Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

innocenceproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 514 posts

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

#471

Post by analog31 »

norir wrote: post #436
analog31 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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.

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

#472

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

mystified5016 wrote: post #461
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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.

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

#473

Post by anonzzzies »

Nathanba wrote: post #191
anonzzzies wrote: post #57

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

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.

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

#474

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

widowlark wrote: post #454
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #434

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 hospita…

"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.

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

#475

Post by handoflixue »

mystified5016 wrote: post #460
calderarrow wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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…

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"?

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

#476

Post by [deleted] »

pjfin123 wrote: post #418
randallsquared wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

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

#477

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kelthuzad wrote: post #240
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other substantial forensic evidence (fingerprints, footprints, hair) was found AND none matched Williams Do you have a source for this? I thought "staff with the prosecutors’ office had mishandled the weapon after the killing – touching it without gloves before the trial," which "made it impossible to determine if Williams’s fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier" [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/09/23/missou... - "Among the evidence police collected: bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, a knife sheath and the suspect's hair collected from Gayle's shirt, hands and the floor. Missing from the house were Gayle's purse and jacket, and her husband's laptop."

That doesn’t say any of the evidence matched someone else. Just that hair and prints were collected. We know the prints were damaged. And hair analysis is notoriously unreliable [1].

[1] https://ncpro.sog.unc.edu/manual/622-1

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

#478

Post by ein0p »

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

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

#479

Post by Teever »

handoflixue wrote: post #475
mystified5016 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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"?

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.

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

#480

Post by Teever »

mystified5016 wrote: post #461
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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?

> what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

Due process?

Post reply on HN