The death penalty is disappearing in America

RHe kills By Felicia Gayle, correspondent for… St. Louis Post dispatchin 1998 was one of those crimes that was perfectly calibrated for shock. On the evening of August 11 of that year, Gayle’s husband returned home from work to find the back door of their home in University City, a St. Louis suburb, wide open. Inside, he found his wife dead in the hallway covered in blood, wearing only a shirt, with a kitchen knife sticking out of her neck. It was, the police guessed, a botched robbery. The killer took a wallet and a laptop, but left behind several other valuables. Bloody fingerprints marked the wall and the misery on the floor. Gayle was stabbed 43 times, apparently after emerging from the bathroom and interrupting the robber. “She was probably as surprised to see it as she was to see it,” the local police chief said at the time.

Twenty-six years later, another murder shocked people in St. Louis. However, this was not surprising: it was announced in advance. On September 24, Marcellus Williams, the man convicted in 2001 of Gayle’s murder, was lethally injected with poison by prison officials. The execution — one of a recent series across several states — has raised questions about the future of the death penalty in America.

Williams has always maintained his innocence. Many thought he was telling the truth. “Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent black man,” he thundered NAACP In a post on X, a social media website. Williams was an “innocent man,” claimed Cori Bush, the outgoing Democratic congresswoman who represents St. Louis. Gayle’s family was among those pleading for mercy. Oddly enough, Sir Richard Branson, a British businessman. Missouri ignored their pleas.

That the execution went ahead was at least in part the result of a deepening partisan divide over the death penalty. Over the past two decades, a majority of Democrats have turned against the death penalty: Polling by Gallup in 2023 suggested only 32% of its return, down from 65% in 2002. But Republicans remain as keen on it as they have always been keen on protecting it. Every state that saved someone this year (there are eight of them) is a Republican stronghold. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, not only supports killers but wants to expand federal capital crimes to include drug trafficking.

However, the truth is that the death penalty has become rare. In fact, in time, it seems likely that he will die himself.

Until recently, it looked as if Williams’ efforts to escape death might succeed. In January, the St. Louis County District Attorney, the office that originally prosecuted the case against him, attempted to overturn his conviction. That job has now been filled by Wesley Bell, who defeated Mrs. Bush in the primary earlier this year and is running for Congress in November. In a 63-page brief, the office outlined why the original conviction was deemed unsafe. None of the forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, collected at the scene proved that it came from Williams. His conviction was based on the testimony of two witnesses, a former girlfriend and a fellow inmate, both of whom Williams told them, and on the recovery of the stolen laptop, which Williams sold. Her friend, Mr. Bell’s office, suggested, citing new witnesses, that in fact, she had given Williams the laptop to sell, and was concealing her own involvement in the murder. The cellmate told investigators he applied for a cash reward. (Both have since died.)

But efforts to dismiss the case have largely failed when a key piece of new evidence is expected to help exonerate Williams-Male DNA The handle of the murder weapon was found that was not his – which was rotated to be investigators, who clearly misused the knife, rather than an alternative suspect. In the aftermath, Williams offered an “Alford plea”, in which he agreed to plead guilty without admitting the crime, and the judge agreed to spare his life. But Missouri’s Republican governor and attorney general insisted it go ahead. They argued that Williams has exhausted the appeals process, and the judicial system’s rulings are being implemented. The Supreme Court split six to three — along its usual ideological lines — in refusing to stop it.

The decision reflects a recent Republican commitment to the death penalty. Last year, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, signed a law that reduces the requirement for a unanimous jury to impose death on a majority of eight out of 12. It’s getting harder to get. Last year, a judge in Utah ruled that the state could use firing squads as a backup for lethal injection (an option lawmakers restored in 2015). In 2021, South Carolina passed a law to reintroduce the electric chair and firing squads as an alternative, and on September 20, carried out its first conviction in 13 years (with a needle). And on September 26, an Alabama man was killed by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen until he suffocated – only the second time this method has been used in America.

But such killing deceives the national trend. So far this year, only 18 people have been executed. The number of annual executions has fallen by four-fifths since the late 1990s. Whether due to drug shortages or legal challenges, executions take decades to be scheduled, with only a few being executed to death. More waiting dies naturally. Of the 2,200 or so people now at execution time, more than a third are in states like California and Pennsylvania where Democratic governors have declared a stand on executions. There is almost no one recently convicted. Last year, 21 new death penalties were passed across the country (see chart). In the 1990s, the annual total rose more than 300. This means that a further collapse in the number of executions is coming.

“People who philosophically do not oppose the death penalty find reasons to offer life sentences, even [for those] Robin Maher, of the Death Penalty Information Center, says, Non-governmental organizations. She says one reason is the greater fear of executing innocent people, and the loss of faith in the judicial system. Since 1976, 200 people have been exonerated at the time of execution. The murder of Marcellus Williams, who has not been proven innocent but whose guilt is unlikely to restore many people’s reasonable doubts, trusts.■

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