This piece first appeared at usnews.com on August 23, 2017.
Tuesday night, Missouri almost executed a man who is likely innocent. Marcellus Williams came within mere hours of execution, and the process that put him there is a scathing indictment of our justice system.
Bloody footprints at the scene did not match Williams’ shoe size. The police lost the fingerprints found at the scene, so they couldn’t be analyzed. Williams’ lawyer requested DNA testing on the knife during the trial, but the court denied the testing. Testing was finally done in 2015, and the DNA did not match. Three different experts have looked at the DNA testing and agree.
Williams had been on death row for 14 years and was scheduled to die by the time this test was done – and yet the courts refused to look at the new DNA evidence. Instead, they set a new execution date for Tuesday.
Thankfully, Missouri’s governor did the right thing and stepped in. A committee will now review the evidence that never got heard in court. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to, and should, look at other claims in the Williams case, such as whether the Constitution guarantees death row prisoners with claims of substantial evidence of their innocence be given a chance to prove it in court.
But that still leaves us with a critical question. If none of the forensic evidence points to Williams, how did he get sentenced to die in the first place?
The 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, of which Williams was convicted, was horrific. Understandably, horrific crimes stoke community outrage. There is pressure to find someone, anyone. There is a high-pitched, emotionally charged demand for someone to suffer. The death penalty fits the bill – especially the death penalty for a black man.
The primary evidence against Williams was testimony from his ex-girlfriend and a jailhouse informant. Both witnesses received financial compensation for their testimony. One of them admitted later that she “set up” Williams in exchange for the reward. Jailhouse informants are notoriously unreliable. This form of so-called “evidence” has led to numerous other wrongful convictions.
Wrongful convictions are especially likely when faulty or weak evidence is weighed across racial groups. Williams is a black man and Gayle was a white woman – the combination most likely to result in a death sentence. Williams’ jury was all white except for one person. Prosecutors successfully struck six out of seven potential black jurors from the jury pool, even though St. Louis was over 50 percent black at the time of the trial.
Those white jury members need not have been overtly racist for race to play a role. Studies consistently show that most of us have implicit biases that are far beneath the surface. These biases make it easier for white people to identify with other white people, and make it harder to give people of color the benefit of the doubt. They make it easier to believe a shred of shaky evidence when it’s a black man on trial for killing a white woman. After all, that’s what it looks like on TV crime shows all the time.
What’s terrifying about this case is what it reveals about our justice system overall. More than 150 people have already been sentenced to death and later released after evidence of their innocence came to light. Jailhouse informants, false confessions, inaccurate eyewitness identification (which is especially error-prone across racial groups), prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective lawyers are all ways innocent people go to prison or death row. And DNA evidence is only available in a handful of those cases.
Public support for the death penalty in the U.S. has plummeted because of these problems. Last year saw the fewest executions and death sentences in decades. It’s time to get our priorities straight and end the death penalty for good.
