This Is Why We Need to Abolish the Death Penalty
No more state-sanctioned barbarity. No more killing of innocent people like Marcellus Williams. Abolish the death penalty.
Wealthy nations including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, and Ireland have largely abandoned the death penalty. Yet executions in America continue apace. (Greg Smith / Corbis via Getty Images)
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.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.