Marcellus Williams Photo: Social media
Decent people around the country and far beyond are outraged at the “legal” lynching of Marcellus Williams—a 55-year-old Black man (who became a poet while imprisoned), executed by lethal injection by the state of Missouri, September 24, for the murder of a white woman in 1998.
Williams was executed in spite of calls from both the prosecutor's office and the victim's family for a stay. And in the days before the execution, there were protests across the state, and more than a million people contacted the governor's office demanding he stop the execution.
Overwhelming Evidence That Williams Was Wrongly Convicted
Williams was convicted in 2001 and given the death penalty for the brutal stabbing death of Felicia Gayle, a white social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, in 1998. Yet the evidence that he was wrongly convicted was overwhelming.
The original prosecutor improperly struck six of the seven potential Black jurors, resulting in a jury with 11 white and only one Black member. The crime scene produced not a shred of evidence linking Williams to the crime. The prosecution’s only evidence came from two “witnesses”—Williams's ex-girlfriend and a jailhouse informant, both described as known fabricators. They told their lies after being promised $10,000 rewards and leniency in their own cases.1
In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the death sentence. Two years later, then-Governor Eric Greitens granted Williams a reprieve just hours before his execution. And based on new DNA evidence from the handle of the murder weapon, Greitens created a “panel of five retired judges to investigate the DNA evidence.” For six years, the panel combed through the findings. But when the new governor (a former sheriff), Mike Parson, took over in 2023, he immediately disbanded the panel before it could issue a final report. Parson declared that it was “time to move forward” with the execution.
In January, 2024, St. Louis County’s top prosecutor filed a motion to throw out Williams's conviction, stating that prosecutors had earlier made “constitutional errors” that contributed to Williams’s murder conviction and that "new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is actually innocent." Three separate experts “have reviewed the DNA testing performed on the knife and each has independently concluded that Mr. Williams is excluded as the source of the male DNA on the handle of the murder weapon.” In light of these findings, the family of the victim publicly opposed Williams’s execution (according to the Midwest Innocence Project).
In late August, analysis of the DNA evidence on the kitchen knife used to kill Gayle showed that it had been contaminated with DNA from the original prosecutor and investigator in the case. In light of the test, the St. Louis County prosecutor and Williams's attorneys agreed he would take an “Alford plea,” a deal that would have allowed him to admit the prosecutors had enough evidence to get a guilty verdict but would have reduced his sentence to life without parole. Williams's attorneys at the time said that agreement would have given them more time to pursue his exoneration.
Yet none of this prevented the six Christian fascist members of the U.S. Supreme Court from refusing to grant a stay. President Biden's press secretary responded to a question about Williams' case by saying, “The president has long talked about his serious concerns about the death penalty … whether it is consistent with the values fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.” And then Biden did not lift a finger to stop the execution.
In the final days before the scheduled execution, the Missouri State Supreme Court denied Williams's appeal. And the final statement from the governor, ignoring the mountain of evidence that Williams was wrongly convicted, was this: “Nothing from the real facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence. As such, Mr. Williams' punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”
From KKK Lynchings to Disproportionate Use of the Death Penalty
Missouri, and this country as a whole, has a long, ugly history of lynchings during the 19th and 20th centuries. As lynchings declined in the first part of the 20th century, death penalty executions became more common. And they, along with murder by police, replaced lynching as a tool of racial violence against Black people.
Across the country, the use of the death penalty has always been, and continues to be, disproportionately used against Black people and other people of color. The death row population is over 41 percent Black, even though Black people make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population. If you’re convicted of a federal offense, on average, you will serve more time—for the exact same crime—if you’re Black than if you’re white. And the lives of white victims are valued much higher as well. Studies show that murdering a white victim is many times more likely to lead to a death sentence than those convicted of killing Black or Latino people.2
After the passage of Clinton's infamous 1994 Crime Bill—which then-Senator Joe Biden took credit for writing, proudly calling it the “Biden Crime Bill”—60 new offenses were added to the list of those eligible for the federal death penalty. In the five years after its passage, 74 percent of defendants given death penalty recommendations by federal prosecutors were people of color—44 percent were Black and 21 percent Latino.3
What kind of a system is this, that proves day after day—from the highest levels of power and authority on down—that white supremacy has been sewn into the fabric of this country from the days of slavery down to today? A system that has to be done away with at the earliest possible time—through an actual revolution. And as revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said:
There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.
