Stanley Tookie Williams, a gangster who became an anti-gang crusader in prison and the focus of a furious clash between advocates of punishment and redemption, was executed by lethal injection early today for four 1979 Los Angeles-area murders that he denied committing.
Williams, 51, was pronounced dead at 12:35 a.m. at San Quentin State Prison, where he had spent nearly half his life. His execution had been all but assured Monday when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency, saying, "The facts do not justify overturning the jury's verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case."
Williams offered no resistance as he was strapped to the gurney in the death chamber but appeared exasperated as prison officials hooked him up to the intravenous tubes that injected the poison, according to reporters who witnessed the execution. One reporter said it took 36 minutes from when Williams was brought into the chamber for him to be pronounced dead.
At one point, Williams looked around and appeared to ask, "You doing that right?" said Kim Curtis of the Associated Press.
A total of 39 people watched Williams die, including a few he invited to be witnesses. Three of them raised their fists in salute as Williams looked at them and afterward yelled, "The state of California just killed an innocent man," said Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan.
Lora Owens, stepmother of one of Williams' murder victims, burst into tears at the outburst.
Williams spent his last hours in a 45-square-foot "death watch" cell, where he was given a new set of clothes -- jeans and a blue work shirt -- to change into before being escorted to the death chamber. While in the cell, Williams spoke by phone with his attorneys as the governor and courts rejected last-minute requests for a stay.
He also had access to a television set, but wasn't watching, said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Outside the prison gates, about 2,000 death-penalty protesters prayed for a last-minute reprieve, while a few motorists shouted from their car windows, "Kill him."
Inside, Williams remained composed, forgoing his final meal and opting only for a couple of small cartons of milk.
"He has been very calm, very quiet and very respectful of the staff," said Todd Slosek, another spokesman for the prison.
Williams' morning started with a bowl of oatmeal, and during the day he met with his lawyers and six visitors, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had publicly spoken out for him.
The condemned man had his visitors brought into his cell one at a time and gave them "his formal goodbyes," Thornton said. "And after that, he gathered them all as a group and addressed them all.
"Some of them looked close to tears and some of them looked angry," Thornton said, relaying what guards had said of the witnesses.
A prison chaplain was available to Williams if he had requested spiritual counsel, but he did not, Thornton said. He also did not request a sedative before the execution, though one was available, she said.
Williams did, however, ask that five witnesses be present at his execution. Earlier he had said he didn't want anyone he knew to see him die, but apparently he had a change of heart.
Williams is the 12th person put to death in California since the state resumed executions in 1992 after a 25-year suspension because of court rulings. No capital case in the state had stirred such national and international attention since Caryl Chessman -- like Williams, an author of books from Death Row -- was executed in the gas chamber in 1960 for rape and kidnapping.
To his supporters, Williams was a man who had turned his life around in prison, writing eight children's books denouncing gang life. Last week Williams was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the sixth straight year, by a philosophy professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont who opposes the death penalty. Williams' books for children and young people have also been nominated four times for the Nobel Prize for literature.
But to others Williams was an archvillain who co-founded the violent Crips street gang and unleashed a crime wave that changed Southern California.
His lawyers tried frantically until the end to find a way to save him. Just two hours before Tuesday's execution, they pleaded with Schwarzenegger for a 60-day stay, arguing that in the 11th hour a witness had surfaced who could shed new light on the case. Earlier in the day, they said three jailhouse witnesses had come forward this week with evidence that could show Williams had been framed for the four shotgun murders that put him on Death Row.
But the governor, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected all the defense efforts to spare Williams' life.
"Clemency cases are always difficult, and this one is no exception," Schwarzenegger wrote in a six-page statement rejecting Williams' bid to have his sentence commuted to life without the possibility of parole. "After studying the evidence, searching the history, listening to the arguments and wrestling with the profound consequences, I could find no justification for granting clemency. The facts do not justify overturning the jury's verdict or the decisions of the courts in this case."
Williams said he was a changed man and of value to society because of his anti-gang writings from behind bars. Schwarzenegger noted, however, that Williams had never apologized for the murders. Williams maintained he did not commit them.
"Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption," Schwarzenegger said. "In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do.''
A native of New Orleans who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, Williams started the Crips gang with a friend in 1971, when he was 16. According to state prison files, he had juvenile convictions for drugs and auto theft in 1970, was sent to a youth detention camp, quit high school in 1971 and later spent two years in junior college. At the time of the murders in 1979, he had no adult felony convictions.
The first victim, Albert Owens, 26, a clerk at a 7-Eleven store in Whittier, was ordered to lie on the floor and then was shot in the back during a $120 robbery on Feb. 28, 1979. One of the robbers, Alfred Coward, granted immunity from prosecution, testified that Williams had fired the fatal shots and laughed about it afterward.
Williams reportedly told friends, "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him."
On March 11, 1979, Yen-I Yang, 76, and Tsai-Shai Yang, 63, owners of the Brookhaven Motel in Los Angeles, and their daughter, Yee-Chen Lin, 43, were shot to death during a $100 robbery. A sheriff's expert testified that a shell casing found at the scene matched Williams' shotgun. Other prosecution witnesses said Williams had admitted committing both crimes, and that he had referred to the motel victims as "Buddha-heads."
Williams, convicted and sentenced to death in 1981, maintained that he was railroaded by witnesses who lied in exchange for leniency in their own criminal cases, by a faulty ballistics test, and by a prosecutor who removed three African Americans from the jury and told jurors that seeing Williams in court was like observing a Bengal tiger in a zoo.
State and federal courts rejected each of his appeals, although federal judges described the evidence as less than airtight, and a three-judge federal panel said he might be a worthy candidate for clemency.
Williams, who was seen mouthing a threat to the jury after the guilty verdict, remained a violent man during his early years in prison, assaulting inmates and guards and spending six years in solitary confinement, from 1988 to 1994. But as he later described it, during that period he began reading widely and reflecting on his life, and resolved to prevent gang violence.
Williams taped a message from prison in April 1993 that was broadcast to Los Angeles gang members at a "peace summit.'' With the help of Barbara Becnel, a writer he met in prison who became his champion, he started work on eight books for children that were published in 1996 as a series called, "Tookie Speaks Out Against Gang Violence.''
He followed with "Life in Prison'' in 1998 and a memoir, "Blue Rage, Black Redemption,'' in 2004 and was working on two more books before his execution. He spoke regularly from prison to youths and educators, and posted a model "peace protocol'' for gangs, which supporters say was widely used, on his Web site in 2000. "Redemption,'' a television movie starting Jamie Foxx in a sympathetic portrayal of Williams, aired in 2004.
Assertions by Williams' supporters of success for his peacemaking efforts drew skepticism from some researchers, who found no decline in killings after gang peace summits. But individual testimonials abounded from youths who said Williams changed their lives.
Chronicle staff writer Mark Martin contributed to this report.
Stanley "Tookie" Williams, founder of the Crips street gangs, was executed by lethal injection in the State of California just after midnight local time Tuesday at the San Quentin State Prison after spending 24 years on death row. He was 51 years old.

Williams said no final words before his execution. It took two nurses 12 minutes to insert catheters into each of his arms, one nurse and one catheter per arm. The lethal doses were injected at 12:20 am, and Williams was pronounced dead at 12:35. 

Hopes for clemency were dashed Monday when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to commute Williams's sentence to life imprisonment.  Last minute appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court were also denied.

Williams was convicted in 1981 of the murder of Albert Owens during the robbery of a 7-Eleven convenience store, as well as the murders of motel owners Tsai-Shai and Yen-I Yang, and their daughter Yee Chen Lin in 1979. 

Following his conviction, Williams became an outspoken anti-gang activist and was four times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His anti-gang message began in 1993. He co-authored with Barbara Becnel an elementary school book series called "Tookie Speaks Out", and wrote a memoir called "Blue Rage, Black Redemption."