The execution of Williams was one more example of racist state terror
By JOHN KIRKLAND
Despite pleas and evidence of possible innocence, the state of Missouri opted to murder Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams. Williams, who languished on death row for 23 years, maintained that he was innocent of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle. In the lead-up to the Sept. 24 execution, thousands, including the original prosecutor in the case and the victim’s family, called for the state to commute the sentence to life without parole. Opponents of the execution cast doubt on the DNA evidence in the case and made claims of racial bias in jury selection at Williams’ original trial.
According to Al Jazeera, “Lawyers argued that there was no forensic evidence connecting Williams to the crime scene and that the murder weapon had been mishandled, casting doubt on the DNA evidence. Testing showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutors’ office who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.”
The jury in the trial had 11 white members and one Black member. Racist exclusions of Black people from juries in capital cases remains common. A study by the Equal Justice Initiative found that “racially biased use of peremptory strikes and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection remains widespread, particularly in serious criminal cases and capital cases. Hundreds of people of color called for jury service have been illegally excluded from juries after prosecutors asserted pretextual reasons to justify their removal.”
Both the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court denied petitions for a stay of execution, and Gov. Mike Parson denied Williams’ final appeal for clemency. Williams’ reported last words were, “All praise be to Allah in every situation!”
Williams’ attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, told CNN, “They will do it even though the prosecutor doesn’t want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don’t want him executed, and the victims themselves don’t want him to be executed. We have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that.”
Candidate Kamala Harris remained silent on the death penalty and the execution of Williams despite her former position in opposition to the death penalty. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris made the controversial decision in 2004 not to seek the death sentence for a gang member for the murder of a police officer. However, speaking out now would hurt her effort to run for the White House as a “tough on crime” prosecutor.
The Williams case is just one of a number of executions in the U.S. Nineteen people have been executed so far this year—almost all of them in Southern states—and at least three more executions are scheduled to take place by the end of 2024. The federal government and 27 states still maintain the death penalty, but federal executions were paused by the incoming Biden administration after the Trump administration carried out 13 executions in its last six months in office. In 2020, Biden campaigned on abolition of the death penalty at the federal level and promised to push for states to follow suit. In office, however, Biden has made no real moves to do away with the practice permanently. In 2024, the Democrats dropped abolition of the death penalty from their platform.
In the last 25 years, there has been a decline in the number of executions. According to The New York Times, “There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year (2023) and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.” In part the fewer number of executions flows from controversies over the method of execution by lethal injection following a number of botched executions.
As of 2021, 2382 prisoners in the U.S. were under sentence of death. Of those sentenced, 97.9 percent were male, and around 40 percent of them were Black. More than 1400 executions have been carried out in the U.S. since 1976, when the death penalty was ruled constitutional.
Sold as more “humane,” lethal injection has proven to be less humane than promised. Currently, three major pharmaceutical companies have voiced their refusal to sell the drugs needed for executions for that purpose. Additionally, health care professionals have expressed ethical objections to participating in the practice. In January 2024, the state of Alabama executed Kenneth Smith through nitrogen gas hypoxia, in which he “thrashed violently on the gurney.”
This was two years after Smith survived a botched execution by lethal injection. Following Smith’s execution, the state Attorney General Steve Marshall claimed that nitrogen gas was an “effective and humane method of execution.”
Following Smith’s execution, Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “I deeply regret the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama despite serious concerns this novel and untested method of suffocation by nitrogen gas may amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Nevertheless, less than two weeks ago, on Sept. 24—the same day that Williams was killed—Alabama used nitrogen hypoxia to execute a second man, Alan Eugene Miller.
Lynching, mass incarceration, and police murder
Legal executions by the state, carried out disproportionately against poor working-class whites and Black and Brown people, is an instrument of race and class terror. Certainly, the death penalty is applied disproportionately to Black defendants, and the likelihood of a death sentence increases in instances where a Black defendant stands accused of killing a white victim. “More than 75% of death row defendants who have been executed were sentenced to death for killing white victims, even though in society as a whole about half of all homicide victims are African American” (deathpenaltyinfo.org).
The era of legal lynching on state and federal death rows has supplanted the Jim Crow era of widespread extralegal lynchings, which claimed thousands of victims. According to records kept by the NAACP, 4743 lynchings took place in this country between 1882 and 1968. These acts of violence and murder were carried out mainly by white mobs in order to terrorize and control Black people, mostly in the South. Many people were lynched without being accused of a crime; it was frequently carried out for mere slights such as speaking to a white person without showing the customary amount of “respect.” Lynchings were often performed as public rituals and celebrations. Photos of lynchings were sold as souvenir postcards.
Nationwide campaigns against public lynchings, and the eventual rise of the civil rights movement, led to a decline in their number; 1952 was the first year without a single public lynching being recorded. However, the practice has not stopped. Lynchings are still carried out by individuals or groups acting as vigilantes or by police—sometimes acting in public and with assumed impunity, such as with the murder of George Floyd in 2020. For the most part, however, these racist extralegal killings have now been removed from the streets in order to take place behind prison walls and under the guise of the institutionalized “legal justice” system.
Abolish the racist death penalty!
The death penalty is a barbaric, racist, and unnecessary practice that must be abolished. As it exists today, similarly to the Jim Crow era, it seems mainly calculated to satisfy the bloodlust of white supremacist politicians intent on terrorizing Black people.
The death penalty is only part of the oppressive set-up at the disposal of the capitalist state. Police and prosecutors are key to the maintenance of the regime of mass incarceration that targets and imprisons Black and Brown people at a disproportionate rate. The regime of mass incarceration holds nearly 2 million people in America’s gulags. More than six million people, more than were enslaved in the pre-Civil War South, are either in prison or under the supervision of the criminal “justice” system. The Prison Policy Initiative states that “the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories—at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year.”
One in 10 Black men in their 30s are in prison or jail every day. The “racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 35% of the prison and jail populations but only 14% of all U.S residents. The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail.”
It’s time to abolish the current prison system. All non-violent offenders should be released immediately, their records expunged, and alternatives to incarceration put in place—alternatives that emphasize treatment, education, and rehabilitation. Crime under capitalism is primarily the result of a system that distributes wealth to the richest and leaves the poor and oppressed to scramble to survive. Under capitalism, the state serves to keep the oppressed and exploited in check by any means necessary.
