In the San Francisco Bay Area, people had been gathering for days in support of Williams and in protest against the death penalty. On Sunday, at an American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California ceremony in downtown San Francisco, 700 people showed up to honor Sister Helen Prejean. She received the Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties' Award. Past winners have included Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall and Farrell, who was there moving through the crowd. But it was clear that Williams was on everyone's mind.

Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of the ACLU-NC, said, "No one should be put to death without the world watching." Sean Penn introduced Sister Helen. They knew each other from working on "Dead Man Walking" together, the movie that starred Susan Sarandon and Penn, and depicted Sister Helen's experience ministering to Patrick Sonnier and watching him die in the electric chair in 1984 in the state penitentiary in Angola, La. At the ceremony she posed a question to the audience: "What if we put 1,000 condemned people in a stadium and shot them?" And then answered it sharply, "The whole world could see. We have killed 1,000 people and nobody saw."

Earlier that morning, members of the anti-capital-punishment group Death Penalty Focus met in Sausalito, Calif., for a fundraiser brunch. Executive director Lance Lindsey had helped organize it, and organization president Mike Farrell talked informally about Williams to a room of criminal attorneys, professors, business entrepreneurs, a vineyard developer, a private investigator and a psychologist. There were artists and writers. There were people with money. There were liberals who had worked in politics, fundraising and volunteering for various social causes and campaigns.

Farrell, who is tall and has watery blue eyes and white hair, said he met Williams five or six years ago. "He's very impressive. He's very calming, extraordinarily peaceful, given his circumstances," Farrell said. "The transformation -- from his perspective, redemption -- is visible. He's quiet. He speaks like an educated man, interestingly articulate. To use an odd word, he's sweet."

Farrell stood in front of a large fireplace. He had helped defend condemned inmates for more than 25 years, starting just after 1976, when the U.S. reinstated the death penalty. "We all have a finger in it," Farrell said. "We all have a finger in the execution of Stanley Williams." He wore a black coat and sweater, dark navy pants. "We must uphold the American principle that we all have human value, and I believe that issue starts with the death penalty." He articulated the issues, talking of the great inequalities in the system, how poor those on death row are, the discrimination, how most death sentences are carried out in the former slave states.

"People like Stanley, people on death rows across this country, I call them 'the invisible people,'" Farrell said, his hands speaking also, as if he were conducting. "The thinking goes that people who are invisible in our own lives can be dispensed with easily."

He said he knew the pain of those who had lost family members. "I lost a loved one to murder, and I felt great pain, but it doesn't mean I'm going to stoop to the lowest part of my self."

"I spoke with a woman who lost her loved one in the Oklahoma City bombing," he continued. "She said she didn't want Timothy McVeigh to be executed. She said, 'No, I want him to be skinned alive.' She wanted him to be tortured every day for this rest of his life. Though I understand the feeling, we cannot, as a society, condone anyone acting on those feelings. Otherwise we might as well strap an inmate to a chair, and give the grieving family an ax and have them go out at them, and let there be blood on the walls."

There was silence in the room. A woman with her legs folded beneath her on the couch looked as if she might cry.

After midnight on Monday, plenty of people were crying. Following the execution, people trickled down the dark street, and Penn was among them. We asked him how one could ultimately make an invisible person visible. "I feel the answer to your question is right here, among all these people, who came to say what's on their mind, what's in their hearts," he said. And why was he there walking among them, lost in the crowd in his black jacket and faded blue jeans, an unlit cigarette in hand? "For the same reasons these people are here. I'm here to abolish the death penalty."

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