On Tuesday night, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams. It was a legally sanctioned murder.
As the Washington Post put it, he was “convicted of a 1998 murder that he said he did not commit.” The evidence suggested that Williams should not have met his end this way. Even the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office, which originally secured the death sentence, did not want that sentence carried out.
Williams’s fate was tangled up in a mess of mistakes and legalisms that obscured what should have been obvious. He died because the people who could and should have prevented his death, each for their own reasons, chose to look the other way.
That Williams was executed is an American tragedy, but he is not alone. The American death penalty system has shown itself to be riddled with errors. Miscarriages of justice of the kind that occurred in the Williams case are legion, though the precise number is not known.
This is because we don’t have a good handle on how many innocent people have been convicted of capital crimes. Law Professor Samuel Gross and his colleagues note that “There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place.”
However, we do know that “Since 1973, at least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated.” That means for every eight executions carried out in the past 50 years, one person has been freed from death row.
Beyond that, a 2014, National Academy of Sciences report estimated that “at least 4.1 percent of defendants sentenced to death in the United States are innocent … that the number of innocent people is likely more than double the number of those actually exonerated and freed from death row.”
Those who are exonerated are the lucky ones. Others, like Williams, have not been so lucky.
The Death Penalty Information Center lists 20 cases in which someone was put to death despite “strong evidence of innocence.” In addition, the center notes that there are many cases in which someone who was executed was subsequently declared innocent, and sometimes even granted a posthumous pardon.
For example, “In Maryland in 2001, Governor Paris Glendening issued a pardon to John Snowden, a Black man who had been hanged in 1919 for the rape and murder of the wife of a prominent White businessman. Two key trial witnesses had recanted their testimony and before the hanging, eleven of the twelve jurors had pled for mercy.”
Or in 2009, when “South Carolina pardoned two African-American men, Thomas and Meeks Griffin, who had been electrocuted in 1915 for murdering a white Confederate War veteran.”
One wonders how soon Williams will join this shocking list of people whose executions we now recognize and acknowledge as shameful mistakes. And we should be troubled by the bloodthirsty quality to Missouri’s insistence on going forward with an execution so shadowed by legal errors.
Though there is no constitutional barrier to executing the innocent, this country would be better served if it adopted a policy wherein executions do not go forward if there exists any doubt about the guilt of the person condemned to death. But we are a long way from that.
In the meantime, let’s look at who turned their back on Williams in his last days, and who failed to embrace that standard.
Let’s start with the United States Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the court refused to stop his execution. Given the pro-death-penalty record of the court’s current majority, that did not come as a surprise. But the majority didn’t even give Williams the courtesy of an explanation for their decision.
They let Missouri do the grisly deed in spite of the fact that, as a report on Scotusblog put it, “Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated that they would have put his execution on hold,” and the fact that the victim’s family did not want Williams executed.
In addition, the governor of Missouri, Mike Parson (R), refused to stop the execution. However, unlike the United States Supreme Court, Parson seemed eager to explain why he was content to let it proceed. “Capital punishment cases are some of the hardest issues we have to address in the Governor’s Office,” Parson said in denying clemency. Given what Williams was facing, this statement seems a little self-absorbed. After all, his difficulty was nothing in comparison with the suffering that Williams encountered as he contemplated being put to death for a crime he has always maintained he did not commit.
Parson went on to say, using a cliche all too familiar among those who want to deny responsibility when they allow someone to be put to death, “I follow the law and trust the integrity of our judicial system.” The governor then offered a recitation of the “facts” of Williams’s case that ignored both the errors that were made in that case and the fact that the prosecutor’s office was now owning up to those errors.
“Mr. Williams,” the governor said, “has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims.”
Then, following the playbook popularized at the national level by former President Trump and his MAGA followers — with whom Parson has frequently found common cause — the governor attacked the media. “I also want to add how deeply disturbed we’ve been about how this case has been covered….I would just implore the media to do their due diligence and not rely on the sole claims of individuals who have a personal or monetary stake in this case.”
Finally, the Missouri Supreme Court bears its share of responsibility for not righting the miscarriage of justice done in the Williams case. In refusing to stop his execution, the court downplayed the significance of the prosecutor’s confession of error in this case.
While prosecutorial misconduct has led to many convictions of innocent people in capital cases, prosecutors rarely, if ever, admit mistakes. That is because, as a 2002 CNN report suggests, “of how politics affects the death penalty. Up until now, anyway, undoing a death sentence was akin to political suicide for an elected district attorney or state attorney general, or for any state official with ambitions for re-election or higher office.”
At the end day, the Missouri Supreme Court seemed more interested in reminding Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor since 2019, that it — not he — had the final word as to the legality of what would happen to Williams. The court wrote that it “is not bound by the [State’s] confession of error” and that Bell “cannot concede constitutional error.”
What happened to Williams fits a sad pattern in this country’s use of capital punishment. But increasingly Americans are paying attention to the fate of people like Williams and turning away from the death penalty because of the unfairness and injustice associated with it. Someday, hopefully, we may look back at the tragedy of the Williams case and conclude that his death helped to spur the end of the death penalty in this country.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.