In America you can serve 24 years for a crime you didn’t do, then when DNA evidence exonerates you, they’ll still schedule your execution for September 24th, 2024. This is Marcellus Williams.
If your only real evidence is witness testimony the death sentence should be fully off the table. It’s insane that we’re putting people to death based on someone’s words. If you don’t have absolutely full proof evidence that someone commited a crime there is absolutely no justification for erasing their existence. I am absolutely sick and ashamed to be an American when I read these stories.
I’m not altogether opposed to the death penalty for certain crimes, but I think the evidence, chain of custody, record keeping, etc. needs to be absolutely immaculate to an almost cartoonishly paranoid extent before the death penalty can be on the table.
Like if the suspect was off camera for even a moment between the moment the crime was committed, that’s enough to make it intelligible for the death penalty because you can’t be absolutely certain they weren’t swapped for a body double when they stepped out of frame.
And that’s before you even get into the absolute insane security and storage requirements needed for that footage to ensure it couldn’t have been tampered with.
If there is any theoretically possible scenario, no matter how absurdly unlikely it may be, where the person in custody isn’t the same person who committed the crime, then you can’t seek the death penalty.
People don’t commit murder because they’re making a careful decision and figure the penalty of life in prison is worth the risk, but death might not be.
IMO the death penalty is only useful for social murder. The CEO who signs off on the reduction of safety protocols at a baby formula plant, resulting in numerous infant deaths or the pharma exec who raises prices of a lifesaving drug on the other hand is likely to weigh risk vs reward.
I don’t care about the death penalty as a deterrent. I care about it as a way to deal with certain people who will continue to pose a threat to others and for whom there are no other viable or humane options to rehabilitate them or otherwise render them safe to be around other people.
You can deal with a greedy pharma exec by seizing assets, injunctions against them participating in the pharmaceutical industry or serving in particular roles, stricter laws, regulations, and oversight on the pharma industry as a whole, etc.
You can’t just regulate someone out of being dangerously emotionally disturbed, and if they can’t be rehabilitated, what other viable options do you have left to keep them from harming others? You can lock them up in solitary, or perhaps take some drastic medical interventions like sedating them, lobotomizing them, or I guess chopping off their arms and legs, and at the point you’re considering those sorts of options, the ethics of just killing them start to sound much more attractive.
The NAACP president has called on the Missouri governor to stop the September 24th scheduled execution of Marcellus Williams. You can help by taking 5 seconds to sign this Innocence Project petition.
https://innocenceproject.org/petitions/stop-the-execution-of-marcellus-williams-an-innocent-man
Jesus fuck! How are we failing our families so badly that this project has SO, SO many petitions?!
Because nobody with the ability to change it wants to change it. They don’t see criminals as people. And it doesn’t matter that the person is not actually a criminal. They somehow think that innocent people being free shows them as somehow being soft on crime, because it requires compassion which is clearly a weakness, or something they just don’t experience, because they’re a sociopath. There’s a reason so many “successful” people show sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, it lets them do things others aren’t willing to do.
Paywall
JEFFERSON CITY — The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday will hear an appeal in the case of Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, who is set to be executed Tuesday after a circuit judge upheld his 2001 murder conviction last week.
Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection for the brutal killing of former Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia “Lisha” Gayle Picus in 1998 in her University City home.
Matthew Jacober, special counsel for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s office, filed the appeal earlier this week with the state’s high court, asking it to review St. Louis County Judge Bruce Hilton’s ruling upholding Williams’ conviction.
In response, the court asked Jacober to explain why the state’s highest court has jurisdiction.
Jacober, in his response, pointed to the procedural history of the Missouri Supreme Court handling death penalty cases. He also noted that the state Supreme Court has already taken up two separate filings in the last two months related to Williams’ effort to prove his innocence.
“Certainly, the court would not at this stage disclaim jurisdiction over a case involving a sentence of death now, after having already exercised its original jurisdiction to grant extraordinary relief to the Office of the Attorney General and order the very hearing that would be at issue in this appeal,” Jacober wrote in his response.
Lawyers for Williams and from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which has opposed William’s efforts, will each have 15 minutes to present their arguments to the judges on Monday.
Williams’ attorneys have also filed appeals with two other courts.
They first asked the Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District to reconsider its 2010 denial of Williams’ claim that a trial prosecutor unconstitutionally removed Black prospective jurors because of their race. The almost 400-page motion presented new evidence from trial prosecutor Keith Larner’s testimony during a day-long Aug. 28 innocence hearing.
Williams, who is Black, was sentenced to death in 2001 by a jury made up of 11 white people and one Black person.
United States District Judge Rodney Sippel on Tuesday denied that motion because he said he could not rule on it without permission from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He also wrote that Larner’s new testimony did not warrant a review of those claims and his previous ruling.
Williams also asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to halt his execution and review a claim that his due process was violated when Gov. Mike Parson broke up a review board before it could reach a conclusion about his innocence.
The U.S. Supreme Court had not filed a response as of Friday morning.
Williams has unsuccessfully appealed and challenged his first-degree murder conviction for more than two decades.
In January, Bell’s office filed to vacate Williams’ conviction, arguing he was innocent.
Eight months later, Hilton heard hours of testimony rehashing evidence that focused on contamination of DNA on the murder weapon, potential racial bias in the jury selection and, in Williams’ lawyer’s view, the unreliable witnesses on which much of his case hung.
Hilton said that Williams’ claim of innocence “unraveled” when an Aug. 19 DNA report showed the DNA profiles on the murder weapon were consistent with Larner and an investigator on the original case — which contradicted previous claims that the killer’s DNA was on the knife and would prove Williams was innocent.
Williams and his defense team have maintained his innocence, and have repeatedly pointed out that no physical evidence connects him to the crime other than a stolen laptop he sold to a neighbor.
The prosecution’s two main trial witnesses — Williams’ former cellmate and an ex-girlfriend — have since died.
