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Marcellus Williams Should Be Alive
Missouri has made it legal to murder an innocent man.
Marcellus Williams, age 55, is dead, killed by lethal injection. His execution was at 6 p.m. CT on Tuesday, September 24th, in Missouri.
Despite thousands of appeals, phone calls, and emails, Marcellus Williams, who spent 25 years of his life on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, was executed. Missorui’s governor refused to delay the execution or commute his sentence. Missouri’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal for clemency. Everyone involved in the death of Marcellus Williams wanted him to die.
The insanity of this execution has sent shockwaves through the legal community and, especially, the Black community. Everyone wanted to see Williams remain alive and even freed, since DNA evidence showed that he wasn’t the killer of a white woman back in 1999. The woman had been stabbed several times — a crime of passion — and DNA evidence linked the crime to someone else — not Williams.
But when politics and racism combine, there is no justice for Black people. None of the white men in the courts of law or the governor’s office wanted to consider clemency for Williams. Egos and hatred drove them to deny the evidence before them, accusing the other side of wrongdoing. Even the prosecutor, who had initially convicted Williams, believed that the evidence was…
