Stanley 'Tookie' Williams

December 3, 2005: the press conference for the presentation of the appeal by Italy’s ‘Governors’ to ask California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger clemency for Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, scheduled to be put to death on December 13, was held in Rome at Hands Off Cain’s headquarters.
All of Italy’s regional Presidents bar Riccardo Illy, the President of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, gave their support to the appeal together with numerous Italian Parliamentarians.
Ottaviano Del Turco, ‘Governor’ of Abruzzo, underlined the differences between the powers held by an Italian ‘Governor’ and one in the US who had to make the dreadful choice between life and death. For this reason Del Turco expressed his appreciation for former Illinois Governor George Ryan, currently Honorary President of Hands Off Cain, and his final gesture in power of emptying the state’s death row.
Pietro Folena MP highlighted the cross party support given to the appeal for Stanley Williams within Italy’s Parliament and commitments to work with Hands Off Cain in the campaign for a moratorium on capital executions established by the UN General Assembly.
Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, speaking from the United States, said it was his awareness of the numerous judicial errors committed in Illinois’ capital cases that induced him to introduce a moratorium which is currently in effect to this day. Ryan added that he was unsure whether to take as a positive or negative sign Schwarzenegger’s decision to fix a private audition for Tookie’s clemency for December 8. It was the first time in thirteen years that such a measure had been taken.
Commenting on the decision taken by the President of Friuli Venezia Giulia to deny his support to Williams’ appeal on the basis of being against mobilization on individual cases, Hands Off Cain Secretary Sergio D’Elia commented: “We would have appreciated Illy’s anti-conformism and his gesture would have been given more credibility if, in these years, since becoming mayor of Trieste until now as President of the Friuli region, he had adhered to or supported Hands Off Cain’s campaign for a universal moratorium on capital executions. That is to say the suspension of the death penalty for any single case but a moratorium for all whether they be American, Chinese or Iranian.”
Francesca Mambro, coordinator of the campaign to save Stanley Williams, announced that the appeal had been sent to Pope Benedict XVI for his intervention in the case.
HOC Treasurer Elizabetta Zamparutti presented the latest death penalty figures for the United States, which is continuing to see a slump in the number of executions carried out, sentences past and a diminishing of support for capital punishment.

December 2, 2005: the European Union renewed its call on Japan to abolish the death penalty after controversial executions in Singapore and the United States.
"We would like Japan to introduce a moratorium on the death penalty immediately," Michael Reiterer, deputy head of the European Commission delegation to Japan, told reporters.
He criticized the "secrecy" about the death penalty in Japan, which gives inmates only a few hours notice before hanging them in order to ward off last-minute appeals. "Executions always take place when the Diet (parliament) is not in session," the Austrian diplomat said.
He was announcing an international conference on the death penalty on December 6 and 7 in Tokyo that will be held by the European Commission with the American Bar Association and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.
He said the forum would discuss Singapore's execution of an Australian drug trafficker with no previous criminal record and the United States carrying out its 1,000th execution since reintroducing capital punishment in 1976.
Japan, the only major industrialized nation other than the United States to practice the death penalty, has executed one inmate this year, but Reiterer expressed alarm that courts were handing out more death sentences.
"The Japanese government answer that 80 percent of Japanese are in favor of the death penalty is not enough. The argument that the death penalty is necessary to prevent crime is not true because hideous crimes took place even after Japan reintroduced death penalty," he said.
Japan suspended the death penalty from November 1989 to March 1993 when justice ministers opposed to the capital punishment refused to agree to executions.

December 2, 2005: China broke its silence to admit for the first time that the organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners for transplant. For many years it had denied that such a trade existed. But Huang Jiefu, the Deputy Health Minister, acknowledged that the practice was widespread and promised to tighten the rules.
“We want to push for regulations on organ transplants to standardise the management of the supply of organs from executed prisoners and tidy up the medical market,” Huang told Caijing magazine. Huang said that regulations drafted in August 2005 and now being amended before being handed to the State Council for final approval aimed to end the commercialization of organ transplants in China.
The only existing regulation covering the removal of organs from the bodies of executed prisoners was a 1984 draft document that stipulated that such operations could take place only with the consent of the family or if the body went unclaimed.
Huang added that the regulations would help to improve China’s image over organ transplants and give condemned prisoners greater control over whether to donate their organs. They would also make it more difficult to buy organs removed after execution. The supply of organs in China is severely restricted because of religious traditions that require the body to be whole when it enters the afterlife. Yet the country had carried out more organ transplants than any other except the US. Since 1993 China had performed 60,000 kidney transplants, 6,000 liver transplants and 250 heart transplants.
Almost all organs harvested from dead bodies came from those of executed prisoners, Caijing magazine said. That had prompted human rights organizations to question the way in which organs were obtained and supplied to patients requiring transplants. In the past doctors had recounted how they have traveled to execution grounds in specially equipped ambulances with a team of nurses to harvest the organs with as little delay as possible.