We should abolish the death penalty
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The death penalty has led to the false conviction and wrongful deaths of far too many. It is time we put our foot down and abolish the death penalty.
With the recent execution of Marcellus Williams, the death penalty and its use have once again come under significant scrutiny. In 2001, Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle; in a scene of armed burglary, he was accused of stabbing her with a kitchen knife 43 times. He spent 23 years in prison. In both 2015 and 2017, he was spared from execution, but his conviction was not overturned.
On August 28th, the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, Wesley Bell, “conceded that the prior administration under Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCullough had committed constitutional errors,” leading to the conviction and death sentence of Williams. Concerns were raised over the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the crime, the almost entirely white jury (as the accused was a black man, and the trial prosecutor seemed to remove black prospective jurors based on their race), as well as the potential invalidity of the witnesses' claims, who may have had been influenced by other incentives in their testimony. Bell secured a hearing for Aug. 21, 2024; however, the night prior, he discovered that members of the trial prosecution team had mishandled the evidence. Thus, any DNA evidence was essentially lost. In light of this new information, Bell reached a deal in which, to prevent his execution, Williams agreed to enter an “Alford plea” and accept “a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.” Attorney General Andrew Bailey, however, appealed, and on Sept. 12, 2024, Judge Bruce Hilton ruled that the death sentence would remain in place. The state Supreme Court upheld this decision, and the US Supreme Court rejected the final request to halt Williams’ execution.
At 6:10 p.m., Central Time, on Sept. 21, 2024, Williams was pronounced dead—an irreversible decision. That life can never be brought back. If he truly was innocent, there is nothing that can be done now as the results are final.
In examining the history of the death penalty, one quickly determines that this is not a unique case and that many people have found themselves on death row without proper examination of evidence and adherence to due process. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, has been “at the forefront of criminal justice reform, using DNA and other scientific advancements to prove wrongful conviction.” This project has represented people who have been wrongfully accused and given the death sentence in cases that were compromised by “prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, eyewitness misidentification, unreliable forensic evidence, racial bias, and more.” According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), since 1973, more than 200 people in the United States have been exonerated who were “wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.” It is well-known that our justice system is riddled with flaws, and to impose a punishment so fatal when there is even the smallest chance of innocence is blatantly immoral.
The use of this punishment is also clearly influenced by racial bias and institutional injustice. Of those approximately 200 exonerated people, 108 were black. The death row population in the United States, as recorded in January of 2024, was over 41 percent black, though black people constitute about 13 percent of the population. This disproportionate application of the death penalty points to a larger history of injustice and racial bias in prosecution. This injustice has not yet been rooted out of our practices and systems. In his decision to oppose the death penalty, former Justice Harry Blackmun commented, “Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die.” Blackmun, who initially supported the federal government’s use of the death penalty as constitutional and voted in favor of its reinstatement, came to the realization that “no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.” The death penalty was not, and could not, be applied fairly—and thus, it should not be applied at all.
We should abolish the death penalty at both the federal and state levels across the nation. One can argue about its inherent constitutionality under the Eighth Amendment and its status as a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Still, one would be hard-pressed to effectively argue that its application is and has historically been, without prejudice. It has proven a dangerous tool in the hands of those with the power to wield it. The use of the death penalty is irreversible and entirely final. If we cannot be completely sure that a conviction is just—between the inherent imperfections in our justice system and the very real potential for bias sprouting from the players within it—then we should not commit ourselves to such a violent and utterly absolute act.