This could have been a pretty important remake. Angels with Dirty Faces. A 1930’s James Cagney film that was anti-gang in its way. It told of the rise of a bootlegger and his friend (Pat OBrien), who becomes a priest while Cagney becomes a thug. Bootlegger commits murder, gets sentenced and O’Brien asks him (Cagney) to feign cowardice on his way to the chair to disillusion the boys who idolize him. As he is led to his death, the bootlegger freaks out, begging for his life. You aren’t sure if he was scared or doing the right thing. but it works. the y boys abandon his memory.

The death of Crips founder Tookie Williams, for the murder of four people, because of their race has died in California’s San Quentin of lethal injection. Williams’ death is the best lesson about gangs he ever could have written about, as it showed children the ultimate consequence of the thug life. Except, his death will magnify his myth.

People argued he should not have died because he was:
a) framed - the witnesses were snitches and other unsavory types. (see link 1 in rebuttal)
b) redeemed
c) black
not necessarily in that order. The people he shot - and bragged about shooting to his friends and family, were just going about their business. He became an anti-gang activist while on Death Row, repudiating his early life, but never saying “forgive me” for the murders. He said he was innocent, He never accepted responsibility. Williams’ death is the greatest anti-gang lesson ever.

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his books, but despite his redemption regarding his gang life and his work, he still failed to forgive those who arrested, tried convicted and ultimately put him to death. The only member of the family of one of the murdered, asked for clemency. Schwarzenegger did grant it .

My question - and before you think I am not in favor of the State taking a life, I am in favor of making sure that every effort to assure that the condemned is indeed the one. Williams’ crime was witnessed. He boasted of it. There are others on Death Row more deserving of anti-Death Penalty actions, but because these men do not write books, get movies made about them, they languish. Self serving actions like Williams’ only make it more difficult for the Truly Wrongly incarcerated to get Justice. The only mitigating reason, in my opinion for his having his sentenced commuted would have been the enlargement to the Myth of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. expect the “narcocorridos”(drug ballads) to be released soon celebrating his crimes and wait for them to become number one with a bullet.

If Williams was innocent, where was the Innocence Project in this? Nowhere. why? I don’t have the answer, but perhaps they looked at the DNA evidence, the transcripts and the evidence and concluded he was guilty. But going to them, wouldn’t have been as sexy… and a google search right at this moment, gives not information on the murders that sent him to the needle. not a word. the victims are nonexistent until page four, and then, the anti still outweighs the stories of the murders. Some of the pages devoted to the evidence:

Sources:
witness list
tNBC4 looking at the evidence
Is guilty and is lying….
These are crime scene photos