This Is Why We Need to Abolish the Death Penalty
By Elias Khoury
September 26, 2024
Source: Jacobin
The lethal injection room at San Quentin State Prison, completed in 2010
The lethal injection room at San Quentin State Prison, completed in 2010
. - Wikimedia.
No more state-sanctioned barbarity. No more killing of innocent people like Marcellus Williams. Abolish the death penalty.
Last night, Missouri state authorities executed Marcellus Williams after the US Supreme Court refused to delay his killing. In 2001, a court convicted Williams for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a forty-two-year-old reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He was almost certainly innocent.
Since at least 2016, activists pled for exoneration, citing exculpatory genetic evidence. Williams’s DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon, one of Gayle’s kitchen knives. The execution was originally scheduled for August 2017, but these arguments led to the governor of Missouri postponing the killing just hours prior.
Absent concrete evidence, the prosecution relied upon the testimony of two witnesses. One was a jailhouse informant known for dishonesty. His account merely repeated known facts from news stories, fueling speculation over whether authorities had simply fed him the relevant information in exchange for a lighter sentence for his own crimes. The other incentivized witness, Williams’s ex-girlfriend, also had a history of deception.
Dodgy testimony is shockingly common in death penalty cases. Incentivized witnesses contribute to an estimated 14 percent of convictions that lead later to DNA exoneration. Studies show that disturbing numbers of death row inmates are innocent.
The death penalty is also brutal. And while it shouldn’t matter whether killing a prisoner is cheaper than housing them in prison, Equal Justice USA reports, “death penalty cases are . . . ten times more expensive than comparable non–death penalty cases.” The death penalty’s dissuasive effect is also suspect, with evidence from states that have banned the death penalty showing it’s an ineffective deterrent.
That fruitless barbarism is why wealthy nations including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, and Ireland have largely abandoned the practice. Yet executions in America continue apace, and not just at the state level. One of Donald Trump’s more underreported crimes in office was reviving the federal death penalty. In 2019, he terminated a sixteen-year federal moratorium on the practice. After losing the 2020 election, Trump went on a killing spree. He pushed through thirteen executions in his final months in office, ending 130 years of no federal death penalties during presidential transitions.
Another Trump presidency may be even worse. Project 2025, the now-infamous blueprint for his second term, propounds not just retaining but expanding federal executions.
“Convicted” and “guilty” aren’t synonyms. Just ask the family of Marcellus Williams, or even the prosecuting attorney who sought to overturn his case. Miscarriages of justice are shockingly common in the United States. Williams is just one example. There are many more. As the Equal Justice Initiative notes, “For every eight people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated.”
A national ban on executions is long overdue. Unfortunately, neither major presidential candidate is committed to delivering one. Trump’s position is heinous, and Kamala Harris repeatedly defended the death penalty in court as California’s attorney general. And while the Democratic Party called for ending federal executions in its 2020 platform, its platform this year is silent on the issue. Neither Harris nor Trump seem bothered by the continued state-sanctioned killings of innocent people like Marcellus Williams.
No more state-sanctioned barbarity. No more killing of innocent people like Marcellus Williams. Abolish the death penalty.
Last night, Missouri state authorities executed Marcellus Williams after the US Supreme Court refused to delay his killing. In 2001, a court convicted Williams for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a forty-two-year-old reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He was almost certainly innocent.
Since at least 2016, activists pled for exoneration, citing exculpatory genetic evidence. Williams’s DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon, one of Gayle’s kitchen knives. The execution was originally scheduled for August 2017, but these arguments led to the governor of Missouri postponing the killing just hours prior.
Absent concrete evidence, the prosecution relied upon the testimony of two witnesses. One was a jailhouse informant known for dishonesty. His account merely repeated known facts from news stories, fueling speculation over whether authorities had simply fed him the relevant information in exchange for a lighter sentence for his own crimes. The other incentivized witness, Williams’s ex-girlfriend, also had a history of deception.
Dodgy testimony is shockingly common in death penalty cases. Incentivized witnesses contribute to an estimated 14 percent of convictions that lead later to DNA exoneration. Studies show that disturbing numbers of death row inmates are innocent.
The death penalty is also brutal. And while it shouldn’t matter whether killing a prisoner is cheaper than housing them in prison, Equal Justice USA reports, “death penalty cases are . . . ten times more expensive than comparable non–death penalty cases.” The death penalty’s dissuasive effect is also suspect, with evidence from states that have banned the death penalty showing it’s an ineffective deterrent.
That fruitless barbarism is why wealthy nations including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, and Ireland have largely abandoned the practice. Yet executions in America continue apace, and not just at the state level. One of Donald Trump’s more underreported crimes in office was reviving the federal death penalty. In 2019, he terminated a sixteen-year federal moratorium on the practice. After losing the 2020 election, Trump went on a killing spree. He pushed through thirteen executions in his final months in office, ending 130 years of no federal death penalties during presidential transitions.
Another Trump presidency may be even worse. Project 2025, the now-infamous blueprint for his second term, propounds not just retaining but expanding federal executions.
“Convicted” and “guilty” aren’t synonyms. Just ask the family of Marcellus Williams, or even the prosecuting attorney who sought to overturn his case. Miscarriages of justice are shockingly common in the United States. Williams is just one example. There are many more. As the Equal Justice Initiative notes, “For every eight people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated.”
A national ban on executions is long overdue. Unfortunately, neither major presidential candidate is committed to delivering one. Trump’s position is heinous, and Kamala Harris repeatedly defended the death penalty in court as California’s attorney general. And while the Democratic Party called for ending federal executions in its 2020 platform, its platform this year is silent on the issue. Neither Harris nor Trump seem bothered by the continued state-sanctioned killings of innocent people like Marcellus Williams.
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