Many of the contributors to this thread are under the wrong impression that the police found the victim's laptop and other items in Marcellus Williams' car. This is not true. According to Wikipedia, the murder occurred in August 1998, but it was not until May 1999 that the victim's family "announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. In response, two individuals, Henry Cole and Lara Asaro, named Marcellus Scott Williams as the culprit."
The wikipedia article continues: "Lara Asaro, the girlfriend of Williams at the time of the crime, gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her... This is after she discovered evidence from the crime scene in Williams' car."
This is an important clarification: The police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car. Rather, Williams' ex-girlfriend, who was incentivized by reward money, claimed, more than 8 months after the crime, that she saw the victim's property in his car.
This is one of the the main reasons that the Innocence Project correctly argues that there is no reliable evidence linking Marcellus Williams to the murder.
"The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
The full quote from the article in justia.com states the following: "In November of 1999, University City police approached Asaro to speak with her about the murder. Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
The only thing linking the laptop to Williams was the testimony of a witness. Even if the witness is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing how Williams obtained the laptop.
By any reasonable standard, all this is extremely flimsy evidence: More than a year after the murder, the police found a "Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator" in the suspect's car that belonged to the victim? And someone testified that Williams had the victim's laptop. And it is on the basis of this pitifully weak evidence that you would justify the execution of Williams, the suspect? Even though, as the Innocence Project correctly observes, there is no direct physical evidence linking Williams to the crime scene, and the DNA recovered from the crime scene does not match Williams?
I was just helping everyone understand that your important clarification, was in fact, wrong.
Since I wasn't on the jury, I can't say whether or not I would have been ok with the death penalty in this case, although the murder was particularly heinous.
This is the second time in as many days I've seen some one use the argument that the severity of the crime meant the standards for conviction should somehow be less stringent. Sadly, I don't get the impression is an uncommon way of thinking.
This line of thinking peeks through all the time from otherwise intelligent people. Merely mentioning how heinous a crime was when we're talking about the guilt or innocence of a suspect should immediately kill your credibility. Too bad the criminal justice system doesn't care about that.
Horribly, you regularly see this in supreme court cases. Some case has the conservatives denying a significant right to a criminal suspect and the decision will start with a lurid depiction of the crime they were convicted of through the denial of some right.
its not a deterrent for multiple other reasons too:
1. most murderers do not expect to get caught if they are acting at all rationally, and do not care if they do not, and,
2. unless you execute a high proportion of people committing a particular crime any one criminal knows they are unlikely to be executed.
I think the Tutu quote at the end of the video.
Most of the rest of the work world has abolished capital punishment, and most of the rest uses it very sparingly. The big exceptions are China and the Middle East. Good company to keep?
This in and of itself very likely creates a bias against the defendant. For me, there is overwhelming evidence that many innocent people have been executed. To support the death penalty, you seem likely to either not believe in systemic injustice (which means you are also probably more likely to believe flimsy testimony) or accept that innocent lives are a tolerable tradeoff to ensure that some people are executed for their crimes. Both groups seem more likely to convict to me than a random sample.
Personally, I also feel that it is morally wrong to give jurors life and death decision making power. The jurors themselves can be deeply harmed by this if they later learn that they convicted a defendant on the basis of false evidence.
I think the bigger problem though is that the death penalty is too abstract. There are many people who believe that certain crimes are worthy of execution. I don't personally agree, but I accept other's beliefs on that point. But even if I grant the righteousness of execution in certain cases, it seems nearly impossible to implement justly and without heavy costs to society. This includes the costs to the people who must carry out the execution as well as the exceedingly high financial costs relative to other forms of punishment.
Indeed, it starts with the judge deciding (without trial or jury) whether capital charges can be brought. Then a capital jury is chosen.
In practical terms, it also requires an incompetent lawyer. Ruth Bader Ginsberg said "No well defended person receives the death penalty." I read that in an article about the one isolated case where she was wrong.
I also suspect that the death penalty corrupts the societies that use it.
In your prior comment you say that Asaro was incentivized by a reward offered in May 1999, but that doesn't agree with waiting for the police to approach her in November.
The "approach" by the police was essentially an offer to either testify and get the reward money and have police drop some charges against her, or not testify and face the charges herself.
Circumstantial. There are a 1000 different ways he could have obtained those items without committing a murder. Prove that having them is proof positive he killed someone.
I don't think we should have capital punishment at all, anywhere, and certainly this is a textbook example of why, but circumstantial evidence is real evidence, admissible in court cases.
My understanding is that the opposite is closer to the truth: most cases are made on circumstantial evidence. Jury instructions apparently tell jurors not to weight it any differently than direct evidence.
Multiple witnesses seeing a suspect run out of a store holding a smoking gun shortly after the store clerk was shot is both circumstantial evidence and plenty for a DA to bring to trial.
"Circumstantial" evidence is often stronger than "direct" evidence. e.g. DNA is almost always "circumstantial", yet more modernly maligned eye witness evidence is "direct".
[1] Ruler is in the folded laptop, laptop gets stolen, laptop is sold, ruler inside, buyer is told he can keep the cool ruler.
[2] Murderer specifically tries to pin the murder on someone else. Someone else being prosecuted is a good way to live free after, gifts his laptop and a ruler to the suspect or leaves them somewhere where they are discovered and taken.
Is that unlikely? Is it more unlikely than a murderer keeping the laptop and ruler from a victim, tying him to the murder?
For me this alone would be absolutely insufficient evidence, to sentence someone to death. The ease with which some here would do this shocks me.
Fair, but the Innocence Project did not argue that the defendant received inadequate representation. So presumably the defense would have had to offer an explanation during the trial and the jury was apparently unconvinced.
Juries can get things wrong, but we’re also just getting the cliff notes of the trial rather than the whole story.
Am i the only one in favor of capital punishment in this thread?
My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).
Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a "State Hospital" for rehabilitation. It's not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51/51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.
The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.
Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren't rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you've taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).
Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.
I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.
Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.
I used to think that false convictions were rare. In capital cases like this one it is close to 4%! That made me think, is it worth killing 4 innocent people to avoid having to imprison 96 guilty ones for the rest of their life? If I went out with a gun and killed 100 people, 4 innocent and 96 justifiably, I may as well be number 97.
I'm curious what percentage of false convictions are caused by LEO and DA omitting or destroying evidence.
I suspect, ignorantly, that it's north of 70%. If anyone should be getting the death penalty, it should be those that abuse power granted to them by the people.
I guess false confessions are a huge issue. In addition, our system is mostly designed to around the needs of the rich and corporate interests. Prosecution for crimes against the poor and disenfranchised is critically underfunded. Public defenders offices are even worse off.
Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.
That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.
This is true of any punishment, though: if we want to hold people in prison, we're going to have innocent people in there too. Why draw the line specifically at "death"?
With capital punishment, we remove the possibility of fixing our mistake if someone is innocent. But if we lock someone up for 30 years, they have the opportunity for justice to be served, and we have mechanics to _try_ to make it right.
Right? Like if you run with the argument that people are making then we can't give people a life sentence because they may die in jail when they're innocent.
So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him.
From a humanity standpoint the first option is much more barbaric.
Besides, what is the chance an innocent gets out if he was convicted in the first place?
I believe it's so low that the mistake is not giving a decent out (and avoiding large costs to society) to problematic peoples on the off chance that you might get an innocent released 10 years earlier.
If he was truly innocent, his life is ruined already, he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life...
i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.
This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?
You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?
That's the whole point of the system is it not? We accept that there is a vanishigly small chance that a innocent person may be locked up and imprisoned. The point i was making is that we are already making that choice by the allowance of jails and prisons. So if we accept that, the sentencing does not matter. They were proven guilty in the court of law. There is a handful of studies, i'm sure someone could pull up about such cases where people on death row were found innocent after 20 years. However, those are exceptions and 99.99% of cases are not that way and are mostly because we "discovered" dna evidence as a thing.
It's death by a million cuts as soon as you start second guessing the system and trying to use the same system to fix it's inherent imperfections. Proven guilty by the court of law needs to mean something.
I think put yourself in the shoes of someone about to be executed innocent of their crime. Then make your argument. It sounds like “some of you die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” otherwise.
Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.
I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.
The right way to reduce the cost of incarcerating people is to end mass incarceration, not to kill people. Just shooting everybody on LWOP in the head won't do nearly as much.
Further, I think that we should have a high expense per prisoner. It should cost society something to imprison somebody, since crime is in many ways a product of society's systems and choices. A world with mass incarceration and a focus on reducing the cost of the prison system is a world that basically necessitates abuse.
Doesn't the US privatized incarceration so it's basically a _free_ market, where shady deals are made to funnel more public money to private entities, and many people are incentivized to have as many people in prison as possible?
In that case, the cost on citizens for incarceration of people shouldn't be taken into account in the discussion around capital punishment because it's another issue altogether?
Funny enough, i think i agree with you. the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state. And that's why we have innocent until proven guilty.
But I think we disagree on our trust of the legal system. Once proven guilty under the court of law that must be upheld. If you locked the doors and burned your grandma alive because you thought she was satan you should be executed, not put in a cushy hospital to be "Rehabilitated". If you caused harm to society in such a violent way, justice is not the tax payers paying $2.7m and to forver bear the burden of one who cannot function in our society.
I disagree, on the basis that retribution should simply not be a state penalogical goal at all. When you say someone "should be executed" you're conjuring up innate feelings of the desire for vindictiveness. A modern state should not have that in consideration at all.
Either they're so dangerous that no matter what you do or say to them they will never change their ways, or they can be rehabilitated. Neither of those posibilities justifies the kind of cruel treatments that plague America's prisons today, much less the death penalty.
Unfortunately cases like this come along where it is not applied correctly, forcing us to have to face the reality that we are not capable of using it as a proper tool.
I believe that people against it are either incredibly annoying idealists (who fail to understand that perfect is the enemy of good) or full-on barbarian who rejoices at the idea of wasting someone's life in a much worse way than just killing him.
I believe long-term imprisonment is much worse than death, especially since there is no real life possible after so much time in prison. It is truly worse than death from a humanity point of view.
I don't believe the nonsense about potentially innocent people, if justice isn't completely certain, then they can put them in prison awaiting more evidence.
But I think it is actually pretty rare, the problem is mostly lack of evidence; you don't get trouble with justice when you are a good citizen and juste mind your own business.
1. The witness who claimed Williams confessed provided non-publicly-available, but known-to-police, details about the case. This is very strong evidence that the confession was made to them.
2. The girlfriend's hesitation to go to police (she never asked for the reward money) is due to the fact that Williams threatened her family, which is a real threat considering his history of violence
3. The prosecution had several other witnesses that were not called to the stand to whom Williams told about the murder
4. Williams not only had Gayle's laptop, but had her husband's laptop and had sold it to someone. The police found the laptop and the owner identifier Williams as the seller.
5. Williams not only had her laptop but a bunch of household items. Tell me, when have you had several items from a murder victim in your car? Williams offers no explanation for where these came from.
Look... criminals are not the type to take responsibility for their actions. Williams criminal history and jailhouse violence indicate that this is not a man who learns from past mistakes, or who even think he needed reform of any kind.
I was unable to find a "letter" from Missouri Governor Michael Parson about this case, but there is a press release from the Office of the Governor (url copied below). Here are some of the highlights of the Governor's statement to the press:
The Governor's Office offers the following summary of the crime: "Marcellus Williams murdered Felicia Gayle on August 11, 1998. He burglarized Ms. Gayle’s home, ambushed her as she left the shower, stabbed her 43 times and left the knife lodged in her neck."
Because of the bloody and brutal nature of the crime, the police were able to recover DNA evidence at the crime scene. However, as the Innocence Project observed, the DNA evidence that was left behind by the killer does not match Marcellus Williams. The perpetrator left a knife in the victim's neck, but the DNA recovered from the knife - which could have conclusively determined who killed the victim - was contaminated and destroyed by the state, as noted by the Innocence Project.
Yet, the governor's press release completely ignores these facts, and then proceeds to deliver an astonishing statement: "I also want to add how deeply disturbed we’ve been about how this case has been covered. Mr. Williams’ attorneys chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which Courts have repeatedly rejected. Yet, some media outlets and activist groups have continued such claims without so much of a mention of the judicial proceedings or an unbiased analysis of the facts."
DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would presumably include the critical details that (1) none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
The other evidence cited by the Governor's Office is all circumstantial. Contrary to the Governor's assertions, the witnesses who testified against Williams were in fact incentivized with reward money, and they did not offer details of the crime that were unknown to the public through media reports.
In summary, there is no direct evidence connecting Marcellus Williams to the crime scene. The real murderer in this case is Missouri Governor Mike Parson.
DNA evidence is notoriously iffy. I would not convict / not convict someone based purely on that. There's so many confounding factors. No one knows whose DNA was left. There's no way to know any DNA is 'the killers'. For all we know Gayle was having an affair. That doesn't explain the hard facts of why her stuff ended up in his car and she died in a manner that fits Williams' previous violent attacks.
Look... obviously I can't see he did or did not do it with incomplete information. However, it's pretty clear the innocence project is wildly manipulating the story. Moreover, the innocence project frequently calls out the iffi-ness of DNA evidence when it suits them, and are now claiming that we should listen only to it.
The truth is that the police recovered some DNA and it happened to be a man's they cannot connect. It could be her killer. It could not be. It could be a friend; it could be an affair partner; who knows. Either way, that man did not have all her stuff, and did not confess to the murder.
> DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would
DNA exists sure. but no one knows whose DNA was collected, and DNA matching is not 100%.
> none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
Why would we expect any of the DNA to match? DNA of all sorts of people are everywhere. It doesn't seem there was much struggle. There was no rape. Exactly what do you expect to find?
> The presence on the knife of a male DNA profile is also significant and worthy of additional testing and evaluation. In briefing, the State argued that the presence of DNA on a kitchen knife is unremarkable because anyone in the home could have used the knife. However, the State has long recognized the power of DNA found on a murder weapon and has relied upon such evidence to secure convictions. Here, the only male who lived in the home was the victim’s husband. Additional testing could be performed to develop a profile from the husband for comparison to the profile found on the knife. Assuming the victim’s husband (who is not and never was a suspect) is excluded as a match, it is then clear that the DNA matches the killer. Yet, law enforcement has never conducted such testing.
The innocence project is making the wild claim that the male DNA on the kitchen knife is certainly the killers. Let me ask you... how many men have you had at a dinner party? The idea that their DNA on the murder weapon should be sufficient to indict them, while all the other physical evidence linking Williams to the murder is not sufficient is... a stretch. Under this scheme, Mrs Gayle's dinner guest from the night before is more likely to be the murder culprit than the random attacker who just happens to have a ton of her personal belongings after she is killed? Come on. Let's live in the real world.
What we do know is that Williams has a track record of violence and then not doing anything to address it, while blaming others for his crimes.
It's insane the amount of bullshit people will pille up to defend a man who, even if he was innocent on this case, was clearly a criminal with antecedents and no sign of working on a better life.
Even if he was innocent in this particular case, society just got rid of problematic and disruptive individual that clearly had no will to behave in society.
In any way you put it, it's actually a very positive outcome for everyone but yet we get all this nonsense.
And let's be real, the chance he was actually innocent is so slim it's a complete waste of time trying to do that.
If we were talking about an upstanding citizen with a good life and a lot to lose, yes, it would smell fishy and would need a lot of consideration/better evidence; but this is not the case at all, even if there was a mistake it is a rather small mistake everything considered.
If we aren't going to abolish the death penalty, we should at least require a higher standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt to carry it out. It should require incontrovertible proof. Circumstantial evidence should not be allowed. Expert testimony should be barred. The evidence must be conclusive, plain, and certain to every member of the jury. This would allow you to execute, e.g., mass shooters who give themselves up, but make it extremely unlikely to irreversibly kill someone on the basis of junk science, induced or extorted testimony, or other fallible evidence.
Instead, there is a very high burden of proof, there's a lot of protections built into the process, and, most important, it's an adversarial process in which one side is standing up for the defendant. If the evidence isn't good enough, the defendant's lawyer can and must show that to the jury, with them making the final decision on who is right.
Which, in my opinion, is a fantastic argument against the death penalty.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf
I am currently of the belief that the death penalty should be reserved for the most extreme of the most extreme circumstances. The Boston Bomber & The Park School Shooter are two prime examples.
There is a very high burden of proof for both of them and to my knowledge, no doubts as to their guilt. I personally find it morally reprehensible individuals like themselves are still gifted with life after the lives they ruined.
Maybe this is a mindset I will grow out of as I grow older.
Well yeah, the problem with modern justice is that it doesn't really work. It's a tool for use by the powerful, besides that for common people there is no real justice.
I once got a lot of stuff stolen from me; long story but I could identify the perpetrators with 100% confidence. At the police station they showed me quite a lot of grids of photo mugshots, unsurprisingly I found the thieves.
But then the officer told me that one of them had been caught 17 times, and yet here he was, still stealing stuff.
I was asked to be a witness to make a case, I refused because clearly justice wasn't working at all so what's the point?
I am pretty sure that this person will continue his ways until he dies but society is unwilling to recognize this reality and "justice" is those kinds of people getting a free pass at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
Meanwhile if you are caught driving too fast you will get an insane fee, car seized, and permit revoked. "Justice" is very nice to criminal, but always hard on weak people who have no choice, funny thing that we call it justice.
I completely agree. One of several reasons I'm against the death penalty.
Then again, it's not like I'm super happy about someone being in prison for their whole life, if they're innocent. But practically speaking, there needs to be some way to incarcerate people.
In principle , I am in favor of capital punishment, but the way we do it is a mechanism of injustice. I’m not sure there is a solution.
The problem is the way that the severity of the crime makes juries less reliable.
When there is particularly severe circumstances (like a particularly horrific homocide) the psychological penalty for -not- convicting is much higher, and the desire to feel certain that a perpetrator has been found is much higher than say, a case of property theft.
Combined with the death penalty, these biases add up to a murder machine rather than an instrument of justice.
Estimations based on actual exonerations place the false conviction rate in some states >1%. If 1% are exonerated (which requires extraordinary evidence, often obtained by happenstance in solving other crimes) it’s a pretty safe bet we may be looking at >10% false convictions.
Add to this the fact that even confessions are unreliable, something I have some personal anecdotal experience with.
When I was eleven, school officials accused me of doing something I absolutely did not do. (and in fact there was no evidence that the thing had actually even happened, it was later told to me by the person claiming the event that it was fabricated from whole cloth)
I became so convinced that I did in fact do it that I invented an entire scenario where I had some kind of psychological episode, explaining why I did not directly remember doing the thing, but I was 100 percent sure that I had actually done it.
I am not, and was not , a weak minded person. I did, however, at that time, trust in the idea of authority figures.
It is not hard to to imagine that an adult on the other side of the bell curve that was basically trusting in society might easily fall into the same trap of disbelief->rationalization in an effort to to conform their reality to the “objective truth”.
After this experience,I don’t place much weight in confessions, even less in plea bargains.
We don’t use the word reasonable anymore the way it was written originally, and the actual meaning is what you’re asking for, except for every conviction, not just capital ones. It doesn’t mean “a small but tolerable level of doubt”. It means doubt backed by reason. “Aliens made me do it” is doubt that is not backed by reason. “There is another plausible way that conforms to the evidence given that he came to possess that laptop” is reasonable doubt.
There's almost never incontrovertible proof in a criminal trial. Even if the suspect is on camera confessing. The sheer number of people who confessed to crimes and were then found innocent through DNA evidence is perturbing.
100%. I've seen so many wrongful convictions. A lot of those, the person wasn't necessarily innocent, but the trial process was so faulty that they did not receive the due process they were owed.
The primary responsibility of a defense attorney isn't what a guilty defendant wants (to get off the charges), but it is to ensure that their client receives an absolutely fair trial with all the fairly-obtained evidence fairly presented.
> There's almost never incontrovertible proof in a criminal trial
Having watched a few FBI interrogations and other true crime related videos there certainly are such proofs.
I have a few of these come to mind, like the dude who killed his ex, took the house surveillance cameras down after the facts but didn't know they were backed up on servers, he was caught with the cameras in his truck shortly after. Most of these publicly known cases have a ridiculously long trail of proofs actually
I'm not saying mistakes don't happen, they obviously do, but in many cases it's extremely easy to prove if someone's guilty or not.
I wonder how one would encode such a level of burden of truth into the legal system such that the "really incontrovertible" cases are distinguishable from the "not really incontrovertible" ones.
I think most people would agree with that stuff in isolation, but reasonable solutions aren't really addressing the problem. Support for the Death Penalty is a political shibboleth in the modern US. It's not going to change, realistically ever, absent a major demographic realignment in the way we sort our citizens into parties.
Preaching to a choir of geeks looking for "solutions" is the wrong target.
And some states while not having banned it outright have made it effectively impossible to carry out. Oregon IIRC had their execution chamber and death row dismantled when their last governor left office. Execution is still on the books though.
The argument is that the girlfriend and jailhouse snitch both were looking to get the $10k reward money for his conviction. And that’s the only way the third point (had the items in the car) was known (from the girlfriend).
>And though Picus’ laptop was recovered, the prosecuting attorney’s office says Roberts told investigators Williams said he’d gotten it from Asaro – a claim Roberts reiterated in an affidavit signed in 2020. Jurors at trial never heard this assertion, which the prosecutor’s motion says illustrates “the person with the most direct connection to the crime” was “Laura Asaro, and not Marcellus Williams.”
additionally, they only made the statements after being threatened by police
>The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.
What amazes me is how routine this practice is to this very day. It is commonplace for police to use vile tactics and tell patent lies. The entire system is rigged in a way that cares not about truth but about winning. When you measure things in conviction rate this is bound to happen.
> argument is that the girlfriend and jailhouse snitch both were looking to get the $10k reward money for his conviction
The Governor's counterargument being the "girlfriend never requested the reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder, despite claims that she was only interested in money" [1].
The interesting thing is I could see myself, were I on the jury, and if the other facts of the case aligned, finding Williams guilty beyond reasonable doubt where the punishment is life without parole. But I can't reach the certainty I'd want for the death penalty. Yet that implies a tremendous amount of faith in my ability to finely distinguish probabilities of guilt, an ability I don't think I have.
This discussion is confusing because it's about two separate issues: a Rorschach test on your views on capital punishment and an orthogonal one about due process and William's guilt. (They're not orthogonal, but the interaction between those can probably be entirely described by the former.)
> But I can't reach the certainty I'd want for the death penalty
There is a degree of certainty required for a conviction. It is up to the jury to only decide if that degree of certainty has been reached. It is up to the judge to determine the sentence. I make this point as the US justice system is set up explicitly so that the jury is not considering the sentencing, but only guilty or not guilty. This removes the rorscach test from the jurors consideration.
Interesting! Thank you for the additional information.
Would it be fair to call this an aberration in the US justice system? Namely that except for death penalty cases, that my previous comment holds? I generally viewed that distinction of guilt finding vs punishment selection as fundamental. This is food for thought -thank you.
The death penalty is unique, in that the crime must be convicted, death chosen as the punishment, and then a second jury formed to actually decide if death is warranted in this case given the guilt.
In addition to what the sibling commenter said about extra approval, also consider that in many places the prospective jurors is told up-front that the death penalty is on the table, and jury candidates who are not ok with that are dismissed.
So I'd expect that if possible punishments weren't discussed beforehand, you'd end up with a jury that doesn't support the death penalty quite as much.
And in that jury you'd be more likely to find someone who might believe the defendant is guilty, but vote to acquit because they don't believe their crime merits death, but are pretty sure that that's what the sentence would end up being if convicted.
And in that jury you might even find someone who is opposed to the death penalty entirely, and vote to acquit for the same reasons.
Probabilities at the extremes are counterintuitively easy to distinguish. There is a negligible difference between the evidence that would leave you 50% certain and that which would leave you 51% certain, but if you go from 99.9% to 99.99% certain, your evidence has gotten 10x stronger.
It also highlights the stupidity of the death penalty: the jury is instructed "if you find this person guilty, we will kill them for it" - i.e. an action with no possibility of reversal or redress.
It's an odd stress test of the idea of "reasonable doubt" because of course in reality, there's always some doubt but the level of doubt for "let's irreversible kill a person" versus "let's detain them for life, but admit the possibility extraordinary evidence might emerge which changes our decision" is pretty vast.
In a world where the development of DNA testing technology changed a lot of outcomes including numerous capital punishment cases, it's essentially unthinkable that we could continue with it.
No, they knew the items were in the car because they searched his car and found the items. He has not, as far as I know, offered any alternative explanation of how he came into possession of a murder victim's random personal items.
This is exactly what I would focus on as a juror. How did he come by the items, surely if someone sold them to him he would say immediately who that was or offer some other way of getting it other than “I murdered her”
He is not required, but absent an explanation, a jury might think him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. After all, if your husband comes home late at night with lipstick all over him in a drunken stupor and unzipped pants, and then, as you threaten divorce and kick him out of the house, he offers no explanation, you too might think him guilty. Whereas, if he claims to have been assaulted by a very large woman you might listen to him. The 5th amendment protects you from being called as a witness against yourself. That doesn't mean you should not offer the jury testimony in defense of yourself.
In general, if you have an alternative explanation for the circumstances which have led to your suspicion, you should offer them up readily.
> He is not required, but absent an explanation, a jury might think him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s just plainly insane. Absence of proof of innocence is not proof guilt. It’s not even suggestive of proof, let alone proof without a resonable doubt!? That would leave half the country with a death sentence because they don’t have reliable affirmative proof that they didn’t commit this murder. Do you remember where you were on the day the murder happened? If you cannot provide proof, we’ll consider you guilty of murder beyond reasonable doubt.
That's true, but I'm not sure what your point is. The prosecutor did prove that, convincing a unanimous jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Perhaps you're thinking of it as a self-incrimination issue? That's a misperception I've seen before, where people generalize from Fifth Amendment protections to a broad rule that criminal defendants can never be at a disadvantage for refusing to explain themselves. That's not the case. If the prosecution says you obtained some items by taking them from the victim, and that's the only reasonable explanation the jury hears for how you got them, it's 100% within bounds for them to infer it's the correct explanation.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the messaging has shifted to he's innocent, where I believe the right message (and far less viral message), is the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted. I don't believe in the death penalty because I don't think the state should have the authority to execute citizens and even moreso when a very high bar of culpability hasn't been reached.
In this quest for vengeance I think people forget these rules are in place for the State to not abuse it's powers. I'm not against the death penalty because I'm a hippy vegan. I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.
> I believe the right message (and far less viral message), is the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted.
The jury makes that determination after being locked in a room and forced to hear both sides and all the evidence. How much of the evidence are you aware of? What The Innocence Project posted?
This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty who don't think some guy should be executed. That's hardly a surprise, but it has nothing to do with the evidence presented by the state.
I'm aware of the evidence - the lack of direct evidence is why I'm arguing against the death penalty. Again, I don't think the guy should be set free as it's credible he committed the murder. I'm against the state generally, and especially when there's no direct evidence, executing a defendant.
>This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty who don't think some guy should be executed.
> That's hardly a surprise, but it has nothing to do with the evidence presented by the state.
Again, call me a "small government" freak, but I think the cases in when the state should be allowed to execute someone is vanishingly small. I don't think anyone should live in a state that is allowed to execute someone based entirely on testimony.
The prosecutor's office and the victim's family both pushed to stop the execution due to reasonable doubt. Think they might have an idea of the available evidence?
The previous governor had begun an inquiry into the matter but the new governor shut that board down and blocked any and all attempts to halt the execution.
No, a prosecutor at no point argued that this guy was not guilty. Nobody argued that, except dishonest activists who lied to you. All prosecutor offered was commuting the death penalty to life without parole.
In addition, I don’t see how a random prosecutor’s opinion is relevant. If this was the original prosecutor who prosecuted the case, then it would have some evidentiary value. In this case, this is just some guy with zero connection to the original case. Why should we care what he believes, over opinion of hundreds of prosecutors in this country who are happy that the justice has finally been served?
> This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty
Who even argues in favor of it? What studies shows that the death penalty is effective? Who has done cost benefit analysis for civic life to have the government executing people generally speaking? So many truthy arguments on behalf of the death penalty.
I oppose the death penalty, but social policies should not be based on the outcome of cost/benefit analysis. If they were, executions would be used far more, on much less serious crimes, given rates of recidivism and revictimisation amongst certain crime types.
Cost benefit analysis would likely trace back to root causes in the same way it's cheaper to fix a bug before it gets shipped.
There's a great TED talk from a lawyer who was looking to reduce death penalty executions, who realised the best way to do that would be to reduce the number of murders and the best way to do that was to support kids and families with problems due to poverty and poor mental health.
The childhood anecdote from the guy he was working with that got executed has stayed with me for over a decade now:
Rehabilitation has not been shown to work regularly in practice, particularly for criminals with long criminal histories (such as Marcellus Williams). The primary benefit of incarceration is incapacitation - keeping repeat criminals off the streets.
Personally, I would make prison conditions less harsh, as long as we could guarantee that repeat criminals would stay in prison until they reach the age at which aggression has declined enough that they’re unlikely to impulsively commit crimes. That might have to be 50+ years old. Then they should be released with a UBI. Most people who would get sent to prison for decades after a life of crime were never suitable employees in the first place, and they’ll be even less so after prison. However, they should have enough money to live a life of dignity after prison, and if they can keep a job, they should keep all that money too.
> Rehabilitation has not been shown to work regularly in practice
It works when it's done right [0].
One of the main reasons it fails to work is when the justice system itself is perceived as unfair [0]. So, things like inconsistently applied sentencing (!), systemic racism (!), over-the-top punishments (!) even in cases with significant doubt (!), etc...
"In this quest for vengeance I think people forget these rules are in place for the State to not abuse it's powers. I'm not against the death penalty because I'm a hippy vegan. I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield."
I am not sure what the US tries to achieve with the death penalty. Deterrence? Seems not to work. And EU countries have much lower violent crime. Even if they have assault rifles at home (Switzerland). Revenge? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
> the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted
The jury only provided the unanimous guilty verdict. After that point, the defendant has been declared guilty beyond all reasonable doubt by the state, and it's up to the judge to determine the appropriate punishment for someone guilty of the crime of 1st degree murder, robbery, etc.
It's possible that some on the jury did not want the death penalty, but were not ready to acquit.
> I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.
To your point, the Innocence Project claims 251 exonerations, with ~9% (22) exonerations coming after the death penalty had already occured. The IP reported receiving 65,600 letters for assistance, so around ~0.4% of all requests for help were later proven to be wrongful convictions. There are currently around 2,200 prisoners on Death Row (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row/overview/death-row-us...). Assuming the ~0.4% wrongful conviction rate is representative for this population, that would be around 8-9 people. Some States have paused executions, and the US executes about ~20 people per year. So that would be a wrongful execution every ~12.5 years on average, again if these percentages are representative of death row convictions.
> The jury only provided the unanimous guilty verdict. After that point, the defendant has been declared guilty beyond all reasonable doubt by the state, and it's up to the judge to determine the appropriate punishment for someone guilty of the crime of 1st degree murder, robbery, etc.
In Missouri (as in most US States with capital punishment), the death penalty must separately be approved by the jury after the jury convicts.
Friend, this is completely the wrong math on so many levels!
I don't even know where to start... these numbers are not even remotely representative of anything about the larger prison population.
The IP reported receiving 65,600 letters for
assistance, so around ~0.4% of all requests
for help were later proven to be wrongful convictions.
[...]
Assuming the ~0.4% wrongful conviction rate is
representative for this population
For this to be even remotely representative of the overall wrongful conviction rate, this would mean that the IP thoroughly investigated and pursued all 65,600 cases and that new and completely fair trials were conducted in all 65,600 cases.
- The 251 exonerations were obtained by pursuing only a small fraction of those 65,600 cases. Presumably ones where they felt most certain of overturning the conviction.
- The 65,600 letter-writers are surely not representative of the overall prison population; this is a subset of convicts who have the resources to know about the IP and get a letter to them, with some kind of self-belief in their own innocence
- While apparently not true in this case the standards for death sentences tend to be higher than those for other convictions because they are so likely to be appealed, so the percentage of wrongfully convicted people on Death Row is likely to be different than that of the general convict population
- etc etc etc
I don't think your numbers are correct even as a back-of-the-envelope Fermi equation sort of estimate...
Sure, it’s a ballpark, but in the context of a conversation about how many innocent people are being executed, I think the wrongful conviction rate of the entire prison population is less relevant than a ballpark rate of those wrongfully sentenced to life/death. For example, if the wrongful conviction rate for minor offenses or white collar crimes was as high as 10%, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate that 10% of people sentenced to death were also wrongfully convicted. Its very possible that juries dealing with more serious crimes and more serious punishments are more careful in their decisions or innately require a higher burden of proof to convict.
I assumed that most of the letters received by the IP are for life/death sentences or at least major crimes with multi-decade long sentences, which I think would probably have a more consistent wrongful conviction rate in the group vs. the entire prison population.
And while you’re right that the IP might only have the resources to attempt to overturn the top X% cases, one could assume that they don’t win all their cases and that the next tier of cases they don’t accept would have diminishing returns.
So I think it’s fair to treat this estimate as closer to a lower bound with some significant error bars, but I’d be surprised if the reality is 5x or 10x higher.
They found this a 8-10 months later, not the next day. So much misinformation, I believe on purpose. And her GF snitched before, not to mention she wanted the reward.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 in the USA, many innocent Americans have been executed by the state. There is a considerable literature of scholarly research documenting this issue. For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend the following books:
Justin Brooks (2023) You Might Go to Prison Even Though You're Innocent, University of California Press
I was doing some reading based on your comment, and I'm kind of astonished to learn that public support for the death penalty only went up after the Gregg decision, peaking at 80% for in 1990. Wow.
> Even the victim’s family believes life without parole is the appropriate sentence
That is odd, if there is no evidence that links him to the crime why not argue to let him go? Is that just from a desire to have someone punished, no matter who it is.
There's plenty of evidence. He confessed to his girlfriend, and a cellmate. He pawned the victim's possessions. He was seen disposing of bloody clothes. He already had 15 felony convictions in addition to offenses related to Ms. Gayle's murder: robbery (2), armed criminal action (2), assault (2), burglary (4), stealing (3), stealing a motor vehicle, and unlawful use of a weapon.
Now, as to whether this evidence is solid enough for a death penalty conviction, that's tougher to say. But there's plenty of evidence.
> There's plenty of evidence. He confessed to his girlfriend, and a cellmate.
Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence. Those people claim that he confessed to them, but there is a lot more context. Here is what the linked story says about the "he confessed" part:
> The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.
> Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.
You're mistaken. There are many exceptions to the evidentiary rules against hearsay in the US, and one of the more common exceptions is a statement made by the opposing party (i.e. while the prosecution is questioning a witness, a statement made by the defendant to that witness) (Rule 801(d)(2)). It's evidence.
Your issues with the credibility of those witnesses are valid, and the defense had the opportunity to bring those issues up at trial (that's why we have jury trials and why you have a right to defend yourself at your jury trial). They certainly weren't the only pieces of evidence against him (there's a lot), and I'm sure the jury considered that.
> Both of these individuals were known fabricators
Careful- it we're considering their history, then Mr Williams has a history of over a dozen counts of armed violence, burglary, robbery, and assault.
> this is hearsay and not evidence
Conflicting reports say that Asano provided verified information that had not been publicized. And Asano refused a cash reward for relaying the confessions she had heard. Regardless,
> Nothing contained in this section shall bar the admission in evidence of any confession made or given voluntarily by any person to any other person without interrogation by anyone, or at any time at which the person who made or gave such confession was not under arrest or other detention
I would think the far more compelling detail is the one you overlooked:
> Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.
Not only were the two known liars, but their accounts could not be verified, and they conflict with each other as well as the existing evidence. That seems enough reason to me to call their testimony into question.
Also, I'm a little curious about your assertion:
> Conflicting reports say that Asano provided verified information that had not been publicized
When TFA specifically included the following:
> neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police.
That, coupled with the fact that apparently none of the evidence at the scene was linked to Marcellus Williams makes me wonder how he was ever convicted in the first place. If we can take TFA at its word, the whole thing smells wrong.
Did they explain why they convened a board to research the topic to get to the bottom of this and then disbanded the board before they finished? Seems kind of shady when the government says "We are not sure, we need to do more research before we do this" and then never actually do that research and just kill someone?
Either you trust the government, and agree that they should have waited.
Or you don't trust the government, in which case you really can't trust them to kill someone.
The previous governor stayed the execution and created the commission to investigate which lasted 6 years until the new governor was elected. The new governor disbanded the commission. They were from different political parties and probably had different views on the death penalty / the use of state resources.
> neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police.
from The Innocence Project seems carefully worded to imply that they didn't say anything that mattered, while still leaving open that they provided information that the police had, but which had not be publicly released.
> When speaking with law enforcement, the jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement.
This is hard to fake and seems like pretty compelling evidence that the informant is telling the truth.
> Careful- it we're considering their history, then Mr Williams has a history of over a dozen counts of armed violence, burglary, robbery, and assault.
This is all superfluous to the question of the credibility of the two witnesses. It isn't about being "fair" and treating Williams and the two witnesses the same -- one is on trial, the others are not.
I think you are out of your element. To my understanding hearsay refers to a claim made by someone not in court. In this case the girlfriend and jailmate were called as witnesses and gave testimony in court.
Witnesses are evidence and they are one of the oldest forms of evidence, your view that evidence is only material is a gross misunderstanding of trial procedures.
> Evidence that is not within the personal knowledge of a witness, such as testimony regarding statements made by someone other than the witness, and that therefore may be inadmissible to establish the truth of a particular contention because the accuracy of the evidence cannot be verified through cross-examination.
Tying the two together, basically it would be anything that can't be verified (in court) by the one who the witness is 'quoting'.
Regarding witness testimony, I don't think the tradition of it makes it any more iron clad. We used to have a lot more testimony of sorcery and such as well that got people killed. Further, we have only recently begun to study it scientifically. From what I gather, from my very limited knowledge of the studies thus far, it doesn't look good for eye-witness accuracy in general.
> The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.
There should be criminal penalties for prosecution or people involved with the chain of evidence for criminal trials failing to mention details that might sway the jury towards defense
Note that it's possible the person you are replying to was using the everyday "observation increases relative likelihood of theory" definition of evidence rather than the legal one.
It's not hearsay to go to the witness stand and say the defendant told you something. That defendant is there in court and is able to defend themselves.
Correction: it is in fact hearsay but it is admissible under one of numerous exceptions to the rule that hearsay is not admissible.
Laws are generally clearer if you write them as general definitions and general rules and if those cover too much carve out exceptions in the rules rather than the definitions. It would work to make the exceptions to the definitions instead, or to both the definitions and rules, but that is usually going to be more complicated and less clear.
For hearsay the general definition is "an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of what the statement asserts" and the general rule is "hearsay is not admissible", and that is narrowed by a bunch of exceptions to the "hearsay is not admissible" rule. As far as I remember pretty much everyone has left the definition untouched.
> Laws are generally clearer if you write them as general definitions and general rules and if those cover too much carve out exceptions in the rules rather than the definitions.
Similar motivation as exceptions for error handling
…did you read the link you just posted? If the person whose words are being presented as evidence is available for cross-examination then (legally) it’s not hearsay. The defendant in a criminal case is always available, so any statement they make out of court is never hearsay.
That's not quite correct. An out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted therein is always hearsay. The exceptions given in that Wikipedia article are not exceptions to it being hearsay. They are exceptions to the rule that hearsay is not admissible.
> The defendant in a criminal case is always available, so any statement they make out of court is never hearsay.
That's also not quite correct. A declarant is considered to be unavailable for example if they refuse to testify about the subject matter despite the court ordering them to. They are also considered to be unavailable if they testify that they cannot remember the subject matter. See rule 804(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence for the criteria for being unavailable.
(I'm using FRE because that seems to be what others are using. Really though we should be using Missouri's rules of evidence. I think most state's rules of evidence are fairly close to the FRE so that's probably reasonable).
Someone who is incarcerated snitching on someone who’s in there with them just screams “give me your cupcake or I’m gonna tell the cops you confessed to me”. Williams was also a person who was black and Muslim so prejudice alone could have been a motivation
People say stupid things all the time as well. It’s not inconceivable to brag about something that’s not true either as an act of defiance or for social reasons such as to get some respect, look important, or to be left alone.
As someone who has personally known jailhouse snitches, I don't think this is accurate. The biggest problem with becoming a snitch is that you are then forever more labeled as a snitch, and while (unlike the movies) this is unlikely to result in violence, you will certainly be shunned for the rest of your prison life.
Right, these types of hearsay are only useful if they can lead investigators to more evidence that is actually supported by a solid source/chain-of-legitimacy. So it can be valuable but probably shouldn’t be submersible to court or at least the defense should really be able to lay into and tell the jury it is -highly- suspect.
As stated in the article written by the legal scholars at the Innocence Project:
> "There is no reliable evidence proving that Marcellus Williams committed the crime for which he is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24. The State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him."
DNA evidence is based on proven science, and the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory.
As far as I can tell, this isn't actually true: "the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory". The Innocence Project are being very careful with their wording here. Initially, they relied on trace DNA on the knife that didn't match the accused murderer, but that ended up being from someone in the prosecutor's office handling it after it had been processed for forensic evidence. Then they tried to argue that this showed the state had destroyed evidence which would've proved his innocence, but the courts didn't buy it because all available evidence suggests the killer's DNA was simply never on the knife. (Which isn't that surprising - DNA evidence isn't perfect and gloves exist.) The other "forensic crime scene evidence" seems to be hothingburgers like a few non-matching hairs in a house that'd had a large number of people going in and out in the recent past.
It's sad to me that the Innocence Project, instead of being a neutral third party investigating and then pushing back against wrongful convictions, have just become an all out 'stop the death penalty' advocacy group.
Ultimately I think this undermines their cause and hurts their ability to save truly innocent people.
Do you have reason to also claim that any of the points raised in the article are incorrect? If not, that would seem to contradict your claim that they are just a stop-the-death-penalfy advocacy group.
This is the real issue. Either the death penalty is wrong in all cases, even when it’s brutally obvious that the person is guilty of heinous crimes, or it is simply a matter of taste when it should be applied, like seasoning. The argument against executing someone should stem from the first not the second, even though the second is much easier to play in the media.
The Innocence Project has been like this for a while. They are not a neutral third party, they are activists. In this particular case, this man was plainly and obviously guilty of a heinous murder. They’re using weasel words and a disingenuous reading of DNA evidence to argue that there’s reasonable doubt when there is not. If their issue is with the death penalty then just argue that issue.
DNA evidence is notoriously faulty. Let's not pretend it's 100% accurate. If I understand correctly, the innocence project has -- in the past -- used the fact that it's not accurate as a way to cast doubt on convictions.
Prior convictions are evidence in the broad sense (because they provide information that could update one's belief about a defendant's character or likelihood of committing a crime), but not legally admissible evidence (in many jurisdictions).
Presumably they still think he’s (probably) guilty.
Victims and their family’s can and often do oppose capital punishment on moral grounds, same as anybody else.
They want him punished but believe that killing him is a moral wrong, or they’re more comfortable with the risk that he’s innocent if he’s in prison with the possibility of being exonerated rather than killed.
As far as I could find reading about this case, the “evidence of innocence” is very flimsy. But it’s a reasonable moral stand by the family to want to stay the execution if they think there is even a slim chance of innocence.
If you read the article, the "evidence of guilt" is equally flimsy. And if we take "innocent until proven guilty" seriously, that means he not only should not have been executed, but should never have gone to jail in the first place...
This seems like an exceedingly bad hill to die on. Curtis Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death six times for the same murder by juries of his peers, yet he's a free man today.
We don't have a better system at the moment, accepting its judgements is reasonable in light of that. And backseating when we're probably missing 90% of the evidence presented at court is unlikely to be any more accurate.
“Evidence of innocence” is a very problematic concept. Have you thought through what is your evidence of your innocence? (Not just regarding to this case, but regarding all cases involving dead or missing people.) Should we execute you if you ever come up short?
The problem is there are two different standards of proof at different points of the legal process.
Conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt — all the onus is on the prosecution to prove that you indisputably committed that crime. In this case unreliable evidence was used without which this standard likely would not have been met.
Once you’ve been convicted (in this case on shoddy evidence) the onus is on you to offer evidence that you’re actually innocent - a reasonable doubt is no longer sufficient, you need to offer strong, new evidence that disproves the already decided “fact” that you committed the crime.
So conviction is a "trap door" of evidence weight? If someone is convicted based on evidence that is later shown to be totally insufficient to support that conviction, this new information does nothing to overturn the conviction?
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "later shown to be totally insufficient to support that conviction"? The sufficience of evidence doesn't randomly change. If you mean that they were convicted based on evidence that shouldn't have been shown to the jury, you can win an appeal on that.
The standard before your convicted is that the jury must find you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard after you've been convicted is that you must have found substantial new evidence that warrants reconsidering the verdict, or you must show that the original trial was mishandled somehow. "I think the jury was stupid" is not a valid appeal.
Interesting points. The full details of the evidence was not presented to the jury. In that way, it did change. It is more, "the jury was not told the full story."
A lot of rights (like your right to remain silent, your right to a speedy trial, your right to bear arms, your right to vote, your rights to be free from search without reason) have been interpreted only apply up to the point of conviction. So yes, things get MUCH tougher once convicted as many rights no longer apply to you or are stripped from you.
In this case, up until conviction you are presumed innocent and guilt must be proven. Post conviction most of the appeals process is bared if not filed within 14 days of conviction (it used to be forever but then the US Justice system decided woohhh there that's too long and burdensome on the Justice system so 14 days was deemed a reasonable change to the previous 'forever'. A totally reasonable happy middle). After 14 days from conviction really the only relief available is to prove actual innocence, a much higher and more difficult standard to meet.
So falsify and/or misrepresent evidence just long enough to fool a jury. If the ruse is discovered one minute after conviction, who cares? Person's convicted now, doesn't matter?
With the caveat that this is coming from someone with zero training in law: what a load of horseshit.
No, people have 14 days not one minute (previously forever but reduced to 14 days to find a happy balance to ease the load on the judicial system) after conviction in the Feds to file what most Americans' think of when they think of an appeal. After 14 days (previously forever) the appeal process is greatly limited.
I was once accused of a financial crime, around taking money from an account. I was, admittedly, guilty, however, the amount claimed was nearly triple the amount that I had taken (there were multiple shenanigans happening).
When my attorney and I said "Actually, we think the amount is $X, not $3X, because x y and z", we had an extraordinarily difficult time with the Prosecutor, who wanted US to justify why we thought the amount was only $X.
Apropos of any plea or deal or whatever, no... the onus is on the Prosecution to verifiably demonstrate the loss. Not for me to justify why I think the amount is different. Ironically, the justification we did provide came from the Prosecution. "You said the loss was $Z, including $Y in checks which were diverted. Witness statements and other testimony showed that these checks were NOT diverted, by their own words. Ergo, the loss is $Z-$Y."
Prosecutor was still "you need to show me the math for what that equates to". "No, that amounts to incriminating self, and is, bluntly, not my responsibility. You need to assert how you came to the number you are claiming in the charge."
As I understand it, it's also extremely rare for a prosecutor to admit mistakes and that a convicted person is innocent, even when it is sufficiently proven, they tend to double down on bad convictions. In this case the prosecutor said the defendant didn't do it. Which makes this a very rare case.
Apparently the family believes that he is guilty but doesn't want him executed (but does want him in prison). In some countries the families wishes are enough to prevent an execution but not in the US.
Does anyone find it deeply disturbing that the justice system will just sit on its own hands when presented with new evidence? It seems like prosecutors are more interested in maintaining a hi conviction rate rather than seeking justice. Judges seem totally apathetic.
The justice system wasn't presented with any new evidence. Some DNA from the prosecution's office ended up on the weapon sometime in the preceding 17 years, big whoop. This isn't exculpatory and doesn't contradict a single claim made by the prosecution, and there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop and bragging about how he did it in words that included nonpublic details about the crime.
This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.
> there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop
This should not be sufficient to justify the death penalty. Whether or not this guy did it, using such an incredibly weak standard will and almost certainly has killed innocent people.
> This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts…whose conviction was based on very strong evidence
“Very strong” evidence should never be enough to sentence someone to death. The evidence should be irrefutable. Anything less is unacceptable and inexcusable.
“The” prosecutor was not pushing against the execution. “A” prosecutor was, who did not have significantly greater relationship to the case than thousands of other prosecutors in this country. I don’t see how this guy’s opinion is more relevant that anyone else’s.
> the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution
Reading this thread, it's obvious there's been a big game of telephone with regards to what happened (half saying "a", half saying "the").
I hope this reminds people that they need to chase down sources as close to the original information source as possible as things can get misunderstood or distorted along the way.
It is very hard to get cases reopened, it is true. Once DNA testing came about many convicts tried to get the evidence in their cases tested to prove their innocence, but this took many, many years in a lot of cases.
In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.
Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government.
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
That case is even worse as it rested fully on the testimony of the other robber, which he made to get a lesser sentence and later rescinded:
> Prosecutors had no forensic evidence connecting Allah to the shooting. Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable.
The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.
> Golden said he agreed to plead guilty and testify when prosecutors assured him he would not face the death penalty or a life sentence – a deal that was not disclosed to the jury.
> “I substituted [Allah] for the person who was really with me,” he wrote, saying he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”. He did not identify this person.
If your friend is wrongly facing the death penalty and you know they’re innocent there’s no reason to not name the person you claim is the real shooter.
> Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening in Missouri after the US Supreme Court denied a stay.
> The 55-year-old was put to death around 6 p.m. CT at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
I am very happy when I see The Innocence Project taking on a case like this because it tells me they have already worked through the backlog of actually innocent people as well as the people who might possibly be innocent, and now have worked there way to the cases which are 1% flawed but in which the correct perpetrator has nevertheless been identified, tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, appealed, etc.
Aside the fact that the death penalty shouldn't exist in the first place, the victim's family should be able to veto it (automatic commutation to a life sentence).
Incidentally, that's a feature of Islamic law, and where the concept of blood money comes into picture. Which also means that you might be able to get away with murder, if you're rich enough.
Still not sure with so many of the (esp right leaning) in the US claiming to be christian, can also accept this as a punishment. But I get nonsense begets more nonsense.
I think even as a non-christian and especially if you comment like this you should know the absolute minimum about christianity: that the death penalty is obviously in the bible and commanded by God plenty of times
There's also testimony of God overturning / fulfilling prior commandments (Matthew 5:17–21, Acts 10:9–16). The Bible contains a lot of laws and punishments that aren't respected in the United States: selective quoting doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling argument.
There's also testimony of Jesus disrupting an instance of capital punishment (John 8:3–11). There may have been procedural issues in that case, of course – for example, no accusers are said to have claimed witness to the crime itself, which was legally required for an execution – but Jesus points this out after the mob has dispersed, not before, and many Christians interpret that verdict more generally.
It is important to understand the difference between moral laws, which are immutable, and other laws in the Bible, often categorized as civil or ceremonial.
In modern legal theory, we have a similar distinction, which you may know from Legally Blonde: malum in se (that which is inherently wrong) and malum prohibitum (that which is wrong because a lawful authority prohibits it). Example: endangering the safety of others by driving too fast is wrong in itself, while breaking the speed limit is wrong because the town said so.
The former type (moral, and in se) doesn't depend on the existence of a government or system of laws and justice. The latter type certainly does, and the wrongness of those things 1) is changeable at the will of the governing authority, 2) applies only to those properly under the authority, and 3) expires when the governing structure expires.
Christians believe the ten commandments are moral law, whereas when we get into the ins and outs of the ancient Israel system of justice, described at length in Leviticus, eg, we are seeing one civilization's implementation of that moral law into civil law, coupled with religious law and ceremonies that symbolized and pointed to deeper realities.
When Jesus says he does not abolish but fulfills the law (and he means all of the law, not just some laws), he can't mean you are now free to murder. He means if you murdered someone, you may yet receive eternal life and not eternal death, because he can pay the penalty on your behalf. He means he lived a perfectly moral life and can impute that to you. That's fulfillment of moral law.
It also doesn't mean eating pork was immoral and now it's moral. That dietary restriction was a malum prohibitum component of the ceremonial cleanness symbolism that was meant to point the Israelites to the reality of what happens to a soul that consumes unholy things. It was never immoral, only prohibited. But the law is fulfilled in that the symbol is no longer required. Jesus institutes a new symbol that fixates on his own holiness and cleanness imputed to us as if by eating it (the Lord's Supper). The early Christian movement quickly incorporated non-Jews who had no heritage of living under the authority of the Israelite state, which was, by this time, already expired/expiring, many times over through successive conquests and occupations by various other governments. Neither the non-Jewish Christians nor the Jewish Christians needed to abide by those laws, though many did for a time, as it was an integral part of cultural and religious custom.
You're right, Jesus isn't saying "you are free to murder". But in every case we see Jesus prevent (or reverse: Luke 22:49–51) bloodshed, the bloodshed would have been retribution or punishment. Jesus is presented as reasonably anti-murder. Whether that holds in the case of capital punishment, I can't say.
Though, Jesus was subject to capital punishment, despite the original prosecutor (Pontius Pilate) claiming no lawful basis for the execution (Luke 22:66–23:25). This was presented as unjust, despite Jesus' insistence that it had to happen. This is a bit muddled as an analogy, but I see how some people might take "capital punishment is wrong" from it.
This entire thread shows that christians who do believe disagree with eachother about this; I was raised some form of protestant christian and in that form, I was told that any type of killing is only allowed by god and god alone, never by humans. That includes war, capital punishment, abortion and everything else. Of course (... this is religion so it's all nonsense anyway), this did not include the maker his other creation like animals; you can kill and torture those and go to heaven. But nah, nothing 'obviously'; that god commands atrocities obviously means you cannot do them on your own; you need to be commanded; the death penalty is not commanded by god, or, well, in some interpretations it might be.
A large part of the organized activism against the death penalty is also run by christians, especially catholics and orthodox who are a lot more consistent on this.
It's not the christianity per se that makes them bloodthirsty. Contemporary american evangelical christianity is a novel social-political-religious movement and in some theologically significant ways has broken with near-universal christian tradition. Trying to understand it purely as a religion is too incomplete.
As a serious Christian and a dabbling linguist, I really hate that they've ruined a word meaning "gospel" (the English calque).
We really should call them "dysangelical" when they bring death like this (as opposed to warning of death, which is in scope of euangel when there's also a way to avoid it).
"Still not sure with so many of the (esp right leaning) in the US claiming to be christian, can also accept this as a punishment."
You shall not kill!
What I don't understand. It is my impression that most of the US states that still have the death penalty, strongly oppose abortion. I find this a contradiction. And also these are the states that oppose abortion, at the same time are strictly against any kind of welfare "not our problem!".
I think it’s a question of agency. If you’re an adult that makes their own choices (crime, bad financial decisions, etc.), then you know what the consequences are.
If you’re an unborn child, you’re don’t have agency.
For some there’s probably deeper religious belief in good things (birth) being the work of God and bad things (crime, vice, death) being the work of Satan.
To your point there are plenty of competing religious teachings that could lead some to be pro-choice, pro-welfare and anti-death penalty.
As in: "Only God can administer life and death, so stop those abortions or we'll set on fire your clinic and kill the doctors".
Psychology can explain completely that behavior, however this is not the right place for such discussions.
It is pro innconcent life, not pro murderer life? Pro life and pro choice are just marketing terms. People who are pro-choice aren't pro not wearing a seat belt (well some may be, but it has nothing to do with the topic). It has to do with abortion and only abortion.
I was foreman of a jury on a murder trial once; it’s my signature on the verdict form that sealed the fate of a man. In an extremely real and personal sense, I am directly responsible for putting a man in prison, and given his age, health conditions, and the sentence that was going to be passed, that means I’m directly responsible for ensuring a human being dies in prison.
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.
It seems wrong, that the 2 major points of evidence against Marcellus are a testimony from his ex and cellmate. I don’t trust humans, to trust convicting people based on 2 hearsay sources of testimony. Maybe this worked in the past when America was smaller and the average morality of a person was very high, but now this just seems ripe for abuse.
I wouldn’t use this evidence to make a decision in an office dispute.
I applaud the Innocence Project for taking this case, but honestly, Missouri? What did they expect? This is the same governor that tried to prosecute a newspaper reporter after they uncovered social security numbers in the HTML code from a state-run website. Then, when the governor was informed about how stupid his claim was, he doubled-down, insisting he would seek prosecution.
which is (I think...) the decision of the state supreme court on the appeal. There are several points where it seems like there is some dispute about what exactly the evidence is tying Williams to the murder, and where the original trial transcript might help clarify things.
Legally speaking Stalin's purges were also not murder, by definition.
It's obvious the previous poster was making a point of morality, not legality. You can of course disagree with that morality. That's fine. But going "but akshually the law says..." is being highly obtuse.
I'm just saying that "X is legal" is not really a good counter to "X is not moral", which of course also applies in the reverse. Legality and morality are just not the same thing.
Oh lol. I was being serious. Been thinking about the nuances of it recently and I felt it kinda resides within that framework. Wasn't meant to be snide but also this threads not the place for it.
If you're wondering if the Missouri governor Mike Parson sparingly uses his clemency and pardon power, you'd be mistaken [1]:
> Parson, a former sheriff, has now granted clemency to more than 760 people since 2020 — more than any Missouri governor since the 1940s
including those who waved guns at BLM protestors [2] and the son of the KC Chiefs coach who caused grave bodiy injuries to someone in a DUI.
Available data shows a pretty clear trend [3]:
> An analysis of available demographic data conducted by the Missouri News Network indicates that almost 90% of those who have been granted clemency by the governor are white.
If you're wondering where the US Supreme Court stands on this, consider this quote from then-Justice Antonin Scalia [4]:
> [t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.
Also, consider this racial bias demonstrated in the exoneration for those sentence to death [5]:
> Since 1973, at least 189 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. 100 of the death row exonerees are Black.
Lastly, even if you want to ignore the immorality of the death setnence, look at it from the lens of cost [6]. Death penalty cases are substantially more expensive to litigate and death row inmates are substantially more expensive to incarcerate. A life-without-parole would be substantially cheaper.
Also, you can release someone from prison wrongly convicted. You cannot bring them back to life and there are multiple cases of people who were executed and later exonerated. Williams is sadly added to that list.
Utterly pointless to argue this since we do not have access to the totality evidence and testimony that the Court and the jury had access to. Could it be that they were wrong? Unlikely but yes. Is it likely that we here are “less wrong”. Not a chance
The prosecutor who wanted to pardon him was not the original prosecutor, but a recent progressive elected one. The original prosecutor still believes he is guilty. Furthermore it is highly suspect that he was caught selling the laptop stolen from her house and the story about how he came into it is implausible.
People who are willing to commit murder are often sociopaths and pathological liars. It isn’t surprising he would maintain his innocence for years.
That said we shouldn’t execute him, there’s enough doubt to make it possible he didn’t do it and executing an innocent man is horrendous. And IMO we should eliminate the death penalty anyway.
But regardless, I still find the weight of evidence much stronger in favor of guilt over innocence.
> Furthermore it is highly suspect that he was caught selling the laptop stolen from her house and the story about how he came into it is implausible.
Things like “the State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him” should at the very least make everyone pause and reconsider the course of action. I am not familiar with the case so I don’t have an opinion on whether he is guilty or not, but this is not a way of running a justice system.
In any case, yes, the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism in a liberal society.
I'm not entrenched in my position, but I would argue that there are cases where the death penalty makes sense. It seems more cruel to lock someone up for the rest of their life with no chance of parole AND denying them the ability to commit suicide. Maybe avoidance of cruelty isn't the point of getting rid of the death penalty, though.
I'm against the death penalty - I do believe there's times it makes sense, and I certainly believe there's crimes worthy of it. But I don't trust the state to make this determination with 100% accuracy - and anything less than 100% means we have to make the choice between not giving the death penalty to those who do deserve it, or executing those who don't deserve it.
It's not unusual to hear stories of people being found innocent after decades in prison - and every single time it hammers home to me that they could have been pardoning a grave.
If it were up to me it would be in the constitution that everyone has the right to euthanasia and suicide with no conditions. At first i thought it seems like a completely unrelated issue to the death penalty. After thinking about it more maybe you have a point. Society will likely never get over the taboo of enabling suicide so i suppose it can be seen as a lesser moral evil to kill someone rather than subject them to life imprisonment under suicide watch. Interesting moral questions
> It seems more cruel to lock someone up for the rest of their life with no chance of parole AND denying them the ability to commit suicide.
It does, but at least it is reversible. I think when the worst case (an innocent being killed) is so wrong, it makes sense to design the system to avoid it, even if this has side effects such as making it worse for the actual criminals.
I would support leaving the opportunity to commit suicide in good conditions rather than strangling themselves with their bedsheets, but doing that properly would be tricky.
> Maybe avoidance of cruelty isn't the point of getting rid of the death penalty, though.
That’s a tricky one. It is hard to want to avoid cruelty in the case of gruesome murders. Nobody wants to say that they want to make the life of jailed terrorists better.
But among the opponents to the death penalty, I don’t think that cruelty is the main point. By keeping them alive, we don’t lower ourselves to their level, we leave them an opportunity to become better, and we avoid the moral cost of killing innocents.
Besides, life in prison is as good or bad as we collectively want it to be. There is a spectrum between Swedish jails and a hole in a dungeon.
This was all considered by the state Supreme Court. Due process was invoked and after numerous reviews at every level no court found anything to retry or reverse the case.
My personal take - of course he was guilty as unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public. And the property findings.
Saying that I’m not sure killing people is the greatest thing.
> unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public
Do you have a source?
"The case against Mr. Williams turned on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses who were incentivized by promises of leniency in their own pending criminal cases and reward money. The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.
Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. "
> " [...] neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. "
My brain is short-circuiting over the two parts of this snippet from The Innocence Project. Presumably both are intended to suggest unreliable individuals and an unjust guilty verdict, but I find a mismatch between the two. It's one thing to suppose the individuals revealed some details that were featured in media accounts. But it's quite a different thing to suppose the individuals revealed some details that were known only to police. The former point is of no consequence, but the latter point, if true, supports the reliability of the individuals and the guilt of the accused.
Not that I support the death penalty anyway. But I'm leaning toward nemo44x's personal take mentioned above. And the snippet was presumably written to coax us that the man was innocent. Am I missing something? They seem like weasel words, as another poster put it. :(
Just read the background from the appeal case and urs clear as day he’s guilty. They challenged a bunch of technicalities with flimsy arguments. At no point did they challenge if the evidence was sufficient.
This is a lawyer's evasive way of hiding that these individuals revealed info that was not known to the public but was confirmed to be accurate by the police
I love how they try and paint the witnesses as unreliable because they have "records" while defending the guy who had 15 violent felonies and already serving time for armed robbery as a victim of the system. While also ignoring the testimony of the person he fenced the victim's laptop to and the victim's belongings being found in the car he used to drive to burglary turned murder.
Everything is fallable, sure. But consider this: the guy had millions of dollars of pro bono legal machinery behind him and even still could not produce an argument or counter evidence to support his claim. Our system is amazingly transparent and corruption or outright denial of evidence would be clearly apparent. And it’s not there.
The system works almost always but does get it wrong sometimes. I doubt that this was that time. Justice was served.
> and corruption or outright denial of evidence would be clearly apparent
Not really - the legal discovery rules require full disclosure of all evidence, yet you regularly hear about how prosecutors don't disclose evidence. Sometimes the appeals process will grant a new trial, sometimes they overturn, but often the judges will just say "we're not going to bother worrying about the lack of a fair trial". It happens often enough that prosecutors are willing to take the gamble on it, otherwise it wouldn't continue to be a common news story.
In this case though the defense never even challenged the evidence or if it was sufficient. You “regularly” hear about it because it’s so rare that it’s news if it happens. It’s a very rare event.
Read the background here and tell me you really support this man who stabbed that woman - mother and wife - 43 times.
> The prosecutor who wanted to pardon him was not the original prosecutor, but a recent progressive elected one
It's beyond stupid to elect people who are in charge of upholding laws and prosecute crimes. They have to campaign, make their views known, and to get elected, show views which of course aren't necessarily related to what their job should be about.
Get professionals that are as impartial as possible. They will still have biases, but they won't have to advertise them and be beholden to them in order to get reelection.
No, that's silly and not at all the same thing as a prosecutor being accountable to the electorate as a whole. The entire point is that I don't trust one person, or a small group of people, to pick someone who is "unbiased". I don't trust the electorate as a whole either, but I trust them more than elected officials.
Only three states in the US have appointed, rather than elected, district attorneys. The United States Attorney General is an appointed position, and we've seen in recent administrations how it can be corrupted quite easily.
> No, that's silly and not at all the same thing as a prosecutor being accountable to the electorate as a whole.
In my perspective, it is exactly the same thing when you disagree with the electorate. Which is why (personnally) I don't want you, or any electorate choosing prosecutors.
If every time you voted for a prosecutor, and every time your vote was in a minority, would you still feel you had a say in the bias of the prosecutor?
I agree with respect to appointments being not good. In my view those are proxies for an election. I personally trust neither electorate nor elected officials.
> In my perspective, it is exactly the same thing when you disagree with the electorate.
In a democracy, you can argue with and convince your fellow citizens to change the law and how it is enforced. If a majority doesn't agree, you won't get your way. This is not a good system, but it is better than any other system.
If there were some other alternative that guaranteed that everyone always gets a completely unbiased prosecutor - great, I'm all for it! That system doesn't exist, though.
> If every time you voted for a prosecutor, and every time your vote was in a minority, would you still feel you had a say in the bias of the prosecutor?
You said previously at least by voting you had a say in the bias. Is your answer to the above a genuine "yes" because you feel there was opportunity to lobby other citizens?
I don't agree that there is necessarily even that possibility. Thus my position is that elected or appointed by an elected official are equally broken.
Who, exactly, gets to choose how unbiased the prosecutor is? You won't get that from a democratic election and you won't get that from elected officials choosing them.
My question is sincere. If the upstream comment wants to choose bias, then a "yes" answer to my question would be a consistent position and interesting if sincerely answered that way.
To your question, a priori bias would be hard to evaluate. Post facto there would be some data and perhaps some metrics that could be used. It would less be "who", but "how."
Prosecutor bias is a bit nebulous though. Prosecutors should be honest and present the best case possible, met with the best defense possible. The best defense being a function of wealth rather than a consistent standard is damning. But I quickly digress...
I would be interested to have my original question answered.
> If the upstream comment wants to choose bias, then a "yes" answer to my question would be a consistent position and interesting if sincerely answered that way.
I have no idea what you're saying here, but my comment was just saying that I want to vote for prosecutors rather than having them appointed. I prefer to decide for myself how biased the candidates are than to trust an elected official to pick someone who is unbiased, and to have my fellow citizens vote as well.
I don't have to assent to any random Dick, Joe, or Harry choosing a prosecutor for me to believe that everyone is better off if we are all prosecuted by someone elected.
> I prefer to decide for myself how biased the candidates
> have my fellow citizens vote as well.
I find those positions at odds to one another. Personally I don't want prosecutors to be neither appointed by elected officials nor elected. Though, I am more digging into that you think you might get a choice when voting.
Re-read what I wrote. I believe the grammar correct and it is clear.
Though, I'll illustrate with an example. Let's say the electorate is 10 people. You, 3 of your friends that think identical to you, and me with 5 of my friends that think identical to me. This is a 6 vs 4 situation. Now let's say we put up two prosecutors for election. One who will always try you unjustly, and one who will always try me unjustly. If there is an election, the 6 to 4 majority would not vote your way. Thus, despite there being a vote - you are not getting the choice of bias. Ergo, when saying (paraphrasing) "I want to choose the bias via vote", you are also saying: i am okay with others deciding the bias of a prosecutor against me
Your point is completely out of scope of what's being discussed. My comment was a reply to a comment saying "It's beyond stupid to elect people who are in charge of upholding laws and prosecute crimes." My argument is entirely and only an argument that prosecutors should be elected instead of appointed.
All this other stuff about language is not relevant and I don't care about your thought experiment because it's completely unlike the way elections work in the real world, and has nothing to do with me preferring that over a situation where one of the 10 people gets to pick the prosecutor!
My point is to demonstrate that a minority can be consistently oppressed by a majority. Thereby negating the vote of the minority. This is how people feel in northern California, eastern Oregon, and many other places.
My point is that appointments and elections are almost the same thing, nearly a distinction without a difference. Don't like the appointments, then vote for a different person. Bit of a distinction of representative democracy vs direct. Not necessarily that different. Almost entirely equally broken IMO.
> situation where one of the 10 people gets to pick the prosecutor!
That is not at all the simplification. We could change it that the 10 people are voting for someone to do the appointment of a prosecutor. Or we could flip it to a real world example where someone is in eastern oregon voting conservative, or someone lives in 1930s rural south as a minority.
The majority rule can lead to a bad path. Notably authoritarian regimes where the prosecutor promises to go after the minorities. Which has its examples historically throughout the world, including the US
"People who are willing to commit murder are often sociopaths and pathological liars. It isn’t surprising he would maintain his innocence for years."
An innocent person would also maintain his innocence for years. With respect, this reminds me of some commentary at the time of the Central Park Five case. "They did it because they're evil." Well, somebody was evil, but we needed to know a little more than "we found these kids and there is evil". In the end that attitude led to a horrifying miscarriage of justice.
Somebody was a murderer, it sounds like we agree on that.
I'm ignorant about the case, but the abundance of physical evidence at the crime scene, none of it pointing to the executed man, seems much more relevant than anything you cited in your comment. Again, I say this with respect. If you care to respond, I hope I'm open to logic and reason.
I haven't read anything about the Supreme Court's decision, but did they dissent on the grounds that they believed he was innocent, or that capital punishment shouldn't be allowed (and not comment on his guilt)?
The US Supreme Court's decision was that there was not grounds for them to interfere in the case, because the state courts had already provided sufficient due process. They made no official ruling about guilt or capital punishment.
Supreme Court justices don't typically explain their reasons for dissenting in emergency applications like this. They can if they choose to, but they didn't here.
“Other evidence that helped convict Williams ‘remains intact,’ the attorney general said.
‘The victim’s personal items were found in Williams’s car after the murder. A witness testified that Williams had sold the victim’s laptop to him. Williams confessed to his girlfriend and an inmate in the St. Louis City Jail, and William’s girlfriend saw him dispose of the bloody clothes worn during the murder,’ the attorney general’s office said.”
The US has more violent crime than other Western countries, so as a deterrent, it does not work. Perhaps instead of wasting money on death penalty appeals and killing innocent people, we should think about how we as a country can overhaul the prison system and our societal structures.
It's extremely difficult to compare crime statistics that don't involve death. There's under reporting right and left, and there are classification problems.
With that said, I don't think it's true that the US has, per capita, significantly more violent crime than the median Western country. What we have is a LOT more guns, which increase the probability that our violent crime becomes lethal.
We DO have vastly more incarceration than most other countries, though.
For profit prisons are not helping anything. They have zero interest in rehab and reformation - and unfortunately a lot of people in the states and beyond believe once you're a criminal you're tarnished forever.
That logic doesn't follow, because it could be the case that America would be even more violent if we didn't execute people. Having said that, I find the deterrence angle suspect. Very few people would consider spending the rest of their life in jail acceptable, but being put to death unacceptable.
To me the definition of a 'civilized society' is an absence of the death penalty.
Many people are also very confused about the justice system in America. It isn't about determining the truth. It's about trying to get you convicted, to advance the career of the prosecutor.
In that sense, the 'justice department' is anything but. The 'innocence project[0]' has shown time and time again that truth finding isn't the goal.
In the mean time, study after study shows that the death penalty doesn't deter people from crime and it's much more expensive than long prison sentences.
However, a strong reason not to execute people, is acknowledging that the 'justice system' is made of people who can make mistakes and that we can never be that certain.
Instating the death penalty shows a lack of humility and shows that it's absolutism is mostly for political gain. It scores with more authoritarian inclined voters who like 'simple solutions' and ignore all the complicated context.
<thought experiment> Suppose we lived in a world where it was possible to know someone's guilt or innocence with strictly 100% confidence. Curious to know if your views would change?
Note the cost of incarceration is around ~$70k/year; enough to save lives, house people, heal people, feed people etc if put to other uses.
Guilt or innocence is irrellevant to the discussion about whether the death penalty is justified though, for several reasons; it's binary thinking (there's a right and a wrong, there's good and bad people); it's dehumanizing (a bad person is forever bad and will forever be a burden to society); it's reductionist (a prisoner unit costs X per year at no benefit to society), etc. I don't know enough philosophy to list everything wrong with this premise.
Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign. Then think about what you think the purpose is of a sentencing? Is it for revenge, revalidation, setting an example, or removing undesireables from society (temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently)?
> Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign.
I think that the kind of crimes which lead to a death sentence happen because the perpetrator is a bad person who likes to hurt others. There's no "background" or "circumstances" that would make you break into a woman's house and stab her to death - to do such a thing, you have to either not know or not care that it's wrong.
That doesn't by itself prove that the death penalty is right, or even that people who commit these kind of murders can never be rehabilitated. But it's really disturbing to me how often people whitewash the specific crimes death row inmates are accused of, as though we're all a couple missed paychecks away from randomly murdering people.
Plus what of the potential profit? The guilty person could be a teenager making a silly mistake who could grow up to become the next Einstein. Insert Bill Gates' mugshot here, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and bringing billions into the US / worldwide economy.
But he was guilty and it would probably have been better to execute him because what if he did something else wrong?
They don't give the death penalty to teenagers making 'silly mistake's. It's a sentence not handed out without weighty thought and only to those who knowingly and intentionally take life.
I'm so tired of the "next Einstein" pithy replies. These are adults who have done heinous crimes against innocent people. Justice requires severe consequences.
Here’s another thought experiment. We have ample evidence that the death penalty hasn’t made America safe from murder. But we don’t know if it has deterrence value for lesser crimes.
I propose death by hanging for repeat littering and speeding near a school. I bet that’d be effective.
If murder is illegal, then it makes no difference if the state does it as punishment for committing murder. You’ve still sanctioned a murder, admittedly of a murderer. A civilised country accepts this simple logic and doesn’t sanction murder under any circumstances.
No. Murder is not the same as killing, just like not all taking is stealing. Even the most civilised society imaginable admits that killing is sometimes acceptable (in self defense, for example). Killing done by the state is trivially not murder by definition, and less trivially there are justifications you can argue about. But you have to argue about it, your "simple logic" is unfortunately too simple.
You're right that it is too simple, but it's an easy rule of thumb with which to think about and frame the problem.
If it's illegal to kill a human being, then it's illegal. The existence of a death penalty where the state is able to do it in certain cases, as in the main case where someone themselves has broken the rule and murdered, for me, still does not justify any kind of legalistic justification for sanctioning they be killed. While "the state" is this abstract entity formed by all of us, the state has to act through people, who then have to be involved in taking a life. The state's premeditation of the killing of the murderer is even more premeditated and drawn out form of murder. It's easy to be blinded by the language used around this towards what is happening. I believe even further that if the state is allowed to do it, it opens a loophole in thought that could actually cause more murders to happen, because if the state can do it, then maybe I'll do it too...
By this logic, holding someone against their will is illegal too. When a state does it, we call it incarceration. Is it wrong for the state to sanction incarcerating someone?
This goes much further into philosophy, politics, and legality than I'm comfortable with but there's lawful and unlawful killing, the difference being... well, one is allowed and the other isn't, as per the law (be it national or e.g. international / warfare laws).
I can't even make a statement whether killing is always morally injustifiable or not.
I love the moral direction, but this sadly doesn’t hold up to philosophical scrutiny. Is it murder to
1. Kill someone who’s about to kill someone?
2. Kill someone in a defensive war to defend your freedoms?
3. Kill someone by prioritizing things other than their medical care, eg in hospice?
4. Kill someone by letting them smoke/drink/overeat?
5. Kill someone by letting them starve?
If you want to say that no country is civilized yet then hey I’m with ya. Otherwise, it’s not quite so simple. The death penalty is a tragic injustice, I agree, but just saying “it’s murder” is not a serious engagement with the issue IMO.
In such a world (which is, by any means likely ever to be available, impossible), we’d still run against the issue that the state has the authority to kill people. This world would also have to be free of political corruption, and be so politically stable that what constitutes a crime worthy of the death penalty could never change.
The point is to distinguish between an act that is immoral in and of itself and one that is immoral because we aren't sufficiently smart/honorable/efficient. This informs the argument - in the latter case killing could be permissible if only we become more advanced - in the former case it would never be permissible.
Probably too many comments. Too much activity compared to the number of votes is interpreted as a sign of flame wars and heated and unproductive discussions, and sink stories. This kind of topics don’t stay on the front page for long, usually.
the American justice system is flawed. It's mob justice that was only fit for the 1700s when there was nothing better. Or maybe there was,I wasn't around. Untrained people can't decide on guilt or innocence. They can't judge evidence. They allow themselves to be swayed by beauty or likeability to greater extent. They're lives are no good, on average. This makes most of them mean and vindictive. If they can allow someone to suffer like they have, it feels good to them.
I'm not sure whether it's racism. It's the usual explanation for this phenomenon. I can understand racism. I don't believe in opening the floodgates. it sounds more like plain bloodlust. Because blood is what you're going to get if you go on this way.
To my European eye I'm curious why those who have ordered and those who have executed the wrongfully convicted prisoner, despite the evidence, are not arrested for aggravated murder... It's simple: they have choose, they are responsible for an homicide PERIOD.
Many of the contributors to this thread are under the wrong impression that the police found the victim's laptop and other items in Marcellus Williams' car. This is not true. According to Wikipedia, the murder occurred in August 1998, but it was not until May 1999 that the victim's family "announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. In response, two individuals, Henry Cole and Lara Asaro, named Marcellus Scott Williams as the culprit."
The wikipedia article continues: "Lara Asaro, the girlfriend of Williams at the time of the crime, gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her... This is after she discovered evidence from the crime scene in Williams' car."
This is an important clarification: The police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car. Rather, Williams' ex-girlfriend, who was incentivized by reward money, claimed, more than 8 months after the crime, that she saw the victim's property in his car.
This is one of the the main reasons that the Innocence Project correctly argues that there is no reliable evidence linking Marcellus Williams to the murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Felicia_Gayle
"The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...
The full quote from the article in justia.com states the following: "In November of 1999, University City police approached Asaro to speak with her about the murder. Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
The only thing linking the laptop to Williams was the testimony of a witness. Even if the witness is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing how Williams obtained the laptop.
By any reasonable standard, all this is extremely flimsy evidence: More than a year after the murder, the police found a "Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator" in the suspect's car that belonged to the victim? And someone testified that Williams had the victim's laptop. And it is on the basis of this pitifully weak evidence that you would justify the execution of Williams, the suspect? Even though, as the Innocence Project correctly observes, there is no direct physical evidence linking Williams to the crime scene, and the DNA recovered from the crime scene does not match Williams?
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...
I was just helping everyone understand that your important clarification, was in fact, wrong.
Since I wasn't on the jury, I can't say whether or not I would have been ok with the death penalty in this case, although the murder was particularly heinous.
It doesn't matter how heinous the murder was if you have the wrong suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU
> Priti Patel: this is about having deterrents...
> Ian Hislop: It's not a deterrent killing the wrong people!
This is the second time in as many days I've seen some one use the argument that the severity of the crime meant the standards for conviction should somehow be less stringent. Sadly, I don't get the impression is an uncommon way of thinking.
This line of thinking peeks through all the time from otherwise intelligent people. Merely mentioning how heinous a crime was when we're talking about the guilt or innocence of a suspect should immediately kill your credibility. Too bad the criminal justice system doesn't care about that.
Horribly, you regularly see this in supreme court cases. Some case has the conservatives denying a significant right to a criminal suspect and the decision will start with a lurid depiction of the crime they were convicted of through the denial of some right.
Sometimes the crime in case isn't actually that bad, so they have to dig for a lurid description of a different crime entirely.
its not a deterrent for multiple other reasons too:
1. most murderers do not expect to get caught if they are acting at all rationally, and do not care if they do not, and, 2. unless you execute a high proportion of people committing a particular crime any one criminal knows they are unlikely to be executed.
I think the Tutu quote at the end of the video.
Most of the rest of the work world has abolished capital punishment, and most of the rest uses it very sparingly. The big exceptions are China and the Middle East. Good company to keep?
As I understand it, you have to be OK with the death penalty, to be on a capital jury.
This in and of itself very likely creates a bias against the defendant. For me, there is overwhelming evidence that many innocent people have been executed. To support the death penalty, you seem likely to either not believe in systemic injustice (which means you are also probably more likely to believe flimsy testimony) or accept that innocent lives are a tolerable tradeoff to ensure that some people are executed for their crimes. Both groups seem more likely to convict to me than a random sample.
Personally, I also feel that it is morally wrong to give jurors life and death decision making power. The jurors themselves can be deeply harmed by this if they later learn that they convicted a defendant on the basis of false evidence.
I think the bigger problem though is that the death penalty is too abstract. There are many people who believe that certain crimes are worthy of execution. I don't personally agree, but I accept other's beliefs on that point. But even if I grant the righteousness of execution in certain cases, it seems nearly impossible to implement justly and without heavy costs to society. This includes the costs to the people who must carry out the execution as well as the exceedingly high financial costs relative to other forms of punishment.
Indeed, it starts with the judge deciding (without trial or jury) whether capital charges can be brought. Then a capital jury is chosen.
In practical terms, it also requires an incompetent lawyer. Ruth Bader Ginsberg said "No well defended person receives the death penalty." I read that in an article about the one isolated case where she was wrong.
I also suspect that the death penalty corrupts the societies that use it.
Of all the situations within which it would be morally okay to lie..
false.
you mean, true?
In your prior comment you say that Asaro was incentivized by a reward offered in May 1999, but that doesn't agree with waiting for the police to approach her in November.
The "approach" by the police was essentially an offer to either testify and get the reward money and have police drop some charges against her, or not testify and face the charges herself.
Circumstantial. There are a 1000 different ways he could have obtained those items without committing a murder. Prove that having them is proof positive he killed someone.
I don't think we should have capital punishment at all, anywhere, and certainly this is a textbook example of why, but circumstantial evidence is real evidence, admissible in court cases.
This is true, but circumstantial evidence is seldom enough to have the DA bring a case to trial because it is weak evidence.
At least, thats my impression im not a lawyer.
My understanding is that the opposite is closer to the truth: most cases are made on circumstantial evidence. Jury instructions apparently tell jurors not to weight it any differently than direct evidence.
What does that mean? That they makeup spurious causal chains and believe that is reality?
Just search [missouri model jury instructions circumstantial evidence]. Jury instructions are written in plain English.
This is indeed true. Most cases are made on circumstantial evidence.
Actually the instructions tell the jury that how much weight to give to any evidence is up to them.
Multiple witnesses seeing a suspect run out of a store holding a smoking gun shortly after the store clerk was shot is both circumstantial evidence and plenty for a DA to bring to trial.
I don't think? this is even a real debate. One can want it to be otherwise, but criminal law does not disfavor circumstantial evidence.
"Circumstantial" evidence is often stronger than "direct" evidence. e.g. DNA is almost always "circumstantial", yet more modernly maligned eye witness evidence is "direct".
I don't think there are 1000 different ways to get both a ruler and a laptop that belonged to the same murder victim.
[1] Ruler is in the folded laptop, laptop gets stolen, laptop is sold, ruler inside, buyer is told he can keep the cool ruler.
[2] Murderer specifically tries to pin the murder on someone else. Someone else being prosecuted is a good way to live free after, gifts his laptop and a ruler to the suspect or leaves them somewhere where they are discovered and taken.
Is that unlikely? Is it more unlikely than a murderer keeping the laptop and ruler from a victim, tying him to the murder?
For me this alone would be absolutely insufficient evidence, to sentence someone to death. The ease with which some here would do this shocks me.
Fair, but the Innocence Project did not argue that the defendant received inadequate representation. So presumably the defense would have had to offer an explanation during the trial and the jury was apparently unconvinced.
Juries can get things wrong, but we’re also just getting the cliff notes of the trial rather than the whole story.
Did they ask Williams how the laptop got there? If yes, what did he say? If not, why not?
not the same thing at all lmao
"Lara Asaro... gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her" I know very little about this kind of thing, but isn't this hearsay?
Am i the only one in favor of capital punishment in this thread?
My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).
Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a "State Hospital" for rehabilitation. It's not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51/51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.
The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.
Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren't rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you've taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).
Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.
I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.
Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.
I used to think that false convictions were rare. In capital cases like this one it is close to 4%! That made me think, is it worth killing 4 innocent people to avoid having to imprison 96 guilty ones for the rest of their life? If I went out with a gun and killed 100 people, 4 innocent and 96 justifiably, I may as well be number 97.
I'm curious what percentage of false convictions are caused by LEO and DA omitting or destroying evidence.
I suspect, ignorantly, that it's north of 70%. If anyone should be getting the death penalty, it should be those that abuse power granted to them by the people.
I guess false confessions are a huge issue. In addition, our system is mostly designed to around the needs of the rich and corporate interests. Prosecution for crimes against the poor and disenfranchised is critically underfunded. Public defenders offices are even worse off.
Another way to frame it:
Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.
That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.
This is true of any punishment, though: if we want to hold people in prison, we're going to have innocent people in there too. Why draw the line specifically at "death"?
With capital punishment, we remove the possibility of fixing our mistake if someone is innocent. But if we lock someone up for 30 years, they have the opportunity for justice to be served, and we have mechanics to _try_ to make it right.
Right? Like if you run with the argument that people are making then we can't give people a life sentence because they may die in jail when they're innocent.
So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him. From a humanity standpoint the first option is much more barbaric.
Besides, what is the chance an innocent gets out if he was convicted in the first place?
I believe it's so low that the mistake is not giving a decent out (and avoiding large costs to society) to problematic peoples on the off chance that you might get an innocent released 10 years earlier. If he was truly innocent, his life is ruined already, he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life...
>So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him.
Yes clearly it's better. Killing him definitely ruins his life as well and isn't reversible.
There is an approach that works, see i.e. the Islamic Judicial system. Hudud (Penal laws) are immediately waived with an ounce of suspicion.
i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.
This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?
You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?
That's the whole point of the system is it not? We accept that there is a vanishigly small chance that a innocent person may be locked up and imprisoned. The point i was making is that we are already making that choice by the allowance of jails and prisons. So if we accept that, the sentencing does not matter. They were proven guilty in the court of law. There is a handful of studies, i'm sure someone could pull up about such cases where people on death row were found innocent after 20 years. However, those are exceptions and 99.99% of cases are not that way and are mostly because we "discovered" dna evidence as a thing.
It's death by a million cuts as soon as you start second guessing the system and trying to use the same system to fix it's inherent imperfections. Proven guilty by the court of law needs to mean something.
I think put yourself in the shoes of someone about to be executed innocent of their crime. Then make your argument. It sounds like “some of you die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” otherwise.
> what's the difference in having a random death lottery?
Due process?
Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.
I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.
The right way to reduce the cost of incarcerating people is to end mass incarceration, not to kill people. Just shooting everybody on LWOP in the head won't do nearly as much.
Further, I think that we should have a high expense per prisoner. It should cost society something to imprison somebody, since crime is in many ways a product of society's systems and choices. A world with mass incarceration and a focus on reducing the cost of the prison system is a world that basically necessitates abuse.
Doesn't the US privatized incarceration so it's basically a _free_ market, where shady deals are made to funnel more public money to private entities, and many people are incentivized to have as many people in prison as possible?
In that case, the cost on citizens for incarceration of people shouldn't be taken into account in the discussion around capital punishment because it's another issue altogether?
> Doesn't the US privatized
Isn't that less than 10% of the market (i.e. most prisons are not private)
But how many services in prisons, like being able to be in a call with loved ones, are private?
Executions speed up evolving bad traits out of humanity. Short term bleeding hearts hurt us long term.
"Better a thousand innocent men are locked up than one guilty man roam free."
To clarify, I vehemently disagree with your post and think that the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state.
Funny enough, i think i agree with you. the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state. And that's why we have innocent until proven guilty.
But I think we disagree on our trust of the legal system. Once proven guilty under the court of law that must be upheld. If you locked the doors and burned your grandma alive because you thought she was satan you should be executed, not put in a cushy hospital to be "Rehabilitated". If you caused harm to society in such a violent way, justice is not the tax payers paying $2.7m and to forver bear the burden of one who cannot function in our society.
I disagree, on the basis that retribution should simply not be a state penalogical goal at all. When you say someone "should be executed" you're conjuring up innate feelings of the desire for vindictiveness. A modern state should not have that in consideration at all.
Either they're so dangerous that no matter what you do or say to them they will never change their ways, or they can be rehabilitated. Neither of those posibilities justifies the kind of cruel treatments that plague America's prisons today, much less the death penalty.
I am for the death penalty.
Unfortunately cases like this come along where it is not applied correctly, forcing us to have to face the reality that we are not capable of using it as a proper tool.
Probably not. I am just not in favour for putting them in hospitals. You won’t “fix” a Taoist or murderer.
Put them in prison for life, make them work for food and housing.
> If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.
That's your life and your choice, which I think should be respected.
I believe that people against it are either incredibly annoying idealists (who fail to understand that perfect is the enemy of good) or full-on barbarian who rejoices at the idea of wasting someone's life in a much worse way than just killing him.
I believe long-term imprisonment is much worse than death, especially since there is no real life possible after so much time in prison. It is truly worse than death from a humanity point of view.
I don't believe the nonsense about potentially innocent people, if justice isn't completely certain, then they can put them in prison awaiting more evidence.
But I think it is actually pretty rare, the problem is mostly lack of evidence; you don't get trouble with justice when you are a good citizen and juste mind your own business.
Reading the governor's letter it seems clear:
1. The witness who claimed Williams confessed provided non-publicly-available, but known-to-police, details about the case. This is very strong evidence that the confession was made to them.
2. The girlfriend's hesitation to go to police (she never asked for the reward money) is due to the fact that Williams threatened her family, which is a real threat considering his history of violence
3. The prosecution had several other witnesses that were not called to the stand to whom Williams told about the murder
4. Williams not only had Gayle's laptop, but had her husband's laptop and had sold it to someone. The police found the laptop and the owner identifier Williams as the seller.
5. Williams not only had her laptop but a bunch of household items. Tell me, when have you had several items from a murder victim in your car? Williams offers no explanation for where these came from.
Look... criminals are not the type to take responsibility for their actions. Williams criminal history and jailhouse violence indicate that this is not a man who learns from past mistakes, or who even think he needed reform of any kind.
Can you verify point #1 from publicly available sources? I.e. not relying on the governor's word
I was unable to find a "letter" from Missouri Governor Michael Parson about this case, but there is a press release from the Office of the Governor (url copied below). Here are some of the highlights of the Governor's statement to the press:
The Governor's Office offers the following summary of the crime: "Marcellus Williams murdered Felicia Gayle on August 11, 1998. He burglarized Ms. Gayle’s home, ambushed her as she left the shower, stabbed her 43 times and left the knife lodged in her neck."
Because of the bloody and brutal nature of the crime, the police were able to recover DNA evidence at the crime scene. However, as the Innocence Project observed, the DNA evidence that was left behind by the killer does not match Marcellus Williams. The perpetrator left a knife in the victim's neck, but the DNA recovered from the knife - which could have conclusively determined who killed the victim - was contaminated and destroyed by the state, as noted by the Innocence Project.
Yet, the governor's press release completely ignores these facts, and then proceeds to deliver an astonishing statement: "I also want to add how deeply disturbed we’ve been about how this case has been covered. Mr. Williams’ attorneys chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which Courts have repeatedly rejected. Yet, some media outlets and activist groups have continued such claims without so much of a mention of the judicial proceedings or an unbiased analysis of the facts."
DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would presumably include the critical details that (1) none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
The other evidence cited by the Governor's Office is all circumstantial. Contrary to the Governor's assertions, the witnesses who testified against Williams were in fact incentivized with reward money, and they did not offer details of the crime that were unknown to the public through media reports.
In summary, there is no direct evidence connecting Marcellus Williams to the crime scene. The real murderer in this case is Missouri Governor Mike Parson.
https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Felicia_Gayle
DNA evidence is notoriously iffy. I would not convict / not convict someone based purely on that. There's so many confounding factors. No one knows whose DNA was left. There's no way to know any DNA is 'the killers'. For all we know Gayle was having an affair. That doesn't explain the hard facts of why her stuff ended up in his car and she died in a manner that fits Williams' previous violent attacks.
Look... obviously I can't see he did or did not do it with incomplete information. However, it's pretty clear the innocence project is wildly manipulating the story. Moreover, the innocence project frequently calls out the iffi-ness of DNA evidence when it suits them, and are now claiming that we should listen only to it.
The truth is that the police recovered some DNA and it happened to be a man's they cannot connect. It could be her killer. It could not be. It could be a friend; it could be an affair partner; who knows. Either way, that man did not have all her stuff, and did not confess to the murder.
> DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would
DNA exists sure. but no one knows whose DNA was collected, and DNA matching is not 100%.
> none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
Why would we expect any of the DNA to match? DNA of all sorts of people are everywhere. It doesn't seem there was much struggle. There was no rape. Exactly what do you expect to find?
Here is what the innocence project says (https://dpic-cdn.org/production/legacy/MarcellusWilliamsBoar...):
> The presence on the knife of a male DNA profile is also significant and worthy of additional testing and evaluation. In briefing, the State argued that the presence of DNA on a kitchen knife is unremarkable because anyone in the home could have used the knife. However, the State has long recognized the power of DNA found on a murder weapon and has relied upon such evidence to secure convictions. Here, the only male who lived in the home was the victim’s husband. Additional testing could be performed to develop a profile from the husband for comparison to the profile found on the knife. Assuming the victim’s husband (who is not and never was a suspect) is excluded as a match, it is then clear that the DNA matches the killer. Yet, law enforcement has never conducted such testing.
The innocence project is making the wild claim that the male DNA on the kitchen knife is certainly the killers. Let me ask you... how many men have you had at a dinner party? The idea that their DNA on the murder weapon should be sufficient to indict them, while all the other physical evidence linking Williams to the murder is not sufficient is... a stretch. Under this scheme, Mrs Gayle's dinner guest from the night before is more likely to be the murder culprit than the random attacker who just happens to have a ton of her personal belongings after she is killed? Come on. Let's live in the real world.
What we do know is that Williams has a track record of violence and then not doing anything to address it, while blaming others for his crimes.
It's insane the amount of bullshit people will pille up to defend a man who, even if he was innocent on this case, was clearly a criminal with antecedents and no sign of working on a better life.
Even if he was innocent in this particular case, society just got rid of problematic and disruptive individual that clearly had no will to behave in society.
In any way you put it, it's actually a very positive outcome for everyone but yet we get all this nonsense. And let's be real, the chance he was actually innocent is so slim it's a complete waste of time trying to do that.
If we were talking about an upstanding citizen with a good life and a lot to lose, yes, it would smell fishy and would need a lot of consideration/better evidence; but this is not the case at all, even if there was a mistake it is a rather small mistake everything considered.
Misinfo
If we aren't going to abolish the death penalty, we should at least require a higher standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt to carry it out. It should require incontrovertible proof. Circumstantial evidence should not be allowed. Expert testimony should be barred. The evidence must be conclusive, plain, and certain to every member of the jury. This would allow you to execute, e.g., mass shooters who give themselves up, but make it extremely unlikely to irreversibly kill someone on the basis of junk science, induced or extorted testimony, or other fallible evidence.
> It should require incontrovertible proof.
There's really no such thing.
Instead, there is a very high burden of proof, there's a lot of protections built into the process, and, most important, it's an adversarial process in which one side is standing up for the defendant. If the evidence isn't good enough, the defendant's lawyer can and must show that to the jury, with them making the final decision on who is right.
> There's really no such thing.
Which, in my opinion, is a fantastic argument against the death penalty.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf
I am currently of the belief that the death penalty should be reserved for the most extreme of the most extreme circumstances. The Boston Bomber & The Park School Shooter are two prime examples.
There is a very high burden of proof for both of them and to my knowledge, no doubts as to their guilt. I personally find it morally reprehensible individuals like themselves are still gifted with life after the lives they ruined.
Maybe this is a mindset I will grow out of as I grow older.
I once met a man who told me he had killed his neighbor once. Here's the story:
His neighbor was a kleptomaniac. He constantly broke in and stole stuff from the man I was talking to.
The man I was talking to constantly reported it to the police, who said they could do nothing unless the man broke in.
The man I was talking to eventually caught the thief breaking in, at which point he held him at gunpoint until the police came and arrested the thief.
The man served his time in prison, eventually got out and went right back to his thieving ways.
The man I was talking to waited until the guy broke in, then shot him to death.
Problem solved, but what a stupid and roundabout way of solving it.
Well yeah, the problem with modern justice is that it doesn't really work. It's a tool for use by the powerful, besides that for common people there is no real justice.
I once got a lot of stuff stolen from me; long story but I could identify the perpetrators with 100% confidence. At the police station they showed me quite a lot of grids of photo mugshots, unsurprisingly I found the thieves. But then the officer told me that one of them had been caught 17 times, and yet here he was, still stealing stuff. I was asked to be a witness to make a case, I refused because clearly justice wasn't working at all so what's the point?
I am pretty sure that this person will continue his ways until he dies but society is unwilling to recognize this reality and "justice" is those kinds of people getting a free pass at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
Meanwhile if you are caught driving too fast you will get an insane fee, car seized, and permit revoked. "Justice" is very nice to criminal, but always hard on weak people who have no choice, funny thing that we call it justice.
I completely agree. One of several reasons I'm against the death penalty.
Then again, it's not like I'm super happy about someone being in prison for their whole life, if they're innocent. But practically speaking, there needs to be some way to incarcerate people.
In principle , I am in favor of capital punishment, but the way we do it is a mechanism of injustice. I’m not sure there is a solution.
The problem is the way that the severity of the crime makes juries less reliable.
When there is particularly severe circumstances (like a particularly horrific homocide) the psychological penalty for -not- convicting is much higher, and the desire to feel certain that a perpetrator has been found is much higher than say, a case of property theft.
Combined with the death penalty, these biases add up to a murder machine rather than an instrument of justice.
Estimations based on actual exonerations place the false conviction rate in some states >1%. If 1% are exonerated (which requires extraordinary evidence, often obtained by happenstance in solving other crimes) it’s a pretty safe bet we may be looking at >10% false convictions.
Add to this the fact that even confessions are unreliable, something I have some personal anecdotal experience with.
When I was eleven, school officials accused me of doing something I absolutely did not do. (and in fact there was no evidence that the thing had actually even happened, it was later told to me by the person claiming the event that it was fabricated from whole cloth)
I became so convinced that I did in fact do it that I invented an entire scenario where I had some kind of psychological episode, explaining why I did not directly remember doing the thing, but I was 100 percent sure that I had actually done it.
I am not, and was not , a weak minded person. I did, however, at that time, trust in the idea of authority figures.
It is not hard to to imagine that an adult on the other side of the bell curve that was basically trusting in society might easily fall into the same trap of disbelief->rationalization in an effort to to conform their reality to the “objective truth”.
After this experience,I don’t place much weight in confessions, even less in plea bargains.
We don’t use the word reasonable anymore the way it was written originally, and the actual meaning is what you’re asking for, except for every conviction, not just capital ones. It doesn’t mean “a small but tolerable level of doubt”. It means doubt backed by reason. “Aliens made me do it” is doubt that is not backed by reason. “There is another plausible way that conforms to the evidence given that he came to possess that laptop” is reasonable doubt.
There's almost never incontrovertible proof in a criminal trial. Even if the suspect is on camera confessing. The sheer number of people who confessed to crimes and were then found innocent through DNA evidence is perturbing.
Maybe that’s a clue that we should almost never be using the death penalty.
100%. I've seen so many wrongful convictions. A lot of those, the person wasn't necessarily innocent, but the trial process was so faulty that they did not receive the due process they were owed.
The primary responsibility of a defense attorney isn't what a guilty defendant wants (to get off the charges), but it is to ensure that their client receives an absolutely fair trial with all the fairly-obtained evidence fairly presented.
> There's almost never incontrovertible proof in a criminal trial
Having watched a few FBI interrogations and other true crime related videos there certainly are such proofs.
I have a few of these come to mind, like the dude who killed his ex, took the house surveillance cameras down after the facts but didn't know they were backed up on servers, he was caught with the cameras in his truck shortly after. Most of these publicly known cases have a ridiculously long trail of proofs actually
I'm not saying mistakes don't happen, they obviously do, but in many cases it's extremely easy to prove if someone's guilty or not.
> Even if the suspect is on camera confessing.
That's not enough in most countries
I wonder how one would encode such a level of burden of truth into the legal system such that the "really incontrovertible" cases are distinguishable from the "not really incontrovertible" ones.
This is just down to the jury :/
I think most people would agree with that stuff in isolation, but reasonable solutions aren't really addressing the problem. Support for the Death Penalty is a political shibboleth in the modern US. It's not going to change, realistically ever, absent a major demographic realignment in the way we sort our citizens into parties.
Preaching to a choir of geeks looking for "solutions" is the wrong target.
Plenty of states have banned it in the past 50 years. It's on the decline.
And some states while not having banned it outright have made it effectively impossible to carry out. Oregon IIRC had their execution chamber and death row dismantled when their last governor left office. Execution is still on the books though.
IMO, the only solution is to abolish it.
So it seems that the original case rested on the following:
- Williams GF witness testimony, that Williams confessed to her.
- Jailhouse witness testimony, that Williams had confessed to them.
- That Williams had items (purse, laptop, etc.) in his car, on the day or day after the murder.
But no DNA evidence?
A death penalty seems pretty egregious, when you have that kind of evidence. Seems like there's plenty of reasonable doubt in the picture.
(FWIW, I completely oppose the death penalty - on the grounds that innocent people have been executed. One is one too many)
The argument is that the girlfriend and jailhouse snitch both were looking to get the $10k reward money for his conviction. And that’s the only way the third point (had the items in the car) was known (from the girlfriend).
asaro had more reasons to make these claims
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/us/marcellus-williams-missour...
>And though Picus’ laptop was recovered, the prosecuting attorney’s office says Roberts told investigators Williams said he’d gotten it from Asaro – a claim Roberts reiterated in an affidavit signed in 2020. Jurors at trial never heard this assertion, which the prosecutor’s motion says illustrates “the person with the most direct connection to the crime” was “Laura Asaro, and not Marcellus Williams.”
additionally, they only made the statements after being threatened by police
>The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.
What amazes me is how routine this practice is to this very day. It is commonplace for police to use vile tactics and tell patent lies. The entire system is rigged in a way that cares not about truth but about winning. When you measure things in conviction rate this is bound to happen.
> argument is that the girlfriend and jailhouse snitch both were looking to get the $10k reward money for his conviction
The Governor's counterargument being the "girlfriend never requested the reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder, despite claims that she was only interested in money" [1].
The interesting thing is I could see myself, were I on the jury, and if the other facts of the case aligned, finding Williams guilty beyond reasonable doubt where the punishment is life without parole. But I can't reach the certainty I'd want for the death penalty. Yet that implies a tremendous amount of faith in my ability to finely distinguish probabilities of guilt, an ability I don't think I have.
This discussion is confusing because it's about two separate issues: a Rorschach test on your views on capital punishment and an orthogonal one about due process and William's guilt. (They're not orthogonal, but the interaction between those can probably be entirely described by the former.)
[1] https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...
> But I can't reach the certainty I'd want for the death penalty
There is a degree of certainty required for a conviction. It is up to the jury to only decide if that degree of certainty has been reached. It is up to the judge to determine the sentence. I make this point as the US justice system is set up explicitly so that the jury is not considering the sentencing, but only guilty or not guilty. This removes the rorscach test from the jurors consideration.
In Missouri (as in most US States with capital punishment), the death penalty must separately be approved by the jury after the jury convicts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Un...
Interesting! Thank you for the additional information.
Would it be fair to call this an aberration in the US justice system? Namely that except for death penalty cases, that my previous comment holds? I generally viewed that distinction of guilt finding vs punishment selection as fundamental. This is food for thought -thank you.
The death penalty is unique, in that the crime must be convicted, death chosen as the punishment, and then a second jury formed to actually decide if death is warranted in this case given the guilt.
In addition to what the sibling commenter said about extra approval, also consider that in many places the prospective jurors is told up-front that the death penalty is on the table, and jury candidates who are not ok with that are dismissed.
So I'd expect that if possible punishments weren't discussed beforehand, you'd end up with a jury that doesn't support the death penalty quite as much.
And in that jury you'd be more likely to find someone who might believe the defendant is guilty, but vote to acquit because they don't believe their crime merits death, but are pretty sure that that's what the sentence would end up being if convicted.
And in that jury you might even find someone who is opposed to the death penalty entirely, and vote to acquit for the same reasons.
Probabilities at the extremes are counterintuitively easy to distinguish. There is a negligible difference between the evidence that would leave you 50% certain and that which would leave you 51% certain, but if you go from 99.9% to 99.99% certain, your evidence has gotten 10x stronger.
It also highlights the stupidity of the death penalty: the jury is instructed "if you find this person guilty, we will kill them for it" - i.e. an action with no possibility of reversal or redress.
It's an odd stress test of the idea of "reasonable doubt" because of course in reality, there's always some doubt but the level of doubt for "let's irreversible kill a person" versus "let's detain them for life, but admit the possibility extraordinary evidence might emerge which changes our decision" is pretty vast.
In a world where the development of DNA testing technology changed a lot of outcomes including numerous capital punishment cases, it's essentially unthinkable that we could continue with it.
In Missouri (as in most US States with capital punishment), the death penalty must separately be approved by the jury after the jury convicts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Un...
No, they knew the items were in the car because they searched his car and found the items. He has not, as far as I know, offered any alternative explanation of how he came into possession of a murder victim's random personal items.
This is exactly what I would focus on as a juror. How did he come by the items, surely if someone sold them to him he would say immediately who that was or offer some other way of getting it other than “I murdered her”
Nor is he required to give an explanation. The prosecutor must prove that possession of the items leads to proof of guilt.
He is not required, but absent an explanation, a jury might think him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. After all, if your husband comes home late at night with lipstick all over him in a drunken stupor and unzipped pants, and then, as you threaten divorce and kick him out of the house, he offers no explanation, you too might think him guilty. Whereas, if he claims to have been assaulted by a very large woman you might listen to him. The 5th amendment protects you from being called as a witness against yourself. That doesn't mean you should not offer the jury testimony in defense of yourself.
In general, if you have an alternative explanation for the circumstances which have led to your suspicion, you should offer them up readily.
> He is not required, but absent an explanation, a jury might think him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s just plainly insane. Absence of proof of innocence is not proof guilt. It’s not even suggestive of proof, let alone proof without a resonable doubt!? That would leave half the country with a death sentence because they don’t have reliable affirmative proof that they didn’t commit this murder. Do you remember where you were on the day the murder happened? If you cannot provide proof, we’ll consider you guilty of murder beyond reasonable doubt.
That's true, but I'm not sure what your point is. The prosecutor did prove that, convincing a unanimous jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Perhaps you're thinking of it as a self-incrimination issue? That's a misperception I've seen before, where people generalize from Fifth Amendment protections to a broad rule that criminal defendants can never be at a disadvantage for refusing to explain themselves. That's not the case. If the prosecution says you obtained some items by taking them from the victim, and that's the only reasonable explanation the jury hears for how you got them, it's 100% within bounds for them to infer it's the correct explanation.
That seems like pretty strong evidence to me!
It's unfortunate that a lot of the messaging has shifted to he's innocent, where I believe the right message (and far less viral message), is the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted. I don't believe in the death penalty because I don't think the state should have the authority to execute citizens and even moreso when a very high bar of culpability hasn't been reached.
In this quest for vengeance I think people forget these rules are in place for the State to not abuse it's powers. I'm not against the death penalty because I'm a hippy vegan. I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.
> I believe the right message (and far less viral message), is the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted.
The jury makes that determination after being locked in a room and forced to hear both sides and all the evidence. How much of the evidence are you aware of? What The Innocence Project posted?
This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty who don't think some guy should be executed. That's hardly a surprise, but it has nothing to do with the evidence presented by the state.
>How much of the evidence are you aware of?
I'm aware of the evidence - the lack of direct evidence is why I'm arguing against the death penalty. Again, I don't think the guy should be set free as it's credible he committed the murder. I'm against the state generally, and especially when there's no direct evidence, executing a defendant.
>This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty who don't think some guy should be executed. > That's hardly a surprise, but it has nothing to do with the evidence presented by the state.
Again, call me a "small government" freak, but I think the cases in when the state should be allowed to execute someone is vanishingly small. I don't think anyone should live in a state that is allowed to execute someone based entirely on testimony.
The prosecutor's office and the victim's family both pushed to stop the execution due to reasonable doubt. Think they might have an idea of the available evidence?
The previous governor had begun an inquiry into the matter but the new governor shut that board down and blocked any and all attempts to halt the execution.
No, a prosecutor at no point argued that this guy was not guilty. Nobody argued that, except dishonest activists who lied to you. All prosecutor offered was commuting the death penalty to life without parole.
In addition, I don’t see how a random prosecutor’s opinion is relevant. If this was the original prosecutor who prosecuted the case, then it would have some evidentiary value. In this case, this is just some guy with zero connection to the original case. Why should we care what he believes, over opinion of hundreds of prosecutors in this country who are happy that the justice has finally been served?
The exact words of the person you're replying to were
> The prosecutor's office and the victim's family both pushed to stop the execution due to reasonable doubt.
Nobody claimed the prosecutor argued he's not guilty.
> Why should we care what he believes, over opinion of hundreds of prosecutors in this country who are happy that the justice has finally been served?
Because he's correct. The State doesn't have enough evidence to justify execution. Justice isn't being served by executing this man.
The victim's family do not believe in the death penalty, I have not seen anywhere that they doubt his guilt.
> This thread is full of people who are anti-death penalty
Who even argues in favor of it? What studies shows that the death penalty is effective? Who has done cost benefit analysis for civic life to have the government executing people generally speaking? So many truthy arguments on behalf of the death penalty.
I oppose the death penalty, but social policies should not be based on the outcome of cost/benefit analysis. If they were, executions would be used far more, on much less serious crimes, given rates of recidivism and revictimisation amongst certain crime types.
Cost benefit analysis wouldn't shake out in favor o execution on serious crimes due to add on effects.
Cost benefit analysis and evidence based policy making would lead to a restorative justice system.
Cost benefit analysis would likely trace back to root causes in the same way it's cheaper to fix a bug before it gets shipped.
There's a great TED talk from a lawyer who was looking to reduce death penalty executions, who realised the best way to do that would be to reduce the number of murders and the best way to do that was to support kids and families with problems due to poverty and poor mental health.
The childhood anecdote from the guy he was working with that got executed has stayed with me for over a decade now:
https://youtu.be/HYzrdn7YLCM?si=ehMUoSFbLvQt_h3F
Rehabilitation has not been shown to work regularly in practice, particularly for criminals with long criminal histories (such as Marcellus Williams). The primary benefit of incarceration is incapacitation - keeping repeat criminals off the streets.
Personally, I would make prison conditions less harsh, as long as we could guarantee that repeat criminals would stay in prison until they reach the age at which aggression has declined enough that they’re unlikely to impulsively commit crimes. That might have to be 50+ years old. Then they should be released with a UBI. Most people who would get sent to prison for decades after a life of crime were never suitable employees in the first place, and they’ll be even less so after prison. However, they should have enough money to live a life of dignity after prison, and if they can keep a job, they should keep all that money too.
> Rehabilitation has not been shown to work regularly in practice
It works when it's done right [0].
One of the main reasons it fails to work is when the justice system itself is perceived as unfair [0]. So, things like inconsistently applied sentencing (!), systemic racism (!), over-the-top punishments (!) even in cases with significant doubt (!), etc...
0 - https://www.innovatingjustice.org/sites/default/files/docume...
"In this quest for vengeance I think people forget these rules are in place for the State to not abuse it's powers. I'm not against the death penalty because I'm a hippy vegan. I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield."
I am not sure what the US tries to achieve with the death penalty. Deterrence? Seems not to work. And EU countries have much lower violent crime. Even if they have assault rifles at home (Switzerland). Revenge? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
> not sure what the US tries to achieve with the death penalty. Deterrence?
Retribution, incapacitation and deterrence [1]. (In my opinion, in that order.)
[1] https://www.bsslawllc.com/blog/2021/12/the-four-pillars-of-s...
> the government has not shown enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is warranted
The jury only provided the unanimous guilty verdict. After that point, the defendant has been declared guilty beyond all reasonable doubt by the state, and it's up to the judge to determine the appropriate punishment for someone guilty of the crime of 1st degree murder, robbery, etc.
It's possible that some on the jury did not want the death penalty, but were not ready to acquit.
> I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.
To your point, the Innocence Project claims 251 exonerations, with ~9% (22) exonerations coming after the death penalty had already occured. The IP reported receiving 65,600 letters for assistance, so around ~0.4% of all requests for help were later proven to be wrongful convictions. There are currently around 2,200 prisoners on Death Row (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row/overview/death-row-us...). Assuming the ~0.4% wrongful conviction rate is representative for this population, that would be around 8-9 people. Some States have paused executions, and the US executes about ~20 people per year. So that would be a wrongful execution every ~12.5 years on average, again if these percentages are representative of death row convictions.
> The jury only provided the unanimous guilty verdict. After that point, the defendant has been declared guilty beyond all reasonable doubt by the state, and it's up to the judge to determine the appropriate punishment for someone guilty of the crime of 1st degree murder, robbery, etc.
In Missouri (as in most US States with capital punishment), the death penalty must separately be approved by the jury after the jury convicts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Un...
Thank you, I learned something new. And overall if you’re going to have the death penalty , probably a better process than a single judge deciding.
Friend, this is completely the wrong math on so many levels!
I don't even know where to start... these numbers are not even remotely representative of anything about the larger prison population.
For this to be even remotely representative of the overall wrongful conviction rate, this would mean that the IP thoroughly investigated and pursued all 65,600 cases and that new and completely fair trials were conducted in all 65,600 cases.- The 251 exonerations were obtained by pursuing only a small fraction of those 65,600 cases. Presumably ones where they felt most certain of overturning the conviction.
- The 65,600 letter-writers are surely not representative of the overall prison population; this is a subset of convicts who have the resources to know about the IP and get a letter to them, with some kind of self-belief in their own innocence
- While apparently not true in this case the standards for death sentences tend to be higher than those for other convictions because they are so likely to be appealed, so the percentage of wrongfully convicted people on Death Row is likely to be different than that of the general convict population
- etc etc etc
I don't think your numbers are correct even as a back-of-the-envelope Fermi equation sort of estimate...
Sure, it’s a ballpark, but in the context of a conversation about how many innocent people are being executed, I think the wrongful conviction rate of the entire prison population is less relevant than a ballpark rate of those wrongfully sentenced to life/death. For example, if the wrongful conviction rate for minor offenses or white collar crimes was as high as 10%, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate that 10% of people sentenced to death were also wrongfully convicted. Its very possible that juries dealing with more serious crimes and more serious punishments are more careful in their decisions or innately require a higher burden of proof to convict.
I assumed that most of the letters received by the IP are for life/death sentences or at least major crimes with multi-decade long sentences, which I think would probably have a more consistent wrongful conviction rate in the group vs. the entire prison population.
And while you’re right that the IP might only have the resources to attempt to overturn the top X% cases, one could assume that they don’t win all their cases and that the next tier of cases they don’t accept would have diminishing returns.
So I think it’s fair to treat this estimate as closer to a lower bound with some significant error bars, but I’d be surprised if the reality is 5x or 10x higher.
> I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.
100% agree. We ought not grant the state the power to take our lives.
It seems strong enough to keep someone in jail, potentially forever.
Executing him requires there's absolutely no room for a reversal, and from that point of view the evidence isn't that strong.
For a civil case, probably. But for a criminal case, the threshold is 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Plenty of reasonable doubt in there.
> on the day or day after the murder.
They found this a 8-10 months later, not the next day. So much misinformation, I believe on purpose. And her GF snitched before, not to mention she wanted the reward.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 in the USA, many innocent Americans have been executed by the state. There is a considerable literature of scholarly research documenting this issue. For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend the following books:
Justin Brooks (2023) You Might Go to Prison Even Though You're Innocent, University of California Press
https://www.amazon.com/Might-Prison-Though-Youre-Innocent/dp...
Brandon Garrett (2011) Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, Harvard University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Convicting-Innocent-Where-Criminal-Pr...
Mark Godsey (2017) Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions, University of California Press
https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Injustice-Prosecutor-Psychology...
I was doing some reading based on your comment, and I'm kind of astonished to learn that public support for the death penalty only went up after the Gregg decision, peaking at 80% for in 1990. Wow.
> Even the victim’s family believes life without parole is the appropriate sentence
That is odd, if there is no evidence that links him to the crime why not argue to let him go? Is that just from a desire to have someone punished, no matter who it is.
There's plenty of evidence. He confessed to his girlfriend, and a cellmate. He pawned the victim's possessions. He was seen disposing of bloody clothes. He already had 15 felony convictions in addition to offenses related to Ms. Gayle's murder: robbery (2), armed criminal action (2), assault (2), burglary (4), stealing (3), stealing a motor vehicle, and unlawful use of a weapon.
Now, as to whether this evidence is solid enough for a death penalty conviction, that's tougher to say. But there's plenty of evidence.
> There's plenty of evidence. He confessed to his girlfriend, and a cellmate.
Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence. Those people claim that he confessed to them, but there is a lot more context. Here is what the linked story says about the "he confessed" part:
> The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.
> Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.
> Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence.
You're mistaken. There are many exceptions to the evidentiary rules against hearsay in the US, and one of the more common exceptions is a statement made by the opposing party (i.e. while the prosecution is questioning a witness, a statement made by the defendant to that witness) (Rule 801(d)(2)). It's evidence.
Your issues with the credibility of those witnesses are valid, and the defense had the opportunity to bring those issues up at trial (that's why we have jury trials and why you have a right to defend yourself at your jury trial). They certainly weren't the only pieces of evidence against him (there's a lot), and I'm sure the jury considered that.
> Both of these individuals were known fabricators
Careful- it we're considering their history, then Mr Williams has a history of over a dozen counts of armed violence, burglary, robbery, and assault.
> this is hearsay and not evidence
Conflicting reports say that Asano provided verified information that had not been publicized. And Asano refused a cash reward for relaying the confessions she had heard. Regardless,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3501
> Nothing contained in this section shall bar the admission in evidence of any confession made or given voluntarily by any person to any other person without interrogation by anyone, or at any time at which the person who made or gave such confession was not under arrest or other detention
I would think the far more compelling detail is the one you overlooked:
> Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.
Not only were the two known liars, but their accounts could not be verified, and they conflict with each other as well as the existing evidence. That seems enough reason to me to call their testimony into question.
Also, I'm a little curious about your assertion:
> Conflicting reports say that Asano provided verified information that had not been publicized
When TFA specifically included the following:
> neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police.
That, coupled with the fact that apparently none of the evidence at the scene was linked to Marcellus Williams makes me wonder how he was ever convicted in the first place. If we can take TFA at its word, the whole thing smells wrong.
TFA is published by The Innocence Project, which obviously only presents one side of the story.
I was also using a statement from the governor,
https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...
who makes some assertions which contradict the innocence project's.
Did they explain why they convened a board to research the topic to get to the bottom of this and then disbanded the board before they finished? Seems kind of shady when the government says "We are not sure, we need to do more research before we do this" and then never actually do that research and just kill someone?
Either you trust the government, and agree that they should have waited.
Or you don't trust the government, in which case you really can't trust them to kill someone.
So which is it?
The previous governor stayed the execution and created the commission to investigate which lasted 6 years until the new governor was elected. The new governor disbanded the commission. They were from different political parties and probably had different views on the death penalty / the use of state resources.
So you agree they should have waited.
Gotcha. Thanks!
The quote
> neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police.
from The Innocence Project seems carefully worded to imply that they didn't say anything that mattered, while still leaving open that they provided information that the police had, but which had not be publicly released.
> When speaking with law enforcement, the jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement.
This is hard to fake and seems like pretty compelling evidence that the informant is telling the truth.
https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...
It's worded that way as if one side of the interview knows something, it can easily leak to the other side intentionally or accidentally.
Whereas the Governor’s statement does say that information provided to the police by one witness was not known publicly.
> Careful- it we're considering their history, then Mr Williams has a history of over a dozen counts of armed violence, burglary, robbery, and assault.
This is all superfluous to the question of the credibility of the two witnesses. It isn't about being "fair" and treating Williams and the two witnesses the same -- one is on trial, the others are not.
>Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence.
I think you are out of your element. To my understanding hearsay refers to a claim made by someone not in court. In this case the girlfriend and jailmate were called as witnesses and gave testimony in court.
Witnesses are evidence and they are one of the oldest forms of evidence, your view that evidence is only material is a gross misunderstanding of trial procedures.
Here's a more thorough definition:
> Evidence that is not within the personal knowledge of a witness, such as testimony regarding statements made by someone other than the witness, and that therefore may be inadmissible to establish the truth of a particular contention because the accuracy of the evidence cannot be verified through cross-examination.
Tying the two together, basically it would be anything that can't be verified (in court) by the one who the witness is 'quoting'.
Regarding witness testimony, I don't think the tradition of it makes it any more iron clad. We used to have a lot more testimony of sorcery and such as well that got people killed. Further, we have only recently begun to study it scientifically. From what I gather, from my very limited knowledge of the studies thus far, it doesn't look good for eye-witness accuracy in general.
That's a take, but it's far from reality. Witnesses are a central evidence in most cases.
When the parties are present for cross examination it's not hearsay.
> When the parties are present for cross examination it's not hearsay.
That's exactly what I just said.
There was also a $10,000 reward for information which easily could have incentivized them to provide false testimony
According to the governor,
> The girlfriend never requested the reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder, despite claims that she was only interested in money.
except..
> The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/us/marcellus-williams-missour...
Wow...that is amazing dishonesty on the part of the governor if this is true. Incredible how hard people are trying to hide facts.
There should be criminal penalties for prosecution or people involved with the chain of evidence for criminal trials failing to mention details that might sway the jury towards defense
> Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence.
Note that it's possible the person you are replying to was using the everyday "observation increases relative likelihood of theory" definition of evidence rather than the legal one.
It's not hearsay to go to the witness stand and say the defendant told you something. That defendant is there in court and is able to defend themselves.
Correction: it is in fact hearsay but it is admissible under one of numerous exceptions to the rule that hearsay is not admissible.
Laws are generally clearer if you write them as general definitions and general rules and if those cover too much carve out exceptions in the rules rather than the definitions. It would work to make the exceptions to the definitions instead, or to both the definitions and rules, but that is usually going to be more complicated and less clear.
For hearsay the general definition is "an out of court statement offered to prove the truth of what the statement asserts" and the general rule is "hearsay is not admissible", and that is narrowed by a bunch of exceptions to the "hearsay is not admissible" rule. As far as I remember pretty much everyone has left the definition untouched.
> Laws are generally clearer if you write them as general definitions and general rules and if those cover too much carve out exceptions in the rules rather than the definitions.
Similar motivation as exceptions for error handling
That's literally the definition of hearsay. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay
from the article :)
> if Susan is unavailable for cross-examination, the answer is hearsay
…did you read the link you just posted? If the person whose words are being presented as evidence is available for cross-examination then (legally) it’s not hearsay. The defendant in a criminal case is always available, so any statement they make out of court is never hearsay.
That's not quite correct. An out of court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted therein is always hearsay. The exceptions given in that Wikipedia article are not exceptions to it being hearsay. They are exceptions to the rule that hearsay is not admissible.
> The defendant in a criminal case is always available, so any statement they make out of court is never hearsay.
That's also not quite correct. A declarant is considered to be unavailable for example if they refuse to testify about the subject matter despite the court ordering them to. They are also considered to be unavailable if they testify that they cannot remember the subject matter. See rule 804(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence for the criteria for being unavailable.
(I'm using FRE because that seems to be what others are using. Really though we should be using Missouri's rules of evidence. I think most state's rules of evidence are fairly close to the FRE so that's probably reasonable).
Someone who is incarcerated snitching on someone who’s in there with them just screams “give me your cupcake or I’m gonna tell the cops you confessed to me”. Williams was also a person who was black and Muslim so prejudice alone could have been a motivation
People say stupid things all the time as well. It’s not inconceivable to brag about something that’s not true either as an act of defiance or for social reasons such as to get some respect, look important, or to be left alone.
He did not convert to Islam until he was in prison.
As someone who has personally known jailhouse snitches, I don't think this is accurate. The biggest problem with becoming a snitch is that you are then forever more labeled as a snitch, and while (unlike the movies) this is unlikely to result in violence, you will certainly be shunned for the rest of your prison life.
Right, these types of hearsay are only useful if they can lead investigators to more evidence that is actually supported by a solid source/chain-of-legitimacy. So it can be valuable but probably shouldn’t be submersible to court or at least the defense should really be able to lay into and tell the jury it is -highly- suspect.
As stated in the article written by the legal scholars at the Innocence Project:
> "There is no reliable evidence proving that Marcellus Williams committed the crime for which he is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24. The State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him."
DNA evidence is based on proven science, and the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory.
As far as I can tell, this isn't actually true: "the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory". The Innocence Project are being very careful with their wording here. Initially, they relied on trace DNA on the knife that didn't match the accused murderer, but that ended up being from someone in the prosecutor's office handling it after it had been processed for forensic evidence. Then they tried to argue that this showed the state had destroyed evidence which would've proved his innocence, but the courts didn't buy it because all available evidence suggests the killer's DNA was simply never on the knife. (Which isn't that surprising - DNA evidence isn't perfect and gloves exist.) The other "forensic crime scene evidence" seems to be hothingburgers like a few non-matching hairs in a house that'd had a large number of people going in and out in the recent past.
DNA evidence is where it's hard to get a false negative then false positive.
It's sad to me that the Innocence Project, instead of being a neutral third party investigating and then pushing back against wrongful convictions, have just become an all out 'stop the death penalty' advocacy group.
Ultimately I think this undermines their cause and hurts their ability to save truly innocent people.
Do you have reason to also claim that any of the points raised in the article are incorrect? If not, that would seem to contradict your claim that they are just a stop-the-death-penalfy advocacy group.
They have always been such.
This is the real issue. Either the death penalty is wrong in all cases, even when it’s brutally obvious that the person is guilty of heinous crimes, or it is simply a matter of taste when it should be applied, like seasoning. The argument against executing someone should stem from the first not the second, even though the second is much easier to play in the media.
There cause is to sow distrust and spread misinformation to discredit the death penalty so it will be abolished. They are doing a fair job.
The Innocence Project has been like this for a while. They are not a neutral third party, they are activists. In this particular case, this man was plainly and obviously guilty of a heinous murder. They’re using weasel words and a disingenuous reading of DNA evidence to argue that there’s reasonable doubt when there is not. If their issue is with the death penalty then just argue that issue.
DNA evidence is notoriously faulty. Let's not pretend it's 100% accurate. If I understand correctly, the innocence project has -- in the past -- used the fact that it's not accurate as a way to cast doubt on convictions.
But there's plenty of evidence.
Perhaps so. I'm not familiar with the details of the case.
But this I do know: prior felony convictions are manifestly not evidence.
Presenting them as such causes me to seriously doubt the broader argument you are trying to make here.
Prior convictions are evidence in the broad sense (because they provide information that could update one's belief about a defendant's character or likelihood of committing a crime), but not legally admissible evidence (in many jurisdictions).
Presumably they still think he’s (probably) guilty.
Victims and their family’s can and often do oppose capital punishment on moral grounds, same as anybody else.
They want him punished but believe that killing him is a moral wrong, or they’re more comfortable with the risk that he’s innocent if he’s in prison with the possibility of being exonerated rather than killed.
They who? About the only people who wanted the death penalty were politicians up for re-election.
As far as I could find reading about this case, the “evidence of innocence” is very flimsy. But it’s a reasonable moral stand by the family to want to stay the execution if they think there is even a slim chance of innocence.
If you read the article, the "evidence of guilt" is equally flimsy. And if we take "innocent until proven guilty" seriously, that means he not only should not have been executed, but should never have gone to jail in the first place...
A jury of his peers thought there was enough evidence to convict him and they did. At that point, he's "guilty until proven innocent".
This seems like an exceedingly bad hill to die on. Curtis Flowers was convicted and sentenced to death six times for the same murder by juries of his peers, yet he's a free man today.
We don't have a better system at the moment, accepting its judgements is reasonable in light of that. And backseating when we're probably missing 90% of the evidence presented at court is unlikely to be any more accurate.
It's a bit circular when people say "This court decision is wrong" to argue "But this is the decision that was made."
> the “evidence of innocence” is very flimsy
“Evidence of innocence” is a very problematic concept. Have you thought through what is your evidence of your innocence? (Not just regarding to this case, but regarding all cases involving dead or missing people.) Should we execute you if you ever come up short?
The problem is there are two different standards of proof at different points of the legal process.
Conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt — all the onus is on the prosecution to prove that you indisputably committed that crime. In this case unreliable evidence was used without which this standard likely would not have been met.
Once you’ve been convicted (in this case on shoddy evidence) the onus is on you to offer evidence that you’re actually innocent - a reasonable doubt is no longer sufficient, you need to offer strong, new evidence that disproves the already decided “fact” that you committed the crime.
So conviction is a "trap door" of evidence weight? If someone is convicted based on evidence that is later shown to be totally insufficient to support that conviction, this new information does nothing to overturn the conviction?
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "later shown to be totally insufficient to support that conviction"? The sufficience of evidence doesn't randomly change. If you mean that they were convicted based on evidence that shouldn't have been shown to the jury, you can win an appeal on that.
The standard before your convicted is that the jury must find you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard after you've been convicted is that you must have found substantial new evidence that warrants reconsidering the verdict, or you must show that the original trial was mishandled somehow. "I think the jury was stupid" is not a valid appeal.
Interesting points. The full details of the evidence was not presented to the jury. In that way, it did change. It is more, "the jury was not told the full story."
I think this re-raises the "trap door" question.
A lot of rights (like your right to remain silent, your right to a speedy trial, your right to bear arms, your right to vote, your rights to be free from search without reason) have been interpreted only apply up to the point of conviction. So yes, things get MUCH tougher once convicted as many rights no longer apply to you or are stripped from you.
In this case, up until conviction you are presumed innocent and guilt must be proven. Post conviction most of the appeals process is bared if not filed within 14 days of conviction (it used to be forever but then the US Justice system decided woohhh there that's too long and burdensome on the Justice system so 14 days was deemed a reasonable change to the previous 'forever'. A totally reasonable happy middle). After 14 days from conviction really the only relief available is to prove actual innocence, a much higher and more difficult standard to meet.
So falsify and/or misrepresent evidence just long enough to fool a jury. If the ruse is discovered one minute after conviction, who cares? Person's convicted now, doesn't matter?
With the caveat that this is coming from someone with zero training in law: what a load of horseshit.
No, people have 14 days not one minute (previously forever but reduced to 14 days to find a happy balance to ease the load on the judicial system) after conviction in the Feds to file what most Americans' think of when they think of an appeal. After 14 days (previously forever) the appeal process is greatly limited.
Posting as a throwaway for obvious reasons...
"evidence of innocence"...
I was once accused of a financial crime, around taking money from an account. I was, admittedly, guilty, however, the amount claimed was nearly triple the amount that I had taken (there were multiple shenanigans happening).
When my attorney and I said "Actually, we think the amount is $X, not $3X, because x y and z", we had an extraordinarily difficult time with the Prosecutor, who wanted US to justify why we thought the amount was only $X.
Apropos of any plea or deal or whatever, no... the onus is on the Prosecution to verifiably demonstrate the loss. Not for me to justify why I think the amount is different. Ironically, the justification we did provide came from the Prosecution. "You said the loss was $Z, including $Y in checks which were diverted. Witness statements and other testimony showed that these checks were NOT diverted, by their own words. Ergo, the loss is $Z-$Y."
Prosecutor was still "you need to show me the math for what that equates to". "No, that amounts to incriminating self, and is, bluntly, not my responsibility. You need to assert how you came to the number you are claiming in the charge."
Our justice system isn’t supposed to require evidence of innocence.
Grief is a powerful thing.
As I understand it, it's also extremely rare for a prosecutor to admit mistakes and that a convicted person is innocent, even when it is sufficiently proven, they tend to double down on bad convictions. In this case the prosecutor said the defendant didn't do it. Which makes this a very rare case.
Apparently the family believes that he is guilty but doesn't want him executed (but does want him in prison). In some countries the families wishes are enough to prevent an execution but not in the US.
Probably so he could have a chance at freedom in case new evidence comes to light exonerating him.
Can't really defend yourself if you're dead.
Unfortunately the victims or their relatives are not really the best suited to determine the appropriate punishment. These things are too subjective.
I am assuming there is still some kind of logic behind the statement. How they interpret it for themselves.
Does anyone find it deeply disturbing that the justice system will just sit on its own hands when presented with new evidence? It seems like prosecutors are more interested in maintaining a hi conviction rate rather than seeking justice. Judges seem totally apathetic.
The justice system wasn't presented with any new evidence. Some DNA from the prosecution's office ended up on the weapon sometime in the preceding 17 years, big whoop. This isn't exculpatory and doesn't contradict a single claim made by the prosecution, and there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop and bragging about how he did it in words that included nonpublic details about the crime.
This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.
> there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop
This should not be sufficient to justify the death penalty. Whether or not this guy did it, using such an incredibly weak standard will and almost certainly has killed innocent people.
> This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts…whose conviction was based on very strong evidence
“Very strong” evidence should never be enough to sentence someone to death. The evidence should be irrefutable. Anything less is unacceptable and inexcusable.
In this case the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution, arguing that his guilt was no longer beyond a reasonable doubt.
The blame for this lies squarely on the Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Parson (who has never once granted clemency in a capital case).
As well as the US Supreme Court
“The” prosecutor was not pushing against the execution. “A” prosecutor was, who did not have significantly greater relationship to the case than thousands of other prosecutors in this country. I don’t see how this guy’s opinion is more relevant that anyone else’s.
> the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution
Reading this thread, it's obvious there's been a big game of telephone with regards to what happened (half saying "a", half saying "the").
I hope this reminds people that they need to chase down sources as close to the original information source as possible as things can get misunderstood or distorted along the way.
> when presented with new evidence?
They weren't, for the record.
It is very hard to get cases reopened, it is true. Once DNA testing came about many convicts tried to get the evidence in their cases tested to prove their innocence, but this took many, many years in a lot of cases.
In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.
Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government.
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
Funny, all the "small government" people I know are fine with this.
There was another execution in South Carolina on Friday despite new evidence of innocence
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/20/south-caroli...
That case is even worse as it rested fully on the testimony of the other robber, which he made to get a lesser sentence and later rescinded:
> Prosecutors had no forensic evidence connecting Allah to the shooting. Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable. The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.
> Golden said he agreed to plead guilty and testify when prosecutors assured him he would not face the death penalty or a life sentence – a deal that was not disclosed to the jury.
> “I substituted [Allah] for the person who was really with me,” he wrote, saying he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”. He did not identify this person.
If your friend is wrongly facing the death penalty and you know they’re innocent there’s no reason to not name the person you claim is the real shooter.
Update: it's too late...
> Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening in Missouri after the US Supreme Court denied a stay.
> The 55-year-old was put to death around 6 p.m. CT at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-schedul...
I am very happy when I see The Innocence Project taking on a case like this because it tells me they have already worked through the backlog of actually innocent people as well as the people who might possibly be innocent, and now have worked there way to the cases which are 1% flawed but in which the correct perpetrator has nevertheless been identified, tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, appealed, etc.
> “The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” the petition stated. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”
Imagine we lived in that world.
Aside the fact that the death penalty shouldn't exist in the first place, the victim's family should be able to veto it (automatic commutation to a life sentence).
Incidentally, that's a feature of Islamic law, and where the concept of blood money comes into picture. Which also means that you might be able to get away with murder, if you're rich enough.
Still not sure with so many of the (esp right leaning) in the US claiming to be christian, can also accept this as a punishment. But I get nonsense begets more nonsense.
I think even as a non-christian and especially if you comment like this you should know the absolute minimum about christianity: that the death penalty is obviously in the bible and commanded by God plenty of times
There's also testimony of God overturning / fulfilling prior commandments (Matthew 5:17–21, Acts 10:9–16). The Bible contains a lot of laws and punishments that aren't respected in the United States: selective quoting doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling argument.
There's also testimony of Jesus disrupting an instance of capital punishment (John 8:3–11). There may have been procedural issues in that case, of course – for example, no accusers are said to have claimed witness to the crime itself, which was legally required for an execution – but Jesus points this out after the mob has dispersed, not before, and many Christians interpret that verdict more generally.
It is important to understand the difference between moral laws, which are immutable, and other laws in the Bible, often categorized as civil or ceremonial.
In modern legal theory, we have a similar distinction, which you may know from Legally Blonde: malum in se (that which is inherently wrong) and malum prohibitum (that which is wrong because a lawful authority prohibits it). Example: endangering the safety of others by driving too fast is wrong in itself, while breaking the speed limit is wrong because the town said so.
The former type (moral, and in se) doesn't depend on the existence of a government or system of laws and justice. The latter type certainly does, and the wrongness of those things 1) is changeable at the will of the governing authority, 2) applies only to those properly under the authority, and 3) expires when the governing structure expires.
Christians believe the ten commandments are moral law, whereas when we get into the ins and outs of the ancient Israel system of justice, described at length in Leviticus, eg, we are seeing one civilization's implementation of that moral law into civil law, coupled with religious law and ceremonies that symbolized and pointed to deeper realities.
When Jesus says he does not abolish but fulfills the law (and he means all of the law, not just some laws), he can't mean you are now free to murder. He means if you murdered someone, you may yet receive eternal life and not eternal death, because he can pay the penalty on your behalf. He means he lived a perfectly moral life and can impute that to you. That's fulfillment of moral law.
It also doesn't mean eating pork was immoral and now it's moral. That dietary restriction was a malum prohibitum component of the ceremonial cleanness symbolism that was meant to point the Israelites to the reality of what happens to a soul that consumes unholy things. It was never immoral, only prohibited. But the law is fulfilled in that the symbol is no longer required. Jesus institutes a new symbol that fixates on his own holiness and cleanness imputed to us as if by eating it (the Lord's Supper). The early Christian movement quickly incorporated non-Jews who had no heritage of living under the authority of the Israelite state, which was, by this time, already expired/expiring, many times over through successive conquests and occupations by various other governments. Neither the non-Jewish Christians nor the Jewish Christians needed to abide by those laws, though many did for a time, as it was an integral part of cultural and religious custom.
You're right, Jesus isn't saying "you are free to murder". But in every case we see Jesus prevent (or reverse: Luke 22:49–51) bloodshed, the bloodshed would have been retribution or punishment. Jesus is presented as reasonably anti-murder. Whether that holds in the case of capital punishment, I can't say.
Though, Jesus was subject to capital punishment, despite the original prosecutor (Pontius Pilate) claiming no lawful basis for the execution (Luke 22:66–23:25). This was presented as unjust, despite Jesus' insistence that it had to happen. This is a bit muddled as an analogy, but I see how some people might take "capital punishment is wrong" from it.
The Catholic Church at least is pretty strongly against it.
This entire thread shows that christians who do believe disagree with eachother about this; I was raised some form of protestant christian and in that form, I was told that any type of killing is only allowed by god and god alone, never by humans. That includes war, capital punishment, abortion and everything else. Of course (... this is religion so it's all nonsense anyway), this did not include the maker his other creation like animals; you can kill and torture those and go to heaven. But nah, nothing 'obviously'; that god commands atrocities obviously means you cannot do them on your own; you need to be commanded; the death penalty is not commanded by god, or, well, in some interpretations it might be.
Christ preached non-violent resistance. Death penalty was in mosaic law, and Christ deliberately contradicted it.
Anybody who professes to be a Christian or follower of Christ’s teachings who supports violence in any form is in fact living in contradiction.
A large part of the organized activism against the death penalty is also run by christians, especially catholics and orthodox who are a lot more consistent on this.
It's not the christianity per se that makes them bloodthirsty. Contemporary american evangelical christianity is a novel social-political-religious movement and in some theologically significant ways has broken with near-universal christian tradition. Trying to understand it purely as a religion is too incomplete.
As a serious Christian and a dabbling linguist, I really hate that they've ruined a word meaning "gospel" (the English calque).
We really should call them "dysangelical" when they bring death like this (as opposed to warning of death, which is in scope of euangel when there's also a way to avoid it).
"Still not sure with so many of the (esp right leaning) in the US claiming to be christian, can also accept this as a punishment."
You shall not kill!
What I don't understand. It is my impression that most of the US states that still have the death penalty, strongly oppose abortion. I find this a contradiction. And also these are the states that oppose abortion, at the same time are strictly against any kind of welfare "not our problem!".
Here’s my guess:
I think it’s a question of agency. If you’re an adult that makes their own choices (crime, bad financial decisions, etc.), then you know what the consequences are.
If you’re an unborn child, you’re don’t have agency.
For some there’s probably deeper religious belief in good things (birth) being the work of God and bad things (crime, vice, death) being the work of Satan.
To your point there are plenty of competing religious teachings that could lead some to be pro-choice, pro-welfare and anti-death penalty.
Also, it's often the same people who claim to be "pro life".
As in: "Only God can administer life and death, so stop those abortions or we'll set on fire your clinic and kill the doctors". Psychology can explain completely that behavior, however this is not the right place for such discussions.
>Where isn't the right place for such discussions?
It is pro innconcent life, not pro murderer life? Pro life and pro choice are just marketing terms. People who are pro-choice aren't pro not wearing a seat belt (well some may be, but it has nothing to do with the topic). It has to do with abortion and only abortion.
It doesn't say in the article, but he was executed last night :(
Thank you, was looking for this info since they did mention the 24th but hadn’t said if they really went through with it or not.
Sad shit, just as sad is the fact that it seems like nothing will change.
I was foreman of a jury on a murder trial once; it’s my signature on the verdict form that sealed the fate of a man. In an extremely real and personal sense, I am directly responsible for putting a man in prison, and given his age, health conditions, and the sentence that was going to be passed, that means I’m directly responsible for ensuring a human being dies in prison.
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.
It seems wrong, that the 2 major points of evidence against Marcellus are a testimony from his ex and cellmate. I don’t trust humans, to trust convicting people based on 2 hearsay sources of testimony. Maybe this worked in the past when America was smaller and the average morality of a person was very high, but now this just seems ripe for abuse.
I wouldn’t use this evidence to make a decision in an office dispute.
I applaud the Innocence Project for taking this case, but honestly, Missouri? What did they expect? This is the same governor that tried to prosecute a newspaper reporter after they uncovered social security numbers in the HTML code from a state-run website. Then, when the governor was informed about how stupid his claim was, he doubled-down, insisting he would seek prosecution.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper...
I imagine a team like The Innocence Project expects to lose most of their cases, but they try anyway because every life is worth saving.
well-said ^^^
Is the transcript of the original court case available online somewhere? The oldest thing I'm seeing is
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-... ,
which is (I think...) the decision of the state supreme court on the appeal. There are several points where it seems like there is some dispute about what exactly the evidence is tying Williams to the murder, and where the original trial transcript might help clarify things.
It’s sad that the US government unnecessarily deprived a human being of their right to life.
I hope one day the people involved are prosecuted for this premeditated murder.
State executions are literally, by definition, not murder.
Legally they aren't, morally you could argue they are.
Legally speaking Stalin's purges were also not murder, by definition.
It's obvious the previous poster was making a point of morality, not legality. You can of course disagree with that morality. That's fine. But going "but akshually the law says..." is being highly obtuse.
Chiming in like this makes me wounder what your view on abortion is. I'm not asking, though.
I'm not really sure if I follow how that relates?
I'm just saying that "X is legal" is not really a good counter to "X is not moral", which of course also applies in the reverse. Legality and morality are just not the same thing.
Oh lol. I was being serious. Been thinking about the nuances of it recently and I felt it kinda resides within that framework. Wasn't meant to be snide but also this threads not the place for it.
And who wrote that definition again? Right, the murderers.
If you're wondering if the Missouri governor Mike Parson sparingly uses his clemency and pardon power, you'd be mistaken [1]:
> Parson, a former sheriff, has now granted clemency to more than 760 people since 2020 — more than any Missouri governor since the 1940s
including those who waved guns at BLM protestors [2] and the son of the KC Chiefs coach who caused grave bodiy injuries to someone in a DUI.
Available data shows a pretty clear trend [3]:
> An analysis of available demographic data conducted by the Missouri News Network indicates that almost 90% of those who have been granted clemency by the governor are white.
If you're wondering where the US Supreme Court stands on this, consider this quote from then-Justice Antonin Scalia [4]:
> [t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.
Also, consider this racial bias demonstrated in the exoneration for those sentence to death [5]:
> Since 1973, at least 189 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. 100 of the death row exonerees are Black.
Lastly, even if you want to ignore the immorality of the death setnence, look at it from the lens of cost [6]. Death penalty cases are substantially more expensive to litigate and death row inmates are substantially more expensive to incarcerate. A life-without-parole would be substantially cheaper.
Also, you can release someone from prison wrongly convicted. You cannot bring them back to life and there are multiple cases of people who were executed and later exonerated. Williams is sadly added to that list.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/kansas-city-chiefs-britt-reid-com...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/03/1024446351/missouris-governor...
[3]: https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/state_news/governors...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/associate-justice-anton...
[5]: https://www.naacpldf.org/our-thinking/death-row-usa/
[6]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...
> Parson, a former sheriff, has never granted clemency in a death penalty case.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/missouri-governor-st...
> Parson, a former sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions, and has never granted clemency.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/parson-state-supreme-co...
Utterly pointless to argue this since we do not have access to the totality evidence and testimony that the Court and the jury had access to. Could it be that they were wrong? Unlikely but yes. Is it likely that we here are “less wrong”. Not a chance
The prosecutor who wanted to pardon him was not the original prosecutor, but a recent progressive elected one. The original prosecutor still believes he is guilty. Furthermore it is highly suspect that he was caught selling the laptop stolen from her house and the story about how he came into it is implausible.
People who are willing to commit murder are often sociopaths and pathological liars. It isn’t surprising he would maintain his innocence for years.
That said we shouldn’t execute him, there’s enough doubt to make it possible he didn’t do it and executing an innocent man is horrendous. And IMO we should eliminate the death penalty anyway.
But regardless, I still find the weight of evidence much stronger in favor of guilt over innocence.
> Furthermore it is highly suspect that he was caught selling the laptop stolen from her house and the story about how he came into it is implausible.
Things like “the State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him” should at the very least make everyone pause and reconsider the course of action. I am not familiar with the case so I don’t have an opinion on whether he is guilty or not, but this is not a way of running a justice system.
In any case, yes, the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism in a liberal society.
I'm not entrenched in my position, but I would argue that there are cases where the death penalty makes sense. It seems more cruel to lock someone up for the rest of their life with no chance of parole AND denying them the ability to commit suicide. Maybe avoidance of cruelty isn't the point of getting rid of the death penalty, though.
I'm against the death penalty - I do believe there's times it makes sense, and I certainly believe there's crimes worthy of it. But I don't trust the state to make this determination with 100% accuracy - and anything less than 100% means we have to make the choice between not giving the death penalty to those who do deserve it, or executing those who don't deserve it.
It's not unusual to hear stories of people being found innocent after decades in prison - and every single time it hammers home to me that they could have been pardoning a grave.
If it were up to me it would be in the constitution that everyone has the right to euthanasia and suicide with no conditions. At first i thought it seems like a completely unrelated issue to the death penalty. After thinking about it more maybe you have a point. Society will likely never get over the taboo of enabling suicide so i suppose it can be seen as a lesser moral evil to kill someone rather than subject them to life imprisonment under suicide watch. Interesting moral questions
> It seems more cruel to lock someone up for the rest of their life with no chance of parole AND denying them the ability to commit suicide.
It does, but at least it is reversible. I think when the worst case (an innocent being killed) is so wrong, it makes sense to design the system to avoid it, even if this has side effects such as making it worse for the actual criminals.
I would support leaving the opportunity to commit suicide in good conditions rather than strangling themselves with their bedsheets, but doing that properly would be tricky.
> Maybe avoidance of cruelty isn't the point of getting rid of the death penalty, though.
That’s a tricky one. It is hard to want to avoid cruelty in the case of gruesome murders. Nobody wants to say that they want to make the life of jailed terrorists better.
But among the opponents to the death penalty, I don’t think that cruelty is the main point. By keeping them alive, we don’t lower ourselves to their level, we leave them an opportunity to become better, and we avoid the moral cost of killing innocents.
Besides, life in prison is as good or bad as we collectively want it to be. There is a spectrum between Swedish jails and a hole in a dungeon.
This was all considered by the state Supreme Court. Due process was invoked and after numerous reviews at every level no court found anything to retry or reverse the case.
My personal take - of course he was guilty as unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public. And the property findings.
Saying that I’m not sure killing people is the greatest thing.
> unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public
Do you have a source?
"The case against Mr. Williams turned on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses who were incentivized by promises of leniency in their own pending criminal cases and reward money. The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.
Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. "
> " [...] neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. "
My brain is short-circuiting over the two parts of this snippet from The Innocence Project. Presumably both are intended to suggest unreliable individuals and an unjust guilty verdict, but I find a mismatch between the two. It's one thing to suppose the individuals revealed some details that were featured in media accounts. But it's quite a different thing to suppose the individuals revealed some details that were known only to police. The former point is of no consequence, but the latter point, if true, supports the reliability of the individuals and the guilt of the accused.
Not that I support the death penalty anyway. But I'm leaning toward nemo44x's personal take mentioned above. And the snippet was presumably written to coax us that the man was innocent. Am I missing something? They seem like weasel words, as another poster put it. :(
Just read the background from the appeal case and urs clear as day he’s guilty. They challenged a bunch of technicalities with flimsy arguments. At no point did they challenge if the evidence was sufficient.
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...
He stabbed that women 43 times. And yet these fools support this evil monster of a man.
This is a lawyer's evasive way of hiding that these individuals revealed info that was not known to the public but was confirmed to be accurate by the police
I love how they try and paint the witnesses as unreliable because they have "records" while defending the guy who had 15 violent felonies and already serving time for armed robbery as a victim of the system. While also ignoring the testimony of the person he fenced the victim's laptop to and the victim's belongings being found in the car he used to drive to burglary turned murder.
Literally the Missouri Supreme Court decision and US Supreme Court decision that supports it.
I get your point and I am not arguing for his innocence, but both courts are highly suspect these days.
Everything is fallable, sure. But consider this: the guy had millions of dollars of pro bono legal machinery behind him and even still could not produce an argument or counter evidence to support his claim. Our system is amazingly transparent and corruption or outright denial of evidence would be clearly apparent. And it’s not there.
The system works almost always but does get it wrong sometimes. I doubt that this was that time. Justice was served.
> and corruption or outright denial of evidence would be clearly apparent
Not really - the legal discovery rules require full disclosure of all evidence, yet you regularly hear about how prosecutors don't disclose evidence. Sometimes the appeals process will grant a new trial, sometimes they overturn, but often the judges will just say "we're not going to bother worrying about the lack of a fair trial". It happens often enough that prosecutors are willing to take the gamble on it, otherwise it wouldn't continue to be a common news story.
In this case though the defense never even challenged the evidence or if it was sufficient. You “regularly” hear about it because it’s so rare that it’s news if it happens. It’s a very rare event.
Read the background here and tell me you really support this man who stabbed that woman - mother and wife - 43 times.
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...
The same justices that put a pro-abortion amendment on the ballot.
> The prosecutor who wanted to pardon him was not the original prosecutor, but a recent progressive elected one
It's beyond stupid to elect people who are in charge of upholding laws and prosecute crimes. They have to campaign, make their views known, and to get elected, show views which of course aren't necessarily related to what their job should be about.
Get professionals that are as impartial as possible. They will still have biases, but they won't have to advertise them and be beholden to them in order to get reelection.
If prosecutors are going to be biased either way, I'd prefer a choice in those biases.
I'd prefer them to not have biases, to be criticised when they do, and not to be incentivised (reelection) to proudly show them.
Then you're also okay with me choosing the bias of a prosecutor prosecuting you?
No, that's silly and not at all the same thing as a prosecutor being accountable to the electorate as a whole. The entire point is that I don't trust one person, or a small group of people, to pick someone who is "unbiased". I don't trust the electorate as a whole either, but I trust them more than elected officials.
Only three states in the US have appointed, rather than elected, district attorneys. The United States Attorney General is an appointed position, and we've seen in recent administrations how it can be corrupted quite easily.
> No, that's silly and not at all the same thing as a prosecutor being accountable to the electorate as a whole.
In my perspective, it is exactly the same thing when you disagree with the electorate. Which is why (personnally) I don't want you, or any electorate choosing prosecutors.
If every time you voted for a prosecutor, and every time your vote was in a minority, would you still feel you had a say in the bias of the prosecutor?
I agree with respect to appointments being not good. In my view those are proxies for an election. I personally trust neither electorate nor elected officials.
> In my perspective, it is exactly the same thing when you disagree with the electorate.
In a democracy, you can argue with and convince your fellow citizens to change the law and how it is enforced. If a majority doesn't agree, you won't get your way. This is not a good system, but it is better than any other system.
If there were some other alternative that guaranteed that everyone always gets a completely unbiased prosecutor - great, I'm all for it! That system doesn't exist, though.
Would you answer:
> If every time you voted for a prosecutor, and every time your vote was in a minority, would you still feel you had a say in the bias of the prosecutor?
You said previously at least by voting you had a say in the bias. Is your answer to the above a genuine "yes" because you feel there was opportunity to lobby other citizens?
I don't agree that there is necessarily even that possibility. Thus my position is that elected or appointed by an elected official are equally broken.
Who, exactly, gets to choose how unbiased the prosecutor is? You won't get that from a democratic election and you won't get that from elected officials choosing them.
My question is sincere. If the upstream comment wants to choose bias, then a "yes" answer to my question would be a consistent position and interesting if sincerely answered that way.
To your question, a priori bias would be hard to evaluate. Post facto there would be some data and perhaps some metrics that could be used. It would less be "who", but "how."
Prosecutor bias is a bit nebulous though. Prosecutors should be honest and present the best case possible, met with the best defense possible. The best defense being a function of wealth rather than a consistent standard is damning. But I quickly digress...
I would be interested to have my original question answered.
> If the upstream comment wants to choose bias, then a "yes" answer to my question would be a consistent position and interesting if sincerely answered that way.
I have no idea what you're saying here, but my comment was just saying that I want to vote for prosecutors rather than having them appointed. I prefer to decide for myself how biased the candidates are than to trust an elected official to pick someone who is unbiased, and to have my fellow citizens vote as well.
I don't have to assent to any random Dick, Joe, or Harry choosing a prosecutor for me to believe that everyone is better off if we are all prosecuted by someone elected.
> I prefer to decide for myself how biased the candidates
> have my fellow citizens vote as well.
I find those positions at odds to one another. Personally I don't want prosecutors to be neither appointed by elected officials nor elected. Though, I am more digging into that you think you might get a choice when voting.
Re-read what I wrote. I believe the grammar correct and it is clear.
Though, I'll illustrate with an example. Let's say the electorate is 10 people. You, 3 of your friends that think identical to you, and me with 5 of my friends that think identical to me. This is a 6 vs 4 situation. Now let's say we put up two prosecutors for election. One who will always try you unjustly, and one who will always try me unjustly. If there is an election, the 6 to 4 majority would not vote your way. Thus, despite there being a vote - you are not getting the choice of bias. Ergo, when saying (paraphrasing) "I want to choose the bias via vote", you are also saying: i am okay with others deciding the bias of a prosecutor against me
Your point is completely out of scope of what's being discussed. My comment was a reply to a comment saying "It's beyond stupid to elect people who are in charge of upholding laws and prosecute crimes." My argument is entirely and only an argument that prosecutors should be elected instead of appointed.
All this other stuff about language is not relevant and I don't care about your thought experiment because it's completely unlike the way elections work in the real world, and has nothing to do with me preferring that over a situation where one of the 10 people gets to pick the prosecutor!
My point is to demonstrate that a minority can be consistently oppressed by a majority. Thereby negating the vote of the minority. This is how people feel in northern California, eastern Oregon, and many other places.
My point is that appointments and elections are almost the same thing, nearly a distinction without a difference. Don't like the appointments, then vote for a different person. Bit of a distinction of representative democracy vs direct. Not necessarily that different. Almost entirely equally broken IMO.
> situation where one of the 10 people gets to pick the prosecutor!
That is not at all the simplification. We could change it that the 10 people are voting for someone to do the appointment of a prosecutor. Or we could flip it to a real world example where someone is in eastern oregon voting conservative, or someone lives in 1930s rural south as a minority.
The majority rule can lead to a bad path. Notably authoritarian regimes where the prosecutor promises to go after the minorities. Which has its examples historically throughout the world, including the US
>People who are willing to commit murder are often sociopaths and pathological liars
Only 27% of them apparently[0], so even murderers are still more likely to not be a psychopath.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135917891...
Thanks for posting this, the quoted text smelled like something pulled out of... the air.
"People who are willing to commit murder are often sociopaths and pathological liars. It isn’t surprising he would maintain his innocence for years."
An innocent person would also maintain his innocence for years. With respect, this reminds me of some commentary at the time of the Central Park Five case. "They did it because they're evil." Well, somebody was evil, but we needed to know a little more than "we found these kids and there is evil". In the end that attitude led to a horrifying miscarriage of justice.
Somebody was a murderer, it sounds like we agree on that.
I'm ignorant about the case, but the abundance of physical evidence at the crime scene, none of it pointing to the executed man, seems much more relevant than anything you cited in your comment. Again, I say this with respect. If you care to respond, I hope I'm open to logic and reason.
Bell and the victim's family wanted a commuted sentence, not a pardon. They did not believe in his innocence.
I cannot help but wonder if his race had something do with the outcome :(
The US Supreme Court denied a stay, with 3 liberal justices saying they would have stopped the execution. Thus my comment.
I haven't read anything about the Supreme Court's decision, but did they dissent on the grounds that they believed he was innocent, or that capital punishment shouldn't be allowed (and not comment on his guilt)?
IIRC, they declined to hear the case.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/09/supreme-court-allows-marc...
The US Supreme Court's decision was that there was not grounds for them to interfere in the case, because the state courts had already provided sufficient due process. They made no official ruling about guilt or capital punishment.
Supreme Court justices don't typically explain their reasons for dissenting in emergency applications like this. They can if they choose to, but they didn't here.
Its wild how these discussions dont factor in who the murderer is
Just out there walking around somewhere
.
It is evil. The governor is evil. 'Nuf said.
From CNN:
“Other evidence that helped convict Williams ‘remains intact,’ the attorney general said.
‘The victim’s personal items were found in Williams’s car after the murder. A witness testified that Williams had sold the victim’s laptop to him. Williams confessed to his girlfriend and an inmate in the St. Louis City Jail, and William’s girlfriend saw him dispose of the bloody clothes worn during the murder,’ the attorney general’s office said.”
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-schedu...
Marcellus Williams was executed yesterday, Tuesday. https://apnews.com/article/missouri-execution-marcellus-will...
don't you mean murdered?
an unlawful killing? well that's an uphill battle, but I'll be intrigued to see how far you can get with your claim.
The governor's statement: https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...
There is no place for the death penalty in a civilized country!
I believe there are heinous crimes that do. Both fitting the crime and as a deterrent.
> as a deterrent
Do you have any sources supporting the claim that does actually deter anybody?
The US has more violent crime than other Western countries, so as a deterrent, it does not work. Perhaps instead of wasting money on death penalty appeals and killing innocent people, we should think about how we as a country can overhaul the prison system and our societal structures.
It's extremely difficult to compare crime statistics that don't involve death. There's under reporting right and left, and there are classification problems.
With that said, I don't think it's true that the US has, per capita, significantly more violent crime than the median Western country. What we have is a LOT more guns, which increase the probability that our violent crime becomes lethal.
We DO have vastly more incarceration than most other countries, though.
For profit prisons are not helping anything. They have zero interest in rehab and reformation - and unfortunately a lot of people in the states and beyond believe once you're a criminal you're tarnished forever.
That logic doesn't follow, because it could be the case that America would be even more violent if we didn't execute people. Having said that, I find the deterrence angle suspect. Very few people would consider spending the rest of their life in jail acceptable, but being put to death unacceptable.
To me the definition of a 'civilized society' is an absence of the death penalty.
Many people are also very confused about the justice system in America. It isn't about determining the truth. It's about trying to get you convicted, to advance the career of the prosecutor.
In that sense, the 'justice department' is anything but. The 'innocence project[0]' has shown time and time again that truth finding isn't the goal.
In the mean time, study after study shows that the death penalty doesn't deter people from crime and it's much more expensive than long prison sentences.
However, a strong reason not to execute people, is acknowledging that the 'justice system' is made of people who can make mistakes and that we can never be that certain.
Instating the death penalty shows a lack of humility and shows that it's absolutism is mostly for political gain. It scores with more authoritarian inclined voters who like 'simple solutions' and ignore all the complicated context.
[0]: https://innocenceproject.org
<thought experiment> Suppose we lived in a world where it was possible to know someone's guilt or innocence with strictly 100% confidence. Curious to know if your views would change?
Note the cost of incarceration is around ~$70k/year; enough to save lives, house people, heal people, feed people etc if put to other uses.
You assume that the laws are flawless. They are not. It is hard to un-kill a person if you realize a law was bogus.
The first law I would introduce would be that the death sentance only applies to people who demanded it publically before.
Guilt or innocence is irrellevant to the discussion about whether the death penalty is justified though, for several reasons; it's binary thinking (there's a right and a wrong, there's good and bad people); it's dehumanizing (a bad person is forever bad and will forever be a burden to society); it's reductionist (a prisoner unit costs X per year at no benefit to society), etc. I don't know enough philosophy to list everything wrong with this premise.
Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign. Then think about what you think the purpose is of a sentencing? Is it for revenge, revalidation, setting an example, or removing undesireables from society (temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently)?
> Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign.
I think that the kind of crimes which lead to a death sentence happen because the perpetrator is a bad person who likes to hurt others. There's no "background" or "circumstances" that would make you break into a woman's house and stab her to death - to do such a thing, you have to either not know or not care that it's wrong.
That doesn't by itself prove that the death penalty is right, or even that people who commit these kind of murders can never be rehabilitated. But it's really disturbing to me how often people whitewash the specific crimes death row inmates are accused of, as though we're all a couple missed paychecks away from randomly murdering people.
Even if we had 100% certainty what crimes are 100% worth death? Not even that is simple.
If you want to consider cost, it costs literal millions to execute someone.
Plus what of the potential profit? The guilty person could be a teenager making a silly mistake who could grow up to become the next Einstein. Insert Bill Gates' mugshot here, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and bringing billions into the US / worldwide economy.
But he was guilty and it would probably have been better to execute him because what if he did something else wrong?
They don't give the death penalty to teenagers making 'silly mistake's. It's a sentence not handed out without weighty thought and only to those who knowingly and intentionally take life.
I'm so tired of the "next Einstein" pithy replies. These are adults who have done heinous crimes against innocent people. Justice requires severe consequences.
> Curious to know if your views would change?
It wouldn't. There are cases where we do know someone's guilt with 100% confidence, but in my country we still don't execute them.
Suppose we could see everything that happened in the past, perfectly, and see in to the minds of everyone. We could save dollars!
Here’s another thought experiment. We have ample evidence that the death penalty hasn’t made America safe from murder. But we don’t know if it has deterrence value for lesser crimes.
I propose death by hanging for repeat littering and speeding near a school. I bet that’d be effective.
> We have ample evidence that the death penalty hasn’t made America safe from murder. But we don’t know if it has deterrence value for lesser crimes.
You seem to be suggesting that because murders still happen, we know the death penalty has no deterrence value? That's not how deterrence works.
Hanging? Why not shoot on sight, like the second amendment absolutionists/extremists think is the way to go?
If murder is illegal, then it makes no difference if the state does it as punishment for committing murder. You’ve still sanctioned a murder, admittedly of a murderer. A civilised country accepts this simple logic and doesn’t sanction murder under any circumstances.
No. Murder is not the same as killing, just like not all taking is stealing. Even the most civilised society imaginable admits that killing is sometimes acceptable (in self defense, for example). Killing done by the state is trivially not murder by definition, and less trivially there are justifications you can argue about. But you have to argue about it, your "simple logic" is unfortunately too simple.
You're right that it is too simple, but it's an easy rule of thumb with which to think about and frame the problem.
If it's illegal to kill a human being, then it's illegal. The existence of a death penalty where the state is able to do it in certain cases, as in the main case where someone themselves has broken the rule and murdered, for me, still does not justify any kind of legalistic justification for sanctioning they be killed. While "the state" is this abstract entity formed by all of us, the state has to act through people, who then have to be involved in taking a life. The state's premeditation of the killing of the murderer is even more premeditated and drawn out form of murder. It's easy to be blinded by the language used around this towards what is happening. I believe even further that if the state is allowed to do it, it opens a loophole in thought that could actually cause more murders to happen, because if the state can do it, then maybe I'll do it too...
By this logic, holding someone against their will is illegal too. When a state does it, we call it incarceration. Is it wrong for the state to sanction incarcerating someone?
Incarceration can be appealed.
In that case, would a civilised country have a military? Any military operations is state sanctioned killings.
This goes much further into philosophy, politics, and legality than I'm comfortable with but there's lawful and unlawful killing, the difference being... well, one is allowed and the other isn't, as per the law (be it national or e.g. international / warfare laws).
I can't even make a statement whether killing is always morally injustifiable or not.
Robbery is also ilegal and yet, each month, the government takes about 50% of my wage in taxes.
I love the moral direction, but this sadly doesn’t hold up to philosophical scrutiny. Is it murder to
1. Kill someone who’s about to kill someone?
2. Kill someone in a defensive war to defend your freedoms?
3. Kill someone by prioritizing things other than their medical care, eg in hospice?
4. Kill someone by letting them smoke/drink/overeat?
5. Kill someone by letting them starve?
If you want to say that no country is civilized yet then hey I’m with ya. Otherwise, it’s not quite so simple. The death penalty is a tragic injustice, I agree, but just saying “it’s murder” is not a serious engagement with the issue IMO.
If I could fly by flapping my arms, I wouldn't need airplanes.
In such a world (which is, by any means likely ever to be available, impossible), we’d still run against the issue that the state has the authority to kill people. This world would also have to be free of political corruption, and be so politically stable that what constitutes a crime worthy of the death penalty could never change.
What’s the point of this analogy? We can’t know 100% so it doesn’t matter.
The point is to distinguish between an act that is immoral in and of itself and one that is immoral because we aren't sufficiently smart/honorable/efficient. This informs the argument - in the latter case killing could be permissible if only we become more advanced - in the former case it would never be permissible.
Ah, Republicans are the responsible party here. Right to life my ass.
Why is this submission not on the front page if it has so many upvotes in the past hour, and the number of upvotes exceeds the number of comments?
Probably too many comments. Too much activity compared to the number of votes is interpreted as a sign of flame wars and heated and unproductive discussions, and sink stories. This kind of topics don’t stay on the front page for long, usually.
the American justice system is flawed. It's mob justice that was only fit for the 1700s when there was nothing better. Or maybe there was,I wasn't around. Untrained people can't decide on guilt or innocence. They can't judge evidence. They allow themselves to be swayed by beauty or likeability to greater extent. They're lives are no good, on average. This makes most of them mean and vindictive. If they can allow someone to suffer like they have, it feels good to them.
I'm not sure whether it's racism. It's the usual explanation for this phenomenon. I can understand racism. I don't believe in opening the floodgates. it sounds more like plain bloodlust. Because blood is what you're going to get if you go on this way.
To my European eye I'm curious why those who have ordered and those who have executed the wrongfully convicted prisoner, despite the evidence, are not arrested for aggravated murder... It's simple: they have choose, they are responsible for an homicide PERIOD.