Spotted in San Francisco:

Tookie Williams was a mass-murdering gang member. Convicted of four gruesome homicides, Williams bragged of killing many more, including police officers. He was executed at San Quentin prison on December 13, 2005. But in the years before his execution, he became the poster child for the anti-death penalty movement in California. I documented the “Save Tookie!” frenzy outside the gates of San Quentin on the night he was executed.

What did he do that turned his public image from that of a notorious unrepentant killer to that of a glamorous victim-hero? Why, he “wrote” a series of children’s books counseling kids not to join gangs, with titles like Gangs and the Abuse of Power. All of his books were “co”-authored by his girlfriend and acolyte Barbara Becnel, but even a cursory glance at any of them reveals that Tookie obviously didn’t write them at all — she wrote them, and put his name on them. Tookie was poorly educated and borderline illiterate, but the vocabulary, sentence structure and political tonality of those (and other) books bearing his name were not the kind of thing Tookie was capable of. But no matter: based on those books, not only did he become a hero of the anti-prison movement, but he was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

These two stencils of Tookie Williams were photographed recently on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but I think they’ve been there since 2005, when there was a spate of pro-Tookie graffiti during the run-up to his execution.