This Was Crips Founder Stanley 'Tookie' Williams' Last Meal
Notorious gang leader and founder of the Crips, Stanley 'Tookie' Williams is infamous for many reasons. As a leader of the Los Angeles-area street gang, he was a well-known gangster who ran the streets of the city with violence. In 1981 he was convicted of four murders and handed a death sentence. Williams would spend the rest of his life behind bars in California's San Quentin prison.
While awaiting his execution, however, Williams would reform his life. He spent a lot of his time advocating against violence and gangs. While locked up, Williams authored a few books about turning his life around and warning the youth about the ills of joining a gang and ending up in prison. His turnaround helped him earn him several Nobel Peace Prize nominations, according to Biography. Life behind bars had changed Williams and he became known for something other than gang life and crime.
Though he was a changed man, several appeals and pleas for a commutation of his death sentence were to no avail for Williams. In a last-ditch effort, Williams appealed to California's then-governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for clemency, asking that his death sentence to be thrown out and replaced by life in prison with no chance of parole, per NPR. Schwarzenegger denied the request.
The last meal for an infamous gang leader
On the day he was scheduled to be executed, Williams had the opportunity to pick a specific thing he wanted to eat — a last meal — a tradition extended to many death row inmates in the U.S. The Last Meal Project showcases what some famous prisoners on death row ate before their execution. Some prisoners choose an array of things for their final meal; some go all out and request a lot of food, some don't eat at all, and others might go for something simple.
For Williams, his last meal was oatmeal and milk, per the website. He died by lethal injection on December 13, 2005 at the age of 51.
After his execution, only one other person would be executed on California's death row just over a month after Williams in January 2006, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Since then no executions have taken place in the state, and as of 2019 a moratorium on the death penalty was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, per the CDCR.