up on the
Google, and that’s pretty sad. But after exhaustive research we can
tell you that their names were: Albert Owens, Yen-Yi Yang, Tsai-Shai Lin, and Yee-Chen Lin. The four people were killed in two separate incidents. 

In or around 1971, Williams was a co-founder of the west side Crips,
a Los Angeles based street gang. His intentions in this formation, he
said, had been noble at first. Wikipedia has him quoted on the matter thusly:

"We
started out—at least my intent was to, in a sense—address all of the
so-called neighbouring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense—I
thought I can cleanse the neighbourhood of all these, you know,
marauding gangs. But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed
into the monster we were addressing."

On February 27, 1979, the monster did go awry, in the form of a 7-11
robbery with store clerk Albert Lewis Owens ending up shot twice in the
back face down on a back room floor. A security camera was also shot
out. The financial gain resulting from the murder was a sorry $120.
Williams was later quoted in court transcripts as saying he killed
Owens "because he was white and he was killing all white people", and "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him." Williams then reportedly made a gurgling sound.

The next incident took place less than two weeks later, on March 11,
1979 at the family owned Brookhaven Motel. The motel was owned by the
Yang family, who’d immigrated to the area from Taiwan. Court
transcripts have it that at 5:00 AM Williams kicked in the office door
and shot 76-year-old Yen-Yi Yang (Father), 63-year-old Tsai-Shai Yang
(Mother), and Yee-Chen Lin (Daughter).  One son, Robert,  escaped as he
was sleeping elsewhere in the building. Around $100 was taken in this
robbery.

Williams was convicted in 1981, and some jurors reported that after
reading the verdict, Williams looked at them and said he was going to
get all of them. 

In prison, Tookie is said to have changed, enough to be nominated
for the Nobel peace prize six times.  He wrote several anti-gang books
aimed at youth, including such titles as: Life In Prison, Gangs And
Wanting To Belong, Gangs And The Abuse Of Power… it’s quite a long
list.

Tookie’s supporters viewed all of this as redemption, and that
despite his guilty verdict all those years ago, his receipt of the
death penalty and countless denied appeals, he should be exempted from
the laws stiffest penalty. 

Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California.  The inmate’s
supporters were hoping for Schwarzenegger to grant clemency based on
the said redemption, which he did not.  Schwarzenegger’s reasoning was
this: “…Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption.”

As such, at 12:35 AM on December 13, Tookie died from the lethal concoction released into his veins…

…then Austria lost it. The little Germanic country nestled
soundly on the Slovenian border is very much against the death
penalty. More specifically, Graz, a city very close to where Arnold
grew up, is in an uproar. They’d been so proud of their adopted son’s
massive accomplishments just a few years ago. In 1999 they gave him a
ring to symbolise his honorary citizenship. They named a football
stadium after him too, Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium. To spite him for
his choice in the Williams matter, they are going ahead with plans to
strip his name from the sports arena. In it’s place, in great big
letters above the entry way will reportedly be the words: Tookie
Williams Stadium.

Chew on that for a minute, and re-read the first part of this
article depicting the horrific murders of four people who wanted
nothing more than to go home at the end of the shift, or to hear the
fuzzy buzz of the morning alarm clock. 

And what’s this redemption spoken of? Jeffrey Dahmer, the
notorious people eater, found God before he was killed in prison. Does
that redeem him from all the half eaten hearts of the 18 murdered boys
and men? Ted Bundy killed at least 28 women on his bloody spree, then while in prison he helped catch the Green River Killer. Is this redemption? Should we have tossed him the keys to his cell instead of putting him down?

Why was Tookie any better than them? Because he killed less
people? Because the court that convicted him was less right than
Bundy’s or Dahmer’s? 

You keep your Tookie stadium Austria, and you sell your murder
flavoured popcorn, but you should at least think about naming some of
the parking stalls after Williams’ four victims. They never wrote any
children’s books or had any Nobel Peace Prize nominations, but that
doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it. After all, it’s not their fault,
they just didn’t live long enough.

Read more:

Schwarzenegger in Austrian spat – BBC

[story by Shawn Lindseth]