Topic: Radio campaign against condemned killer attacked
- Nov 27, 2005 12:45pm by NRG - livin the art that is life !
www.64111clinic.com fam
www.nrginmotion.com massage
www.myspace.com/nrginmotion world community Location: havenhouse KCK/ 64111 Clinic 4 Life
By Dan Whitcomb
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 23 — Supporters of Stanley ''Tookie'' Williams, the street gang leader and convicted killer facing execution in three weeks, have filed a federal complaint against a Los Angeles radio station for a ''Tookie Must Die'' campaign by two talk-show hosts.
The Federal Communications Commission complaint, dated Tuesday, charges ''racist and inflammatory statements'' by KFI-AM talk-show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou and comes amid an escalating political battle over Williams, who has been embraced by death-penalty activists and some celebrities.
Williams, 51, the Crips gang founder, is scheduled to die on Dec. 13 unless granted clemency by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Williams was convicted of shooting Albert Lewis Owens to death during a Feb. 27, 1979, convenience store holdup and of killing three members of Asian-American family while robbing their motel.
''If any other radio station set aside an hour as 'President Bush Must Die' and set forth in that hour to incite a riot among people and to call for the death of the president, that station would be in trouble,'' Williams supporter Jasmyne Cannick wrote to the FCC. ''There is no difference with the 'Tookie Must Die/ Kill Tookie' hour on KFI 640 AM.''
Cannick said Kobylt and Chiampou were being racially insensitive by calling for the execution of Williams, who is black, in a city that saw more than 50 people die in race riots after the 1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the racially charged Rodney King case.
California has more than 600 people on death row and has executed 11 people, eight of them white men, since the death penalty was reinstated in the late 1970s
Williams maintains his innocence in the four 1979 murders that landed him on death row. He wrote a series of books urging children to reject violence.
Celebrities ranging from rapper Snoop Dogg to actors Mike Farrell and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx have called for clemency. Foxx portrayed Williams in a sympathetic 2004 TV movie.
Kobylt shrugged off the FCC complaint. He said the ''Tookie Must Die'' hour was in response to what he sees as a dishonest campaign on Williams' behalf by anti- death penalty activists and a failure by the media to report the story accurately.
''(The complaint) is a complete waste of time because the FCC doesn't regulate these kinds of things,'' Kobylt told Reuters. ''They might as well complain to the Animal Control Board.''
He added: ''The jury said Tookie must die. All the judges they've appealed to (since 1979) said Tookie must die. That's his sentence.''
Reuters/VNU
