What Does Justice for Marcellus Williams Look Like? Abolishing The Death Penalty

Marcellus “Khalifa” Williams served more than twenty years on death row for the murder of Felicia Ann Gayle but always maintained his innocence, and appealed for his release on the grounds that there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime. Last week, Williams was executed through the death penalty. 

He wasn’t alone. Four other people were executed last week. Plus, since 1973, at least 200 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., and a 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent. The Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to freeing innocent incarcerated people and preventing other wrongful convictions, joined in on the efforts to overturn Williams’ verdict on the basis of “incentivized witnesses” who may have fabricated testimony and the corruption of evidence. Further, the parents of Williams’ alleged-victim also oppose the death penalty and spoke out against the death sentence he received.

That is the reality of America’s criminal legal system. Even when the crime scene is full of DNA not belonging to the accused. Even with unreliable testimony and inconclusive evidence. Even when the victim’s family opposes the sentence and execution. Even when local community organizers build a campaign and half a million people sign a petition. Even when millions more around the country speak up on social media and call the governor demanding more time to prove his innocence. Even under all these circumstances, the state still chooses to execute. And before we’ve finished mourning, several more lives continue to be claimed. 

The death penalty is wrong even if the accused is guilty, because the punishment is final and disproportionately wielded against working-class, Black, brown and/or neurodivergent people. Most are sentenced to death in their twenties and executed before the average retirement age. Further, executions don’t always go off as planned making for even more painful and torturous experiences. In January, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first death row execution of the year. He also was the first case of execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” in the world. A witness to Smith’s Alabama execution described heaving and spitting saying, “what we saw was minutes of someone struggling for his life.” Accountability should not be such a painful spectacle. We are not safer by getting revenge on a few dozen people each year. So why do we do it? The death penalty only erodes our moral compass and makes us collectively bloodthirsty. 

On September 24th 2024, Marcellus Williams ate his last meal of chicken wings and tater tots and wrote his final statement, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!” Each person is a universe. Williams was a son, brother, grandfather, Imam, poet, friend, and activist. While incarcerated, Williams embraced the religion of Islam and wrote about Palestinian children. Williams, like all of us, should have had a beautiful and long life. Instead, he was robbed; first, when he was arrested for a crime he may not have committed. Then, he was robbed again of more than two decades of his life that he served for that crime. Right when the state had the chance to right its wrongs, the Missouri Supreme Court and Governor Abbott both refused to intervene and allowed the execution to be carried out. That’s the thing about the death penalty. There is no going back, saying we are better now, and hoping to wipe our hands clean. The State of Missouri, backed by the imprudent negligence of the federal government, took a life that wasn’t theirs and with no moral authority.

In 1957, two years after completing his PhD and helping to steer the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a new columnist for Ebony Magazine. People from all over the country submitted questions that Dr. King answered, like this one: “do you think God approves the death penalty for crimes like rape and murder?” King responded clearly: “I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime… capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” More than 60 years later, people are still being executed in the name of justice and in the face of significant doubt.

Nelson Mandela, himself formerly incarcerated as a political prisoner, once said, “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” In the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, it states, “All prisoners shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings” and decries corporal punishment as inhuman and against the goal of incarceration which should be redemption. Amnesty International calls the death penalty “the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” 

Meanwhile the 2024 Democratic Party national platform makes no mention of the death penalty or corporal punishment, though the 2016 and 2020 platforms both called for its abolition. Kamala Harris has historically declined to purse death penalty verdicts as a District Attorney, but hasn’t mentioned her current stance or given a statement on the death of Marcellus Williams. Advocating against the death penalty wasn’t always a controversial stand to take, particularly on the left. Why have senior Democrats walked back their previous advocacy? 

We have been trying to petition our way out of a death machine. We can’t do it alone. If we raise millions of signatures and dollars to only save a handful of people, we are only slapping a band-aid on a gaping hole – and exhausting ourselves in the process. If our political representatives are not also championing a better world, who are they representing? The death penalty exposes the cracks and fissures amongst liberals and progressives. Executives, politicians, and military leaders who poison, hurt, and kill are never held accountable in the same way. Yet, nationwide, we spend so much time, money, and energy on people we’ve decided are “monsters.” If we can’t assert international human rights as the foundation we build upon, we aren’t the nation we think we are.

A recent headline expressed that “The Death Penalty Is Anti-American” but the government has been executing its own citizens – and many more innocent civilians abroad – since the nation’s violent founding. Until we change how we deliver justice, the death penalty will remain very American. We can’t decry the violence as “not who we are” without reconstructing our national identity. Are we a country of exploitation, inequity, and state-sanctioned murder? Or are we a nation of admitting our mistakes, working to repair them, and instituting measures to be sure it doesn’t happen again?