Justice is served in execution of Calif.'s celebrity murderer

Plans are underway in Los Angeles to give Stanley Tookie Williams a funeral befitting a statesmen.
Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson compared Williams to South African leader Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for almost 30 years.
Barbara Becnel, Williams' staunchest supporter, spoke of fulfilling Williams' wish that he be cremated and have his ashes spread in South Africa. Actor Jamie Foxx and rapper Snoop Dogg are expected to attend the services, she said.
We wonder how much pomp accompanied the burial of Albert Owens, a 26-year-old 7-Eleven clerk when he was buried in Whittier in early 1979? How many movie stars were at the services for Yen-I Yang, 76, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63, and the couple's daughter Yu-Chin Yang Lin, 43, who operated a family-owned motel in Los Angeles when they were murdered two weeks after Owens?
Williams died at 12:35 a.m. Tuesday in San Quentin's death chamber, 24 years after being convicted of the murders of Owens and the Yangs in two robberies that netted him and his accomplices about $220.
Lingering deaths
Much has been made of the fact that it took about 15 minutes for a nurse to find a vein in Williams' arm for one of the IV lines used to execute him. Compare his discomfort to the pain of his victims, two of whom clung to life for more than an hour, despite being shot at near point-blank range.
There were nearly 2,000 people holding vigil for Williams the night he was executed. Albert Owens died alone on the floor of a convenience store, gasping for air in a way that Williams would later imitate and laugh about.
Stanley Williams became a celebrity prisoner, often referred to by his nickname, Tookie. It made this giant of a man, this bodybuilder who continued to pick fights and menace guards through the first decade of his incarceration, sound like a lovable bear of a fellow.
What kind of a society would execute a Tookie? Any sane society would execute a robber who murdered his victims to assure they'd never testify against him -- no matter how endearing his name.
For much of his life, Williams was a wretched, violent man. He was convicted of killing four people, but as one of the founders of the vicious street gang the Crips, he was complicit in hundreds of deaths. Legally, he could not be held to account for those deaths, and he was not. He was convicted on uncontroverted evidence for killing four people in cold blood. But morally, he was responsible for gang violence that has left blood on the streets of most major cities in this nation and many smaller ones, Youngstown among them.
In the last dozen years or so, Williams became an articulate opponent of street gangs, including the one he helped found. He wrote children's books. His conversion was the subject of a TV movie. He collected celebrity advocates who attempted to have California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger commute his death sentence.
The evidence stood
But through multiple appeals by various lawyers in state and federal courts, he never refuted the evidence against him; no court overturned the verdict of the jury that found him guilty of four premeditated murders.
The death penalty in the United States is subject to strenuous public debate and to thoughtful review by governors and jurists, which is as it should be in a democracy. But no one can claim that California enforces the ultimate punishment lightly.
Since that state reinstated capital punishment in 1978, 11 men have been executed. The appeals process is so painstaking -- witness the 24 years that passed between Williams' conviction and execution -- that 31 men have died of natural causes while on death row. A convicted murderer in California is three times as likely to die on his bunk than on the lethal-injection gurney.
Williams, however, did not beat those odds. After too long a delay, he was finally held to account for his crimes. The verdict was just and carrying it out was the right thing to do.
If his supporters had any sense of justice -- or even propriety -- they would recognize that his funeral should be small and private. Certainly it should be no more grand than those provided his victims, four people who were doing nothing more than trying to eke out a living when he snuffed out their lives for about $50 each.