Marcellus Williams Is Dead, And We Are All Culpable For His Unjust Execution

America's refusal to demand an end to the death penalty reached a stunning new low this evening when the Supreme Court declined to act.

The face of an innocent man executed by a bloodthirsty penal system.

Marcellus Williams was executed tonight by the state of Missouri in a case where, even by our degraded standards of justice and law, the outcome was shocking. Shocking because the prosecutors and the defense attorneys were both on the same side asking for the execution to be stayed and the conviction overturned. Shocking because a former governor, MAGA favorite Eric Greitens, had moved to vacate the death penalty for Williams, but his successor removed the stay. Shocking because the state attorney general overrode the district court, the county prosecutor, and common sense to barrel forward with this execution.

And shocking that the Catholic majority on the Supreme Court, who has gone above and beyond to prove their fealty to the so-called “pro-life” position, completely cast aside those same religious beliefs in this case. Not that I believe one’s faith should decide matters of secular law, but the decision to blatantly ignore the evidence and their religion’s teachings in favor of an unjust, unlawful execution shock the conscience.

Williams had been convicted of the 1998 murder of a St. Louis social worker and former reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Felicia Gayle. Williams was convicted on circumstantial evidence, since forensics did not tie him to the murder scene in any way. He protested his innocence the entire time, from arrest to trial to his execution tonight. In 2015, the state supreme court stayed the execution to perform new DNA testing on the evidence. Two years later, Eric Greitens, then governor of Missouri, stayed the execution for further investigation after the DNA testing showed no trace of Marcellus' Williams’ DNA on the murder weapon. When Greitens was forced out over an affair, the new governor, former sheriff Mike Parson, dismissed the investigation. Wesley Bell, a reform-minded prosecutor elected in 2022 to be the county prosecutor of St. Louis County, followed up with his own investigation, which found that prosecutors had mishandled evidence along with finding no DNA. Because the clock was ticking, and with the approval of Ms. Gayle’s family, Bell made a deal with Williams’ attorneys and with the district court judge. The verdict would be set aside, and Williams would plead no contest to first-degree murder. Williams would not die unnecessarily.

Enter this man.

This is Andrew Bailey, attorney general of Missouri and a man who looks perpetually constipated. He found out about this deal to save the life of Marcellus Williams, a man that the MAGA-pilled previous governor believed was innocent, and he got angry. You see, Attorney Bailey here thinks there’s no such thing as a wrongful conviction. If there is an effort to see justice done, he will fight it. The man abuses the law like his political friends abuse women. He stepped in and forced the judge to hold a hearing in which the judge ruled the execution must proceed because Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. The Missouri Supreme Court, which is seven judges, three appointed by Governor Parson, rejected Williams’ appeal, and then earlier today, the six “pro-life” justices on the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit.

Marcellus Williams died tonight, despite the objections of the prosecutor’s office, the family of the victim, and the defense attorneys. This trifecta is rarely seen in the American legal system. The amount of effort expended by the state of Missouri when they literally could’ve done nothing, and Williams would still be in prison (which in and of itself would have been a massive injustice) for the rest of his natural life, is astonishing. They actively worked to kill a man whose guilt was very much in doubt. That is what our legal system does—it works in a way that grinds down the humanity of its participants. People who spend their entire lives as cops and prosecutors end up with this distorted lens, where every suspect is guilty, every defense lawyer is evil, and the law doesn’t let them execute people fast enough. This lens is what allows them to accept the execution of innocent people—people who were not mentally competent, people who were beaten into confessing, people who were framed, people who were convicted through prosecutorial misconduct, people whose juries were racially tilted.

The death penalty has never been a deterrent. Its use has done nothing to stem the tide of murder in this country. We would be far more successful by limiting access to firearms and the types of firearms legally available for purchase. We would be far more successful with good community intervention programs and mental health care. That is hard work. What’s easy, in this country, is to try and convict people, often on poor or no evidence, by appealing to fears, biases, and hatreds. 85% of overturned death row convictions stem from police or prosecutorial misconduct. For every eight executions, one death row prisoner is exonerated. One in eight. If that happened elsewhere in another field, like pharmaceuticals, Americans would be climbing the walls for change. We stay curiously silent about the death penalty because we live in a society where the use of state violence is normalized, where politicians boast about being “tough on crime,” where cops can beat the shit out of people protesting or filming police misconduct and half of the country cheers, where we and our allies use drones and missiles to kill “suspected terrorists” and nobody bats an eye. This is not the hallmark of a just, decent, and civilized nation. We have descended into barbarity. We don’t have to be this way, but like it or not, enough people in this country choose this path. They defend the barbarism. They cheer it on. They revel in it, use it in movies and television shows, tweet and post on social media in praise of it.

Marcellus Williams was executed tonight. His blood is on all of our hands.