It is August of 2001. In the Missouri Circuit Court, Judge Emmett M. O’Brien sits imposingly, sporting black robes and leather shoes. In the center of the courtroom stands Marcellus Williams, his hands bound by iron handcuffs and his feet shackled. The jury has reached a unanimous decision, so his fate is already sealed in a tiny paper envelope.
The clock ticks relentlessly. Williams shuffles his feet. Judge O’Brien begins speaking. The final verdict? Guilty, with a death sentence.
Except, it’s complicated. Williams will live for decades on death row. He is stuck in an endless cycle of litigation and appeals. Each time, the victim’s family must come forward, revisit their trauma, and mourn. In this, the death penalty is inherently cruel to both parties. On average, the delay between sentencing and execution is 18 years, and in the most extreme cases of recent years, has been 38 years. For decades, prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for “22 to 24 hours a day.” They are denied visits from family members and loved ones. When someone is sentenced to death, they are also sentenced to delirium, mental suffering, and cruelty.
But maybe Williams doesn’t have to endure this cruel punishment. In the Founding Era of the United States, death immediately followed sentencing–as a result, the death penalty was viewed just as any other constitutional, uncruel criminal sentence. One might argue that the death sentence can be rendered uncruel again–legal procedures can be expedited, appeals can be limited, and execution can be nearly immediately after sentencing. But then, the risk of false convictions arises. Without lengthy legal battles, common causes for retrial–a failure to receive all procedural protections–are overlooked and integrity of the justice system is compromised. Without lengthy wait times, prosecutors risk missing new evidence that can exonerate a convict decades after the crime. For example, in 2023, Leonard Mack was exonerated by DNA evidence after 48 years of intense litany. His case is one amongst many others–there have been 375 DNA exonerations to date, the average time to prove this innocence has been 14 years. There exists two choices, both of which are flawed. Williams must choose between an uncruel, short but potentially unjust death, or a cruel, prolonged punishment with a just death/exoneration.
There are still unanswered questions about how Williams ended up on death row. What gives Judge O’Brien, and countless other jurors and judges across the US the ability to rank morality accurately? The death penalty has been applied unevenly across cases. How do we know that Selwyn Davis, who sexually assaulted a 15-year-old and murdered another woman is deserving of the death penalty, while Joshua Sinclair Owens, who strangled a 48-year-old, assaulted a family member, and sold drugs in prison is deserving of a life sentence? Where was the line drawn in each of these two cases? Was it the rape? The drugs? At what point is depriving a person of their life justifiable?
The answer is complicated. Like many on death row, Williams has ended up on death row for quite frankly, no reason. Justice Stephen Breyer famously took note of this arbitrary application of the death penalty, citing a 2014 study of the death penalty in Connecticut. In this study, the author John J. Donohue notes that there were “205 death-eligible murders leading to homicide convictions in Connecticut from 1973-2007.” Of these 205 cases, 12 cases were assigned the death sentence, and only nine cases received sustained death sentences. Using an objective system of metrics, Donohue assigned a rating of “egregiousness” of crime to each of the 205 crimes–he found that only one of the nine sustained death penalty cases scored in the top 15% of egregious crimes. This affirms that, contrary to what proponents of capital punishment believe, the death penalty does not punish “the worst of the worst.”
Moreover, Donohue found glaring biases. Minorities are 160 times more likely to receive capital punishment compared to their white counterparts. When compared to cases involving white-on-white crime, cases with minority perpetrators and white victims are 90.63% more likely to receive the death penalty. Men have a 48.1% increase in “likelihood of receiving any death penalty,” while women have a 15.1% decrease in likelihood. Not only does capital punishment utterly fail to carry out its penological purpose (retribution), it also is a breeding ground for discrimination.
Given these inconsistencies and biases, it is clear that the death penalty irresponsibly gives jurors and judges the impossible task of assigning moral ‘truths’ to crimes (e.g. Crime A is ‘worse’ than Crime B), which sets a dangerous precedent for the justice system and unalienable rights. It means that someone’s fate becomes a matter of the algorithms that randomly assign citizens to jury duty, a matter of their race and gender, a matter of bias and chance. It means that unalienable rights are subjective, and can be readily deprived on the basis of opinion. It means that Williams has been deprived of his right to life, largely based on things out of his control–centuries of cultural forces, politics, and economic disparities that have coalesced into the stereotypes and biases of today–and not the crime itself.
Marcellus Williams continues deteriorating in his jail cell. Decades later, he will die, either by electric chair, nitrogen gas, lethal injection, or firing squad. ‘Justice’ will be served, and the case can be closed–except, perhaps after his death we will find out that he was innocent, or mistried. If this is the case, he will not be able to file for habeas corpus in the afterlife.
This was nearly the case in 2023, where the execution of a Mississippi man named Willie Manning was halted a mere four hours before scheduled. Two years later, he was proven as innocent. According to Justice Breyer’s dissent, cases involving the death penalty are nine times more likely to be exonerated. From this disproportionately higher likelihood, it can be inferred that there are higher rates of false convictions for death penalty cases. This means that there are likely several less fortunate Willie Mannings, defendants that have been wrongfully executed and will never get justice for their murders. The irreversibility of death promises a temporary semblance of “justice,” stripping away the ability of courts to rectify wrongful convictions, creating an even greater injustice.
If he truly is guilty, I do not mean to clear Marcellus Williams of any wrongdoing, but it is clear that the death penalty has given him the short end of the stick. I am by no means against the concept of the death penalty and retribution, but our justice system will always be flawed because of the imperfect beings who operate it, and therefore, is too erratic to secure the ‘retribution’ in question. These are people’s lives at stake.
The death penalty is cruel for its random finger that glaringly points at some murderers, blissfully ignores other murderers, and ropes in the innocent. The death penalty is cruel given “unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty’s penological purpose.” The death penalty is cruel and unusual.
It is now Sept. 24, 2024. Marcellus Williams has just been executed after 24 years of mental agony. It was later found that the DNA evidence from the crime did not match Williams’s DNA. Our justice system has just killed a potentially innocent man. There are 2,212 other inmates across the US–many of them also potentially innocent–waiting for their deaths. It is time we put an end to this. It is time that we sentence the death penalty to death.
Works Cited
American Civil Liberties Union. A Death Before Dying: Solitary Confinement on Death Row. July 22, 2013. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://www.aclu.org/publications/death-dying-solitary-confinement-death-row.
Otterbourg, Ken. “Leonard Mack.” Other New York Exonerations with DNA Evidence (blog), September 14, 2023. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=6651.
Innocence Project. “DNA Exonerations in the United States (1989 – 2020).” Innocence Project. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/.
“Selwyn Davis.” In Death Row Information. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_info/davisselwyn.html.
Saavedra, Ninfa. 2024. “Man who sexually assaulted woman before killing her and dumping her body at construction site in Houston sentenced.” Click2Houston, October 24, 2024. https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2024/10/24/man-who-sexually-assaulted-woman-before-killing-her-and-dumping-her-body-at-construction-site-in-houston-sentenced/
Breyer, Stephen. 2016. Against the Death Penalty. Edited by John Bessler. N.p.: Brookings Institution Press.
Donohue III, John J. “An Empirical Evaluation of the Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, and Geographic Disparities?.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 4 (2014): 637-696.
“Mississippi Supreme Court Delays Decision on Willie Manning Execution Date, Allows Time for Appeal.” 2023. Death Penalty Information Center. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/mississippi-supreme-court-delays-decision-on-willie-manning-execution-date-allows-time-for-appeal.
“”Death Row USA.”” n.d. Death Penalty Information Center. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row/overview/death-row-usa.
“Marcellus Williams.” n.d. Innocence Project. Accessed September 29, 2024. https://innocenceproject.org/cases/marcellus-williams/.