Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection yesterday in Missouri. rear Republican Governor Mike Parson, the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court all refused to spare his life.
Prosecutors and the victim's family urged that Williams be dropped based on DNA evidence that showed he was in fact innocent. All legal stop-gap measures to prevent such tragedies have failed, highlighting major flaws in America's criminal law, the system designed to protect people with proven innocence from having their lives and liberty taken from them by the government.
On August 11, 1998Felicia “Licia” Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. Forensic evidence recovered at the scene included fingerprints, footprints, hair, and DNA on a meat cleaver. The footprints and DNA did not match Williams, and the fingerprints were lost by police.
Nevertheless, Williams was found guilty of murder after two prison witnesses claimed that Williams had confessed. In exchange for testifying against Williams, the two men secured a cash reward and a reduced sentence in their own cases. Additionally, six of the seven potential jurors who were black were removed from the jury pool.
In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the death penalty. Two years later, then-Governor Eric Greitens (R-Minn.) Williams was given a reprieve. New DNA testing from the handle of the murder weapon found Williams' DNA just hours before the execution. Many scientific experts concluded that the DNA did not belong to Williams. Governor Greitens appointed a commission to investigate Williams' request to commute his sentence to life in prison. However, when Parson takes office in 2023, he immediately disbanded the commission before it released its final report, saying it was “time to move forward” with the execution.
Meanwhile, upon learning that the knife had been contaminated by a former prosecutor who handled it without gloves, St. Louis County prosecutors offered Williams an “Alford plea,” which would have allowed him to plead guilty without admitting guilt and get his sentence commuted to life in prison. Both Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (a Republican) and the state Supreme Court blocked the deal, and Parson later rejected his request for clemency. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay his execution.
Statistics bear out the disturbing fact that America is executing innocent people, and that in many cases, their convictions are tainted by racial prejudice. According to the Death Penalty Information Center:At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have been retried with more experienced lawyers, different juries and access to scientific evidence and later found innocent. National Register of AcquittalsFurthermore, as of 2016, “based on acquittals, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.”
What is there in the law to slow or stop these frauds? Very little.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” but the Supreme Court in 1976 Gregg v. Georgia The court ruled that the death penalty is not cruel or unusual and therefore constitutional, four years after the Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion in 2004. Furman v. GeorgiaThe court ruled that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, but the ruling itself precedent To some extent, I accept the death penalty.
A sentence can be challenged on other grounds in two ways: by direct appeal, i.e. an automatic appeal of the conviction and sentence to a higher court, or by filing a separate civil action called a writ of habeas corpus. Habeas Corpus is Latin for “having the body.” A habeas corpus petition challenges a prisoner's detention or confinement, not a conviction, and is particularly important when the opportunity to raise the issue on direct appeal has expired.
Williams filed two habeas corpus petitions One cited incompetent counsel, the other sought DNA testing of the knife handle. Both were summarily denied. New DNA evidence was later discovered that showed Williams could not have committed the crimes. But even if that had been the basis for a habeas corpus petition, it may not have been enough.
In the 1993 incident Herrera v. CollinsThe Supreme Court has ruled that a death row inmate cannot obtain habeas corpus relief based on new evidence that he or she is in fact innocent unless that inmate can show that their constitutional rights were otherwise violated at some point in their state criminal proceedings, such as by jury misconduct or improperly admitted evidence. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his 2009 dissenting opinion: Davis case“The Court has never held that the Constitution prohibits the execution of a convicted defendant who received a full and fair trial but who later manages to convince a habeas corpus court that he is 'in fact' innocent.”
Somewhat surprisingly, in his majority opinion in Herrera, Chief Justice William Rehnquist raised the possibility of pardon to justify the harsh sentence. “Pardons have provided a 'safeguard' for our criminal justice system,” he wrote. “It is an immutable fact that our justice system, like the people who administer it, is fallible. But history is replete with examples of wrongfully convicted people who were later exonerated by evidence discovered and subsequently pardoned.”
In Missouri, Innocence is There was no basis for a pardon, but despite evidence of his innocence and the support of prosecutors and Gayle's family, Williams did not receive a pardon from the governor.A prolific pardonerAs of November 2023, Parson has denied roughly 2,400 pardon requests in Missouri and granted 618 pardons and 20 commutations.
Because the pardon decision cannot be appealed to a higher authority, Williams' life, like thousands of others like him across the country, is now subject to the whims of one man. In many statesState governors do not have the same unilateral power as Parson, but that fact only limits the use of pardons as a safety valve for wrongful convictions. The near complete lack of habeas corpus relief, even when proven innocent, means the United States incarcerates (and even executes) far too many wrongful people. Meanwhile, the prison system has an average of $80 billion One year.
This heads-you-win, tails-you-lose system of justice has no place in modern America, where technological advances can be used to minimize the number of people who pay a high price for crimes they did not commit. It takes enough public interest and will to insist on reform.
Kimberly WalesHe is the author of a new book “The Power of Pardon: How and Why the Amnesty System Works”
