Zany Progressive: Marcellus Williams was murdered Tuesday. This is why I hate the death penalty. You can’t say murder is illegal and wrong, and then murder people. The number of innocent people who are put to death every year should be enough to have the practice banned. Period.
I was angry and devastated by this. What makes it worse for me is that the Missouri Governor stopped the investigation into his innocence to carry out the “punishment” because “he was convicted by a jury in a court of law.” The same day, he pardoned a white police officer “convicted by a jury in a court of law” after shooting and killing a 26-year-old black man for being in his own driveway. I have no more words. I’ll add an Instagram post and then let The Intercept give more details on this tragedy.
The state-sanctioned killing was not supported by the family of the victim, former newspaper reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, who was stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. In August, Picus’s husband Dan told court officials and representatives of state Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office that while he believed Williams was guilty, he did not want to see Williams executed.
It was Bailey’s actions that cleared the way for Williams’s execution. In mid-August, a St. Louis County Circuit Court judge approved a deal between Williams and the county’s prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, that would have resentenced Williams to life in prison. Bailey scoffed at the deal and intervened to stop it.
On Monday evening, Gov. Mike Parson declined to offer Williams clemency, and, over the dissent from the court’s three more liberal justices, on Tuesday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.
Missouri’s execution of Williams puts the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: With four states slated to conduct four executions by the end of this week, the country will soon reach its 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. While public support for capital punishment continues to decline and juries are voting far less to impose capital punishment, officials in states like Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma continue to schedule executions — including in cases like Williams, where questions about the underlying conviction and its fairness persist — Democrats scrubbed their long-standing goal of ending capital punishment from their platform this year. To date, 200 people on death row have been exonerated: a rate of 1 exoneration for every 8 executions carried out.
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