This week in 2005

After a nurse took more than ten minutes to put the needle into his arm:
“You doing that right?”

— Stanley “Tookie” Williams (aka Big Took) , convicted of murder, lethal injection, California.
Executed December 13, 2005

Williams spent his time on death row writing children’s books with peace and antigang messages, donating the proceeds to anti-gang promotion charities. He was nominated for the Nobel Prizes for Literature and for Peace, but Williams’s life before prison had been exactly the opposite. In 1971 he co founded the violent street gang the Crips, and in 1981 he was convicted for the murders of four people. Williams never admitted to the crimes, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to refuse clemency despite appeals from people including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Jamie Foxx, who portrayed Williams in the TV movie  “Redemption.