From a Hurting Heart: On the Execution of Marcellus Williams

Laura Finley

 September 27, 2024
FacebookTwitte

RedditEmail

Marcellus Williams.

There’s no other way to write this outside of the extensive curse words I want to use: What, the actual, hell? How on earth does the United States have such a deeply flawed system of injustice that the state of Missouri executed a man that both the defense and prosecution believed was innocent? My heart is heavy. How about you?

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday, September 24. He was convicted of a murder committed in 1998. It was apparently a burglary gone wrong that resulted in the killing of former newspaper reporter Lisha Gayle. Williams was sentenced to death.

There is significant evidence that Williams was wrongly convicted. The original prosecutor, Wesley Bell, sought to block the execution out of concerns about the trial. Bell had concern about two of the primary trial witnesses as well as how prosecutors excluded Black jurors. Further, there was no DNA evidence tying Williams to the crime scene. In fact, the DNA found on the knife used in the murder was actually from a prosecutor and investigator who processed the scene without wearing gloves. Repeated DNA testing found no connection to Williams.

The victim’s family as well as several jurors who served on the trial expressed doubt about Williams’ guilt and wished to spare his life. Inexplicably, none of this was enough to commute Williams’ sentence to life in prison because it did not establish his “actual innocence.”

The witnesses who did testify, as is often the case, were seemingly trying to game this messed up system. One who shared a jail cell with Williams and to whom he allegedly confessed, had been convicted of felonies and offered reward to testify. Likewise, a girlfriend who testified likely falsified her claims for financial gain.

Williams’ case is yet another example of how the system of capital punishment is broken beyond repair. The absurdity that everyone can agree that someone is innocent but that bureaucratic issues prevail is not a sign of a healthy system of justice.

I care a lot that Marcellus Williams was apparently wrongly convicted and certainly wrongly executed. We should all, because executions take place in our names with our tax dollars. We need to speak up, not just when the system gets it so horrifically wrong, as it did here, but because if we do not, our silence is endorsement that the state killing people is OK. I cannot live with that. I hope others cannot as well.

As many have pointed out, making a mistake in convicting someone is a fixable problem–unless the punishment is the death penalty. Then a fix is forever impossible. Why would we operate this way?

I am feeling so distraught, yet I am still trying to see a glimmer of hope. As a college professor, I am so fortunate to work with amazing students who I think will do better. I have the most wonderfully smart daughter who I know will be part of the solution.

I can’t stop crying. We can’t stop trying.

Laura Finley, Ph.D., teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.

The Judicial Murder of Marcellus Williams

Jeffrey St. Clair

 September 27, 2024
FacebookTwitter

RedditEmail

Marcellus ‘Khaliifah’ Williams. Photograph: Courtesy of Marcellus Williams’s legal team.

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams on Tuesday night despite knowing he was most likely innocent of the crime he was condemned for.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though he’d consistently professed his innocence of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle.

The State of Missouri put Marcellus Williams to death by injecting him with a toxic chemical compound known to cause extreme pain and suffering.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the prosecutorial office that put him on trial determined that his conviction should be vacated.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after several jurors who voted to convict and sentence him to death said they now regretted their verdict and wanted to see him freed.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the state admitted that the physical evidence used to convict him had been mishandled and tainted by a sloppy police investigation.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though there was no physical evidence to tie him to the murder scene.

The State of Missouri executed Williams, although the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense.

The State of Missouri executed Williams despite the fact that prospective jurors in the case who were black were arbitrarily excluded from the jury. 

The State of Missouri executed Williams even after it was revealed that his prosecutor excluded a Black juror because he said the juror “looked like Williams’ brother.”

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though his jury consisted of 11 whites and one black.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the two witnesses against him were known liars.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the two witnesses against him were both felons.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the two witnesses against him changed their stories multiple times before the trial.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after both witnesses against him learned of a $10,000 reward offered by the family of the victim.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though both witnesses against him were given lenient treatment in pending legal cases.

The State of Missouri executed Williams, although false testimony from “incentivized witnesses” is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though one of the witnesses against him was a jailhouse informant.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though eleven of the 54 individuals exonerated in Missouri were convicted with the use of testimony from jailhouse informants.

The State of Missouri executed Williams despite data that defendants in St. Louis who were convicted in capital cases were 3.5 times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim was white and the defendant white, as in Williams’s case.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though he’d transformed his life while in prison, becoming an imam, a mentor to other prisoners, and a poet. Even on death row, Williams remained, according to his children, a “dutiful” father.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though nine years ago, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed his execution and appointed a special master to review DNA testing of potentially exculpatory evidence. 

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though DNA testing conducted in 2016 showed that Williams was not the source of male DNA found on the murder weapon.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though he was granted a stay by then-Governor Eric Greitens on August 22, 2017, after eating his last meal and just hours before he was scheduled to be put to death.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after the new Governor, Mike Parson Parsons, illegally dissolved the Board of Inquiry before it had a chance to issue its report on the DNA evidence that cleared Williams of the murder.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though St. Louis District Attorney Wesley Bell said that the DNA results and lack of other evidence in the case “cast inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.” 

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though the DNA expert who reviewed the evidence in the case asked, “How innocent do you have to be to avoid being executed?”

The State of Missouri executed Williams even after Williams and prosecutors reached an agreement that he would enter an Alford plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life without parole. (The plea was not an admission of guilt and would not have prohibited him from appealing his conviction.)

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though a judge approved the plea deal.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though Gayle’s family urged that his life be spared. (The desires of families of murder victims for retributive justice are often used by prosecutors to justify the execution of death row inmates. But when these families oppose killing people in the name of their murdered loved ones, their wishes and moral beliefs are ignored.)

The State of Missouri executed Williams despite any evidence that executions are a deterrent to homicides or other crimes.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after 6 “pro-life” justices of the Supreme Court refused to issue a stay to review evidence proving his innocence.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after a Supreme Court that has granted only 11 stays of execution out of 270 requests in the last ten years denied his. 

The State of Missouri executed Williams after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to speak out against the execution of an innocent black man.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though at least 200 people on death row have been exonerated since the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1973.

The State of Missouri executed Williams after the Democratic Party removed its opposition to the death penalty from its platform. The 2020 and 2016 Democratic platforms called for the abolition of the death penalty, which they described as “a cruel and unusual form of punishment” which “has no place” in the nation.

The State of Missouri executed Williams, knowing that the state’s Attorney General’s Office has opposed every innocence case for the last 30 years.

The State of Missouri executed Williams even though at least 20 likely innocent people have been executed in the US since 1989. Their names are:

+ Carlos DeLuna (Texas, executed 1989)

+ Ruben Cantu (Texas, executed 1993)

+ Larry Griffin (Missouri, executed 1995)

+ Joseph O’Dell (Virginia, executed 1997)

+ David Spence (Texas, executed 1997)

+ Leo Jones (Florida, executed 1998)

+ Gary Graham (Texas, executed 2000)

+ Claude Jones (Texas, executed 2000)

+ Cameron Todd Willingham (Texas, executed 2004)

+ Sedley Alley (Tennessee, executed 2006)

+ Troy Davis (Georgia, executed 2011)

+ Lester Bower (Texas, executed 2015)

+ Brian Terrell (Georgia, executed 2015)

+ Richard Masterson (Texas, executed 2016)

+ Robert Pruett (Texas, executed 2017)

+ Carlton Michael Gary (Georgia, executed 2018)

+ Domineque Ray (Alabama, executed 2019)

+ Larry Swearingen (Texas, executed 2019)

+ Walter Barton (Missouri, executed 2020)

+ Nathaniel Woods (Alabama, executed 2020)

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, making him the 21st person executed in the US since the reinstitution of the death penalty despite credible evidence of their innocence.

The State of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams and plans to execute Christopher Leroy Collings in December.

The State of Missouri plans to execute another innocent man, Robert Roberson, on October 17.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

Japanese man's acquittal after 48 years on death row puts nation's death penalty policy under spotlight

By Esther Linder with wires

ABC. AU



Iwao Hakamada was on death row for decades before his murder conviction was overturned. (Kyodo News via AP)

On Thursday, an 88-year-old Japanese man named Iwao Hakamada was acquitted of murder and released after 48 years on death row.

He could be the longest-serving death row inmate in the world, human rights groups say.

He was accused of murdering four people in 1966 but was exonerated after the evidence that initially convicted him was found to be planted or fabricated by prosecutors.

The case has sparked questions about the use of capital punishment in Japan and across the world.
What was the case against him?


Mr Hakamada was convicted of murder for the 1966 killing of an executive and three of his family members, and their home in central Japan being set on fire.
Lawyers, prosecutors, jurors and more believed Marcellus Williams may have been innocent. Missouri executed him anyway

The 55-year-old was sentenced to death in 2001 for killing Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter found dead in her gated community home.

He was sentenced to death in 1968 by Shizuoka District Court, but was not executed due to the lengthy appeal and retrial process in Japan's notoriously slow-paced criminal justice system.

Following his arrest, Mr Hakamada initially denied the accusations, but then confessed. He later said his confession was forced during a violent interrogation by police.

"I have nothing to do with the case … I am innocent," he wrote in a letter to his mother while on trial in 1967.

He spent 48 years behind bars — more than 45 of them on death row — making him the world's longest-serving death row inmate, according to Amnesty International.
Acquitted after 48 years


Mr Hakamada was forced to wait 27 years for his appeal for a retrial to be heard, which was initially denied before a second request was granted in 2014.

A series of appeals through Japan's complex judicial system resulted in a Supreme Court decision to retry Mr Hakamada in October 2023, with the final decision being made this week.

On Thursday, the court concluded that five pieces of bloodstained clothing that investigators claimed to have found hidden in a tank of fermented soybean paste, or miso, a year after Mr Hakamada's arrest must have been planted, and did not match the accused's DNA.


Supporters of Iwao Hakamada celebrated outside the Japanese court after the 88-year-old was acquitted of murder. (Kyodo via Reuters)

Thursday's ruling also blamed the prosecutors for forcing Mr Hakamada into a false confession citing an "inhumane" interrogation lasting days.

Hideyo Ogawa, Mr Hakamada's lawyer, praised the ruling as "groundbreaking" for clearly stating that the prosecution fabricated key evidence at the beginning.

The court found that Mr Hakamada was not the culprit, Mr Ogawa said.

After Mr Hakamada was sentenced to death, he expressed fear and anger at being falsely accused.

"When I go to sleep in a soundless solitary cell every night, I sometimes cannot help cursing God," he wrote to his family.

"I have not done anything wrong .


"What a cold-blooded act to inflict such cruelty on me."

Most of Mr Hakamada's 48 years in prison, before being released in 2014 pending his retrial, were spent in solitary confinement.
Death penalty as punishment


Japan, alongside the US and Singapore, is one of a few democracies that continue to execute people as punishment for some crimes.

The case has drawn attention to and criticism of Japan's legal system.
UN experts call for first US execution by nitrogen gas to be halted

Photo shows A low angle view of the outside fence of Elmore Correctional Facility at daytime

Plans to execute a convicted murderer by asphyxiating him with nitrogen may amount to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" or even torture, experts say.

Japan Bar Association chairperson Reiko Fuchigami urged the government and parliament on Thursday to promptly take steps to abolish the death penalty and lower hurdles for retrials.

"The Hakamada case clearly shows the cruelty of the wrongful death penalty, and the tragedy should never be repeated," she said.

An overwhelming majority of the Japanese public supports executions, according to a survey by the government.

Executions are carried out in secrecy in Japan and prisoners are not informed of their fate until the morning they are hanged.

In 2007, Japan began disclosing the names of those executed and some limited details of their crimes.

According to Amnesty International, 115 people are on death row in Japan. The last execution was carried out in July 2022.

The organisation's East Asia researcher, Boram Jang, said the Hakamada verdict was a "an important recognition of the profound injustice" Mr Hakamada endured.

“As we celebrate this long-overdue day of justice for Hakamada, we are reminded of the irreversible harm caused by the death penalty," she said.

"We strongly urge Japan to abolish the death penalty to prevent this from happening again."

Amnesty International estimated 1,153 people were executed in 2023, excluding China, with the majority of executions happening in Iran.

Australia abolished the death penalty in 1985. A federal law passed in 2010 prohibits its reintroduction.

The Class Struggle in the US Since the Civil War

Richard Moser

September 27, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

An innovative, wide-ranging, thought-provoking account of class struggle in the US since the Civil War, Jon Jeter’s latest book Class War in America: How the Elites Divide The Nation by Asking: Are You A Worker Or Are You White? is both redemptive and damning. He has rendered the tale forcefully but with a charm and grace that frees the reader to face the terrible beauty of class war in America. It’s a story that pulls you in and doesn’t let you go, not just because it’s so well done and so deeply researched but because Jeter guides us on an exploration of the primary issue confronting class struggle in the US — the long and winding relationship between race and class.

The question that reverberates throughout this book is for workers of all colors, but for people like me, as children of the white working class, we must confront our own deeply contradictory position:

America’s interpretation of capitalism…demands a hard choice from its European settlers: Are you a worker, or are you white?*

How we answer that question means everything.

New History 

The first thing I love about this book is that I have learned much about US history since the Civil War. Jeter has revised the accepted timelines and interpretations by excavating tales rarely told and events on the periphery of historical awareness. As a people’s journalist, his chapters also give voice — and often the last word — to the otherwise unheard.

Jeter does not offer a simple linear narration as he travels through time and space. Jumping back and forth between historical eras with ease, the author leaves no doubt about the relevance of his material or the persistence of racial betrayal or class solidarity. Some readers may suffer from jet lag or whiplash, but buckle up—it’s a new kind of history that we desperately need.

Jeter’s account brings us up to the present (with insight on more topics than this review can touch on). He reveals the pattern of solidarity and betrayal emerging during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Jeter introduces us to the question that informs his work by telling the story of two crucial events—the Battle of the Crater and the rise of a third party, the Virginia “Readjusters.”

The Battle of the Crater was a botched, suicidal nightmare in which white racial solidarity triumphed, and Black soldiers were murdered by their own “brothers in arms.”

And then, in a horrific demonstration of racial solidarity, scores of white Union soldiers turned their bayonets, knives, and sidearms on the Colored troops they had fought alongside just moments earlier. “The cry was raised that we would all be killed if we were captured among the negroes,” one white soldier recalled later.

Jeter continues:

A white proletariat literally dug a hole for itself and managed to escape only with the help of the African Americans they had shunned and marginalized. But once the white settler has climbed from the chasm, they do not repay their Black rescuers with gratitude but a knife thrust in the back…. the worst racial massacre of the Civil War shines a spotlight on our maddening national metanarrative…[E]very victory is undone, every insurrection put down, with the 99 percent in full retreat…and the betrayal of a radical Black vanguard by their white allies who—like the Union soldiers at the Battle of the Crater—ineluctably choose “race” when the going gets tough.

Yet, the author also finds a very different flower in the same Virginia soil—a brief but shining example of the rise of a people’s third party—the Readjusters. The Readjusters championed the working class’s interests, actually got things done, and provided a model for bi-racial movements in other southern states.

The Readjusters remain the most powerful independent political movement in American history…. seizing control of the state legislature, the Congressional delegation, both U.S. Senate seats, city halls in Richmond, Danville, Petersburg, and the governor’s mansion, all within a single election cycle.

The Readjusters bucked hard times, white supremacy, and the bankers to form a biracial political party.  They worked with Black Republicans to push through real reforms in 1880s Virginia.

Class solidarity or racial betrayal? So, the story of Class War in America unfolds.

The Mid-20th Century

Jeter makes a compelling case that the defense of the Scottsboro Boys was the catalyst for America’s last period of reform and revolution that lasted from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. An international solidarity movement rose to defend a group of innocent young black men who faced legal lynching after they were falsely accused of rape. Cross-racial solidarity in the face of this injustice and the visionary work of the Communist Party that lead the defense put the New Deal back into the hands of everyday people and a principled left opposition where it belongs.

[T]he arrest of the Scottsboro Boys triggered 50 years of tumult in America’s class relations, as a critical mass of whites forfeited their racial privileges to join with their Black co-workers and fight the wealthiest 1 percent who oppressed them all. Until roughly the moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s 40th president, employees went blow for blow with their employers, modernizing the state in the process.

As we know, this revolution did not occur unopposed. By the mid-1970s, a corporate counterattack was launched to lower wages, impose austerity, and breathe new life into the embattled empire.

Chicago, Counter-Revolution and the Election of 2024

Jeter makes clear that the book’s central question is not posed to whites alone.

The people of Chicago made a last stand against the resurgence of corporate control by organizing a multi-year effort to elect Harold Washington mayor in 1983. But, as the half-century of upheaval and progress waned, a class of elite Black politicians rose to “isolate the vanguard of the revolution: the African American working class.”

If there is one book to read before the 2024 election, this would be it.

Jeter’s recounting of Chicago politics puts Obama and his hand-picked successor, Kamla Harris, in their larger political context. The grassroots movement that put Harold Washington in the Mayor’s office was overshadowed by the rise of well-financed, well-connected Black politicians, including one who would one day occupy the White House.

Absent an understanding of Chicago’s first Black mayor you cannot begin to make sense of the Republic’s first Black president. Obama owed his electoral triumphs to a top-down political movement that was antithetical to the grassroots organizing that produced Washington, and each man governed accordingly. As such, the pro-business policies of Black politicians such as Obama, Kamala Harris, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, New Jersey’s U.S. Senator Cory Booker, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser…can only be explained as a response to an insurrection, and the radical Black polity that was its engine. Or, to put it another way, Obama was the figurehead for a counterrevolution that takes dead aim at its foes in the American working class.

If, indeed, “Obama was the figurehead for a counterrevolution that takes dead aim at its foes in the American working class,” then 2024 offers us no real choice between the two corporate parties, both hostile to everyday people.  We can be sure that war and austerity will continue regardless of which corporate candidate wins. Both poverty and the poverty draft increase the short-term value of white privilege, making it an asset fewer whites are willing to sacrifice to the rigors of class struggle — despite the fact that a much bigger prize awaits a working class who can tell friends from enemies. After all, Jeter asks, “What good would it be to be white in a country where everyone’s needs are met?”

And so, meeting our needs will never be on the agenda of the Democrats or Republicans. Austerity is their strategy to maximize profits, preempt dissent, and perpetuate white ethnonationalism. As we are divided, so are we conquered.

Hey, What’s the Big Idea? 

Jeter convincingly shows that — in the battles of the class war — we do not have an either-or choice between race and class.  Class has multiple meanings in America: multiracial solidarity is the feature of class struggle at its high water mark, and white treachery is the feature of class struggle when the bosses win and we lose.

This thoroughly dialectical account shows that race and class do not work as static opposites but as two possibilities of a single revolutionary process.

In Jeter’s telling, and among the contemporary opposition, there are two master narratives: the colonial/settler narrative and socialist or anarchist-inspired class analysis. Jeter’s contribution, and a significant one it is, has shown us that great storytelling can weave both strands into a single tapestry. Jon Jeter has done his part and paid his dues by moving us closer to the day that workers will answer the call to join and win the Class War in America.

*All quotes are from Jon Jeter, Class War in America.

Richard Moser writes at befreedom.co where this article first appeared.