State of Misery: A Wrongful Death

No picture of Williams exists in the public domain that I can find. This is the Capitol Building of Missouri, located in Jefferson City. Image was uploaded by user Visitjeffersoncity on Wikimedia commons, and is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Above: presidential election map (left, uploaded by user GlebRyabov and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license), population density map (right, uploaded by JimIrwin and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.) Both images from Wikimedia commons.

Yesterday, the State of Missouri executed an innocent man, Marcellus Williams. I’ve been drowning in work and an impending change of residence, so this is the only thing that’s really pierced the fog I’ve been in. It’s a case where there is a fair reason to question the convicted man’s guilt: Williams’s DNA was not found at the scene, the prosecutor at the time rejected at least one juror because he “looked like” Williams (suggesting there may have been a racial component), and two of the key witnesses were incentivized to give the testimony they did by either clemency in their own case or a $10,000 reward. Furthermore, even the family of the victim and prosecutor of the original case believe that Williams is innocent of this crime — but the state of Missouri, acting by means of its governor and its state supreme court, abetted by the supreme court of the United State, nonetheless insisted on his death.

I am reminded of my time in high school, when I was part of our school’s Amnesty International chapter, working, primarily, on death penalty-related causes. Williams’s case seems, to me, to be a dark mirror of that of Joe Amrine. Amrine was released from prison in 2003 after serving 17 years on death row. More recently, there was the case of Ricky Kidd, who received inadequate defense from an underpaid public defender (which is redundant: Missouri pays an average of $356 a case for Public Defenders. Only Mississippi pays less) and – last I heard – was suing Kansas City and its state-run police department (KCPD is under state control, but paid for by the city, by law it is supposed to receive 25% of the city’s budget.)

I could make a case here about the state of Missouri being bloodthirsty, about it continuously trying to kill anyone who falls into its grasp. I could make the case that – because of the fact that the lion’s share of the state population is in Kansas City and St. Louis, leaving less than a million people in the space between the two metropolitan areas – politically Missouri is dominated by a set of fringe interests more representing the thinly-populated land between the more than five million city dwellers. However, I wish to make a much simpler case.

No government at any level should have the power to execute people.

I was raised Catholic and, ostensibly, the prosecutor who originally convicted Williams, the Attorney General that interfered with the case to ensure that the execution goes forward, the Supreme Court Justices who refused to grant a stay, and the Governor who refuses to stop this all share the broad strokes of that religion, being some variety of Christian. I was always taught that killing people was wrong. Maybe that’s one of the doctrinal differences that led to the reformation, I don’t know, I’m not a scholar of that, but I was under the impression that this was one of the big rules: don’t kill people.

The lethal injection room in San Quentin Penitentiary.

Of course, we live in a secular country, and no one’s religion should dictate policy, but we do have injunctions against cruel and unusual punishment – and lethal injection, the method used in Missouri, is cruel and unusual: the body is paralyzed and then a pulmonary edema is induced. Autopsies suggest that it is an agonizing process, and it is generally done in front of an (admittedly small) audience. Hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, burning at the stake, just about any method of execution that you can think of would be cruel and unusual. This is because it is cruel to kill people. The fact of this — and I feel comfortable maintaining that the statement it is cruel to kill people is a fact — transcends particularity, though the particularity of any given case makes the cruelty of it more pointed. Williams was a poet and a man of faith; he maintained his own innocence throughout his near-twenty-five years of imprisonment on death row. He had even been given reprieves previously, in one case mere hours before his scheduled execution. The cruelty to which this man was subject is nothing short of horrific. And the fact remains: it is cruel to kill people.

Beyond this, I would suggest you ask yourself: how much do you trust the government to get the right person? If you look into what numbers are available, there appear to be a shocking number of wrongful convictions. This means – logically speaking – that innocent people have been executed. So, now, the question becomes a fairly simple one: how many wrongfully executed innocents is too many?

I say “any”, because to suggest otherwise is monstrous — but this apparently constitutes an increasingly unusual opinion. After all, the Democrats dropped abolishing the death penalty from their platform this year, for the first time in years, and the Democratic nominee has not yet stated an opinion on the matter. This is, needless to say, a bad sign for people who do not think that any government should have the power to execute people.

The Missouri AG Andrew Bailey even involved himself in the case after Williams took an Alford Plea -- agreeing to take life in prison without parole in exchange for being taken off death row -- on the grounds that "No innocent man is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison unless he knows he is guilty."

This is, it bears noting, monstrous.

Bad enough, then, that in spite of increasing ambivalence, at best, towards the death penalty, the federal-level power best positioned to prevent it seems uncommitted to that particular move, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s failure to prevent the death of an innocent man. In an ideal world, or something closer to an ideal world, when a state-level government insists on this kind of cruel and obscene course of action, a higher level government might be expected to prevent it. Not so here — and not so in Missouri, for a variety of reasons.

What is uniquely bad about the state of Missouri is that – in the two cases I am most familiar with, Amrine’s and Williams’s – the state knew and acknowledged that these men were not guilty of the crimes that they were being accused of. The state specifically sought to prevent clemency for innocent people.

The same people that complain about the DMV, who think that OSHA regulations are too strenuous to abide by, who want to privatize everything under the sun, believe that the state should have the power of life and death. If we were to assume that the point was coherence, to put forward an ideology where the different positions added up to a vision of a world they want that could be considered “logical” or “well-considered”, then it would be an abject failure.

This, however, would be to offer a fig leaf that they do not deserve.

The cruelty is the point. The domination is the point. The death is the point.

Oftentimes, in American politics, we assume that our opponents are stupid and don’t see the harm that they’re causing, and that they’re calculating wrongly how to achieve the ends that we all want. If this were the case, you could just show your work and walk them through it, and that would be that.

This isn’t how it works.

It’s never been how it works, I suspect.

Our opponents might be stupid, but I suspect that they know what they’re doing here and that they’re drawing straight lines from desire to policy. They wish to execute Black men. They wish to have the Kansas City and St. Louis police departments function as occupying armies in those municipalities. They have a simplified picture of what it means to be a suitable resident of this state, and they’re going to punish anyone who diverges from that picture.

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