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Court clears execution path for Crips founder

A divided U.S. appeals court declined to reconsider a death penalty verdict against the founder of a notorious street gang turned peace advocate, making possible his execution later this year after a quarter-century delay. Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the black founder of the Crips gang in Los Angeles, was convicted in the 1979 murders of a convenience store clerk in a $120 robbery and of a woman and her parents in a motel robbery in which he stole $50. An all-white jury convicted him on four counts of first- degree murder and two counts of robbery in 1981 and imposed the death penalty. Since then Williams has filed a long series of legal challenges as well as written a series of books urging youth not to get involved with gangs. The Cannes Film Festival last year screened a drama about his life starring Jamie Foxx. On Wednesday, a majority of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to allow a 11-judge en banc group to reconsider an earlier ruling from a 9th Circuit three-judge panel. The decision produced a relatively rare dissent, with 10 judges in favor of rehearing the case en banc. "In this a case, a prosecutor, publicly castigated by the Supreme Court of California for his pattern of racially motivated peremptory jury challenges, removed all blacks from Williams' jury," Judge Johnnie Rawlinson wrote in his dissent. "In declining to take this case en banc, our court bestows an implicit imprimatur upon the trial court's denial of a constitutionally mandated jury selection process." "The very legitimacy of our system of justice depends upon continued [more] and [more]