Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams
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After a flurry of last-ditch efforts and press, Marcellus Williams was executed by the State of Missouri for a 1998 murder conviction that has been called into question.
Williams, 55, was pronounced dead at the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point.
After two last-minute execution reprieves starting almost a decade ago, momentum to reexamine Williams’s decades-old conviction gathered from unlikely sources, including the local prosecutor from the office that convicted him. Williams received an outpouring of support from legal groups such as the Midwest Innocence Project and a member of Congress. The family of the victim in the 1998 St. Louis stabbing came to oppose Williams’s execution.
Late Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay Williams’s execution. The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — disagreed and said they would have granted the request to halt the execution.
In a statement after the high court’s decision, an attorney for Williams listed people who had opposed his execution and fought for his removal from death row, including the St. Louis County prosecutors who “now admitted they were wrong and zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life.”
“That is not justice,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell said in a statement. “And we must all question any system that would allow this to occur. The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost.”
But for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Gov. Mike Parson, Republicans who opposed efforts to vacate Williams’s conviction, the state long ago met its burden in finding Williams guilty.
The NAACP, which had supported Williams’s attempt to leave death row, called the execution a lynching.
“Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent Black man,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice — it is murder.”
They executed a man who is likely innocent. This is why I’ve moved against the death penalty. Not only does it risk an irreversible punishment on an innocent man, it creates a blood lust in the system that makes killing the innocent more likely.Report
I think the bottom line is that no matter how much you tinker with the process for capital punishment there is no way to pursue it without occasionally executing an innocent person. I’m not ok with that, nor do I see it as a price worth paying.Report
Certainly not when you justify seeing the execution through so that faith in the system as a whole may be preserved via the mechanism of pretending to ignore the evidence of innocence. What that does is make a mockery of the standard of “reasonable doubt,” and inevitably thereafter diminish rather than buttress respect for the law.Report
Everybody relevant was screaming not kill this man but the current governor decided to restart the clock towards death.Report
The argument that got the last few votes in the state legislature here needed to do away with the death penalty was the “canary sheet”: the budget analysis prepared by the legislative staff for each bill with a fiscal impact (so named because it’s printed on bright yellow paper). Successfully seeking the death penalty and carrying out the execution was more expensive than life without parole; unsuccessfully seeking the death penalty was a lot more expensive than life without parole. Dropping the death penalty saved millions of dollars.Report
The cost is similar to the cost of nuclear power plants, in that it’s not actually very expensive to do but it’s very expensive to deal with the legal requirements proving that you did it properly (and the lengthy process necessary to be allowed to do it at all.)
Meaning, “it saves money if you don’t do this thing” is not actually a valid argument because the thing being expensive is a choice we’ve made, not an inherent part of it.Report
If you want to go with “The death penalty would be really cheap if we accepted the occasional killing of an innocent person” then I won’t stop you.
Try it out and let us know how receptive people are.Report
I think if we tried to do it any cheaper we wouldn’t be killing the occasional innocent person, but rather quite a few.Report
I just checked with the prosecutors. They said “waaaaay ahead of ya”.Report
This isn’t an argument that the death penalty is okay, it’s an argument that “the death penalty is expensive” is not a good way to go because a valid response is “okay, we shall pass a law saying that there can be no legal challenges to the process of court-determined sentencing by parties not directly involved, now the death penalty is no longer expensive”.Report
It’s worth thinking about what it means that it’s more expensive to carry out the death penalty than to keep someone in prison for life. Keeping someone in prison for decades is expensive, and execution itself doesn’t cost that much, so where does the extra cost come from?
Mostly it’s litigation of extra appeals. This should give you pause, because it means one of two things:
1. We’re spending too much time and money on frivolous litigation in death penalty cases.
2. We’re not litigating other murder cases enough to justify keeping someone in prison for life.
The greater expense of death penalty cases is not an argument against the death penalty, but evidence that either death penalty cases are more expensive than they need to be or that the legal system is cutting corners with other murder cases.
If the second is true, an interesting corollary is that if you’re convicted of a murder you really didn’t commit, being sentenced to death gives you the best chance of getting out of prison alive.Report
What’s the evidence that he’s innocent? Since the DNA on the knife came from the prosecutor handling it after the murder, it’s not exonerating. The fact that the witnesses were not particularly credible means that their testimony may not be great evidence of guilt, but also is not exonerating. He was in possession of some of the victim’s property, which seems to point pretty strongly to guilt.Report
I’m not sure executing someone based on circumstantial evidence, no matter how damning, is something the state ought to be doing.Report
“Circumstantial” doesn’t mean low-quality or unreliable. In any case, I was responding to a positive claim that he was probably innocent, not just a claim that the evidence against him doesn’t meet whatever arbitrarily high standard of certainty you would like to require.Report
So you believe Missouri was justified in killing him based on this?Report
Marcellus Williams was charged with Gayle’s murder. Prosecutors presented evidence that included testimonies of Williams’ former cellmate, girlfriend, and a man who testified to Williams selling him Gayle’s stolen laptop. Other evidence included Williams’s possession of items stolen from Gayle’s home.
A search of Williams’ car turned up a St. Louis Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator that had belonged to Gayle. A laptop stolen from Gayle was also recovered from a man who testified that Williams had sold the victim’s laptop to him.[3][6]
Williams confessed to three different people. He has a very long criminal record and was serving time for robbing a store. Supposedly one of the confessions included details not released to the press.
DNA doesn’t match him (as previously noted). Witnesses aren’t especially reliable in general.
I see nothing in terms of “proof he is innocent” other than “it’s all circumstantial evidence”.Report
To be fair there does seem to be evidence that he reformed after he was in prison and he had a really nasty childhood.Report
I’ve seen multiple arguments over the guy’s innocence versus whether the prosecutor screwed up.
The prosecutor screwing up is enough for me to say “yeah, we shouldn’t have the death penalty for this case” but, assuming the *OTHER* evidence acknowledged by the trial is, in fact, evidence, I’m not sure that the guy is innocent of the crime of which he was accused.
The prosecutor screwed up, though. That’s for sure.Report
This is the inevitable outcome of the Crime Is OUTTACONTROL hysteria.
Even if the prosecutors, judges, and Governor all sincerely believe the guy was guilty, which path carries the most political risk?
Executing 10 innocent people in case one is guilty, or letting one criminal escape the death sentence?Report
Visible disorder has attendant costs.
Who knew?Report
Oh.
“We can be excused for killing an innocent man. It’s really the fault of that guy who jumped a turnstile, you see.”Report
If you want police reform, try for police reform.
If you want to get rid of the death penalty, try to get rid of the death penalty.Report
You should thank Gavin Newsom for doing just that!
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/california-governor-gavin-newsom-orders-dismantling-of-californias-death-rowReport
I’ll tell Oscar Grant!Report
Kitty Genovese would be a more appropriate example.Report
Oh, so *NOW* you’re opposed to bringing up the police shooting people in the subway in a discussion of the death penalty.Report