On September 24, Marcellus Williams became the 15th person to be executed in the United States in 2024. Advocated by the collective Innocence ProjectWilliams had challenged his sentence several times. While the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the prisoner’s requests for clemency, Marcellus Williams was ultimately denied a last-minute reprieve before the state of Missouri carried out his execution by injection on Tuesday.
The United States is one of 55 countries that still practice the death penalty in 2023. The country has more than 2,000 prisoners on “death row”, a detention that can last several decades before the sentence is carried out. In the United States in 2023, black people are on average six times more often incarcerated than white people. Even though the black population constitutes only 14.4% of the American population, it represents 41% of prisoners on “death row”.
The disproportionate criminalization of black people is the result of centuries of racist policies and unequal procedural practices. In the Marcellus Williams trial, the jury included only one black person, while six others were eliminated in peremptory challenges, a completely legal practice that allows a lawyer to eliminate a juror without a clear reason. River Front Times documented the use of this method by the prosecutor in the case and many other lawyers in St. Louis. These methods contribute to the fact that there are more death penalty deliberations for black defendants.
Also denouncing procedural errors, such as the presence of DNA belonging to other individuals on the murder weapon, and witnesses not examined by the defense, theInnocence Project sought a pardon for Williams. After two postponements that failed to result in an exoneration because of the refusal to consider new evidence, Marcellus Williams’ attorneys tried a third time to appeal. An attempt that was met with another flat refusal from Missouri Gov. Mike Parson.
After 23 years in the prison system and three appeals attempts, Marcellus Williams was finally executed, while theInnocence Project claims that a new examination of the evidence would have concluded that he was innocent. Finding its roots in slavery, among other things, capital punishment in the United States is a continuation of its racist judicial system. More than half of those sentenced to death who have ever been exonerated are black, which shows a tendency to wrongly convict African-Americans. This is also in addition to the fact that African-Americans receive harsher sentences on average. In any case, the case of Marcellus Williams is part of the ordinary functioning of the American justice system.
