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…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Elias Khoury
