On Tuesday night, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams. It was a legally sanctioned murder.
As the Washington Post put it , he was “convicted of a 1998 murder that he said he did not commit.” The evidence suggested that Williams should not have met his end this way. Even the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office, which originally secured the death sentence, did not want that sentence carried out.
Williams’s fate was tangled up in a mess of mistakes and legalisms that obscured what should have been obvious. He died because the people who could and should have prevented his death, each for their own reasons, chose to look the other way .
That Williams was executed is an American tragedy, but he is not alone. The American death penalty system has shown itself to be riddled with errors . Miscarriages of justice of the kind that occurred in the Williams case are legion, though the precise number is not known.
This is because we don’t have a good handle on how many innocent people have been convicted of capital crimes. Law Professor Samuel Gross and his colleagues note that “There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place.”