Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

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.

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.

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.

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

There was 1 time in the past 50 years when that might have happened during Obama’s term for a couple of months, as opposed to republicans polices that want to send women back to the 1850’s for going on decades now. I’ll be fine with blaming dems 1% vs 99% of the repressive efforts of the GOP