This excerpt is from a piece by Keith Thirion that originally ran in Democracy Docket on November 1, 2024.
Marcellus Williams should be alive right now. If justice means anything to our country, it should at least mean that we don’t execute people who are likely innocent.
Yet somehow, the conservatives who make up the Missouri Supreme Court supermajority, the Missouri attorney general, the Missouri governor and the U.S. Supreme Court supermajority all concluded that Williams must die.
It didn’t matter that Williams’ constitutional right to due process was violated every step of the way. Not only was there no evidence connecting Williams to the murder he was accused of, but in fact there was DNA evidence exonerating him. It didn’t matter that the prosecutor struck prospective Black jurors to create an almost all-white jury. It didn’t matter that now some of those jurors, that prosecutor’s office and the victim’s own family opposed his execution. Williams was still executed on Sept. 24, less than two hours after the 6-3 Supreme Court order approved it.
How did we get to this point in which so many administrators of justice could willingly ignore all of the flaws in this conviction and insist upon the finality of the death penalty? What does it say that they care more about the finality of the original conviction and sentence than whether to consider all of the essential information that became available since? What does it say that they care more about preserving an unjust system riddled with racism than preserving the rights — and life — of a likely innocent man?