Source: Jacobin
by Elias Khoury
“Last night, Missouri state authorities executed Marcellus Williams after the US Supreme Court refused to delay his killing. In 2001, a court convicted Williams for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a forty-two-year-old reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He was almost certainly innocent. … Williams’s DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon, one of Gayle’s kitchen knives. … Absent concrete evidence, the prosecution relied upon the testimony of two witnesses. One was a jailhouse informant known for dishonesty. … The other incentivized witness, Williams’s ex-girlfriend, also had a history of deception. Dodgy testimony is shockingly common in death penalty cases. Incentivized witnesses contribute to an estimated 14 percent of convictions that lead later to DNA exoneration. Studies show that disturbing numbers of death row inmates are innocent.” (09/25/24)
https://jacobin.com/2024/09/marcellus-williams-death-penalty-election/