The first in the Tookie Williams Speaks Out Against Gang Violence books appeared shortly afterwards. Williams would draft his words in his cell then communicate them in phone conversations with Becnel, which were limited under prison rules to 15 minutes.In 1997, Williams issued a formal apology on his website in which he lamented the ruin of many young lives, especially young black lives, caught up in the gang lifestyle and vowed "to spend the rest of my life working toward solutions".He has been true to that vow. We terrorised everybody."The murders for which he was arrested were committed in 1979, when he was 26, and he was convicted and sentenced to death two years later. His rehabilitation, as he describes it, did not begin until several years later, when he was placed in solitary confinement to ward off fears of gang warfare within San Quentin and he began to think seriously about who he was and what he could do to atone for the damage he had done.In 1993, he gave an interview to a young writer called Barbara Becnel, who dismissed him at first as an unrepentant thug but came around enough to volunteer her services as his ghost writer. They were scared of him."Williams himself has acknowledged much the same, realising that his magnetism and brute strength was a major factor behind the Crips spreading throughout Los Angeles and beyond in the years when he ruled the streets. "We morphed into a monster," he said on the same radio programme "We performed mayhem and aggression throughout the city. "When I was working the streets, what he was known for is people didn't mess with him, and if you did mess with him, you know, he was a big man and he'd hurt you," a retired South Central detective, Joe Holmes, said on National Public Radio "And people were in awe of him.

With a friend, Raymond Washington, he formed a gang to protect themselves and the other teenagers in his neighbourhood. Nobody quite knows where the name Crips came from; one theory suggests it was short for "crypt-keepers", another that the gang was originally called the Cribs, in acknowledgement of the founders' tender ages. (They also called themselves the Baby Avenues, in homage to the older Avenue gang whom they revered.)Williams grew up quickly and developed a reputation as a 300lb bruiser who was not afraid to use his muscles and let his victims know who it was they were dealing with. Born in Louisiana, he was the product of a broken home and found himself exposed and vulnerable when he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. Proponents of capital punishment have seized on them as a reason to dismiss all of Williams' good works, and death penalty opponents have both minimised their importance and suggested they are part of a concerted campaign by the state to make sure Williams dies by lethal injection, no matter what.Williams's early life started down a depressingly familiar path. The families of the victims have uniformly come out in opposition to clemency for Williams because, for all his apologies about his past life, he has neither acknowledged his role in the murders nor expressed remorse for them. "You can gun down four people and still turn your life around.

Or at least find some suckers who will believe you've changed."Officials at San Quentin say that over the years, they have found evidence that Williams is still in touch with his old Crips brothers, and argued that gang-members still feel a strong allegiance to him as their leader, whatever he might have said or done.Reaction to such claims has depended largely on people's preconceived notions about the justice system. (They do not buy the argument that he did not commit them.)Some of the shriller conservative newspaper columnists and opinion-makers have expressed similar scepticism that a man like Williams can ever really be said to have reformed. "What a swell message for kids," The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders wrote dismissively when talk of commuting Williams' death sentence bubbled up a few years ago. Few things are harder to pull off in the American justice system than to overturn the outcome of a criminal trial, even in a case like this one where the appeals courts understand and broadly accept the argument that Williams is a deserving candidate for clemency.The question arising from the Tookie Williams case is whether the justice system is even remotely interested in rehabilitation, or whether the death penalty serves a much more elemental and vengeful purpose. And he came close to suffering the same fate in the Williams case.