Clemency only way to save Tookie from death

"I’m not going to this hearing with hope. I’m going to this hearing frightened to death,” attorney Peter Fleming Jr. said. "If we fail as counsel, a man dies.”

Last week, the California Supreme Court declined to reopen the case amid allegations that shoddy forensics connected Williams to at least three of the murders. The federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have also ruled against Williams, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981.

During a conference call with reporters, Fleming said if clemency is denied, there isn’t much of a case to bring to the federal courts, where he said he would have to demonstrate that Williams is innocent.

"We’re not in a position to do that,” Fleming said.

Los Angeles County prosecutors, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and family members of the four victims have said Williams should die and that Schwarzenegger should not invoke the state Constitution and grant clemency. Prosecutors have said the Crips gang that Williams co-founded is responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Prosecutors will also meet with Schwarzenegger on Thursday, and each side has 30 minutes to make a case for life or death.

Fleming said he will present Schwarzenegger with a personal letter from Williams, which he declined to share.

"Are we a nation where forgiveness is no longer feasible?” Fleming asked reporters.

The pitch for clemency doesn’t involve claims of innocence. Rather, Fleming said, attorneys will argue to Schwarzenegger, as they did in their written petition, that Williams should be spared because his teachings from behind bars are convincing gang members to opt out of that violent lifestyle.

Williams was convicted of killing Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang and Yu-Chin Yang Lin in a robbery at a Los Angeles motel the family owned, and Albert Owens, a 7-Eleven clerk gunned down in a separate robbery in Whittier.

Hours after the teleconference, Philip Gasper, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, nominated Williams for a fifth time for the Nobel Peace Prize for Williams’ efforts to quell gang violence from behind bars. Williams has been nominated a total of six times for the award.

Schwarzenegger has not indicated when or how he would decide Williams’ fate. The last California governor to grant clemency was Ronald Reagan, who spared a mentally diseased killer in 1967.