This Was A Republican Execution
Marcellus Williams was killed by one injection, but not by one man.
Marcellus Williams was executed by an entire culture, cheered on by former President Trump, who gets a hard-on from his ability to kill people from a safe distance.
Marcellus was killed by lethal injection. Lethal injection can sometimes take a long time to work. Joseph Wood in Arizona took almost 2 hours to die in July 2014.
Marcellus was convicted of the 1999 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle, a former police reporter. His attorneys had filed appeal efforts based on new evidence – including alleged bias in jury selection and contamination of the murder weapon prior to trial. They argued that there were flaws in the jury selection process as well as the handling of the murder weapon, which did not have his DNA on it.
The prosecutor didn’t want him to be killed and the jurors who sentenced him to death didn’t want him executed.
There is no evidence that the death penalty has a greater deterrent effect on crime than imprisonment.
Trump’s Supreme Court refused to grant a stay of execution. As is normal for 99% of Supreme Court rulings, it gave no reasons. Three of its liberal judges dissented.
“We hope this gives finality to a case that’s languished for decades, re-victimizing Ms. Gayle’s family for decades,” said Republican Gov. Mike Parson.
The victim’s family had instead asked that the inmate be spared death.
Here we run into a hard reality of the American public: as of 2015, 77% of Republicans, 57% of Independents, and only 40% of Democrats said they favored the death penalty. Conservatives drove the higher support, especially those in the Catholic Church who favored the death penalty for abortions. Pro-life equals pro-death. Governors like Ron DeSantis tout their support for the death penalty, and Mike Pence wants the death penalty for mass shooters.
Trump wants to bring back the guillotine.
If you’re a Republican governor, it’s advantageous to allow executions of black people to go through so you can be seen as “tough on crime”. Parson was a former sheriff who has never granted clemency in a death penalty case.
A request to outright cancel the execution to provide time to judge racial bias was rejected by Judge Zel Fischer, who assured everyone that “Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence.”
In fact, at least 200 people wrongly sentenced to death have later been exonerated.
I am sure their cold corpses would be gratified to hear the apology: “Oops! Sorry about that.”
If the prosecutor thought there was reasonable doubt that Marcellus was guilty, then it means there is someone still out there on the streets who is the real killer. And that person is unlikely to be haunted by the thought that someone else died on his behalf. That person probably votes Republican.
Because no Republican – governor or murderer - would apologize for killing a Black man.
Trump’s political career started with a public call to execute innocent Black people, and now his vicious Supreme Court semi-humans have ended another man’s life.
What motivates Trump and the people that follow him?
Just like the Roe decision to cancel women’s rights and rule that they should have no access to birth decisions, the Republicans are once again spitting into a prevailing wind. More people are now against the death penalty than are for it.
And the death penalty is a uniquely Republican virtue. It’s seen as a sign of strength; mercy is for women. Give a big manly nod to the executioner and then the trapdoor swings.
People forget that the US was once an international leader in abolishing the death penalty. Today, it is the only Western democracy that still kills people legally. In fact, three-quarters of all nations ban the death penalty.
The death penalty was abolished in the US by the Supreme Court in 1973, on the grounds that it violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.
It did not stay buried long. Re-animated like Frankenstein’s monster by a handful of southern states, the death penalty itself rose from the dead.
It was revived when state laws were allowed to provide an objective process for deciding when to apply it and gave sufficient discretion to juries to determine whether it was appropriate.
This in itself spawned the growth of a large and talented capital defence practice.
Today 27 states retain the death penalty. The states that use it the most are Republican states: Texas has been responsible for the most executions, with 586 since 1977 as of the end of 2023. The states with the next-highest totals are Oklahoma (123 since 1977), Virginia (113), Florida (105) and Missouri (97). It has more impact in a graph:
Let’s take a look at the pathology of the Republican who praises the death penalty: Trump himself.
Trump jumped to public attention in 1989 when he published a full-page ad in the wake of the Central Park jogger attack. He condemned five wrongly arrested teens and calling for the return of New York’s death penalty. They were later totally exonerated – not that this changed Trump’s mind. He is still calling for their execution.
As Rolling Stone put it: “Writing that he was not “looking to psychoanalyze or understand” the criminals he’d spend hundreds of words railing against, the real-estate playboy gave us an early warning of why he should never be entrusted with the power to put anyone to death. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.””
They should be forced to suffer, gloated Trump.
Just as the Outsiders should suffer today, Trump says. “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country—that lie and steal and cheat on elections…[immigrants] come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
He's got that right, but the reason is wrong. It is Trump who is poisoning the blood of America. His hate injections spread with a vengeance to harm every minority group.
Why can’t Trump see that this should apply to him as well?
Why can’t Trump connect the dots and see that if he is convicted, he will only continue to breathe because justice today does not follow his philosophy?
He will not be executed for treason not because he has not earned death – a rich man betraying his country has earned the country’s wrath – but because the democracy has higher standards than he can ever feel. I will condense a book for you soon called “Lucky Loser” that highlights the role that pure chance has had in elevating Trump – and why he cannot recognize causality.
He is also just plain ignorant. He does not read. He has no idea what the death penalty does and doesn’t do; how poorly it serves its cause. People who have worked for him have comments like these: National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope;” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot’;” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”
But he is the king of conmen - the Jim Jones of American politics. Like Jones, Trump led his followers to a mass political suicide.
It is happening today: ignore the polls, and look at the sizes of the audiences he is attracting. Smaller and smaller. Everyone can feel the power leaching away - everyone except Trump and the immediate members of his cult.
They are called Republicans.
Trump won the presidency not because he was popular but because his support was ideally geographically distributed for the electoral college. By the time he was ejected by Joe Biden he lost by seven million votes; people were tired of the hate and conspiracy. Trump employed a racist conspiracy theory against Barack Obama, which helped him gain political prominence in the Republican Party. He later claimed that President Obama had wiretapped his phones. He linked Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He retweeted a supporter who claimed that Marco Rubio was ineligible to run because his parents were not natural-born U.S. citizens. Trump suggested that the suicide of Vince Foster, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, and the death of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia were murders; that childhood vaccines cause autism; and that windmills cause cancer. He has claimed that climate change is “a total and very expensive hoax” by China’s government, that a cybersecurity company framed Russia for election interference, that Ukraine was hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and (of course) that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016.
Now he claims that “Ukraine is gone” and backs Russia’s chief executioner, Putin.
And then he became the country's most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates in the last six months before he left office.
At the end of his term, just before Biden took office, Trump went on a killing spree. Trump just could not allow the Central Park Five to walk away again. Someone had to die.
The executions began with a 40-year-old convict named Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. They ended with the death of Dustin Higgs, 48, at the same site on 16 January. The exactions included the first woman to be killed in more than 70 years. Lisa Montgomery’s timing with Trump as President was unfortunate; women constitute just 1 percent of the nation’s executions and account for only 16 of the 1,526 instances of capital punishment since a Supreme Court case reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Her lawyer from the public defender’s office said Lisa committed the crime while influenced by post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by a childhood of being sexually trafficked.
I wonder how Lisa would have made out if she had been able to spend $100-million in legal fees, the way Trump has in his defences?
The quality of representation a defendant receives in a capital case can make the difference between life and death. Almost all of these defendants cannot afford to pay for a lawyer, and states differ widely on the standards—if any—for death penalty representation. Accounts of lawyers sleeping or drinking alcohol during the trial, lawyers with racial bias toward their client, lawyers who conduct no investigation or fail to obtain necessary experts, or lawyers simply having no experience with capital cases have been rampant throughout the history of the death penalty.
Where higher quality counsel and adequate resources have been provided, death sentences have declined dramatically.
These people are dying not because of what they did, but because of what they could not afford.
These are factors that “free market” believers - more prominent among Republicans – say cannot be changed. This would explain why social justice was never adopted in the US but was adopted by every other Western country. Sorry for this tangent, but Republican free-marketism is the reason Americans will die five years sooner than a Canadian on the other side of the border. It’s not because Canadians eat poutine (though I wish it was – I’d live forever!).
A prisoner on death row usually has failing health. He is confined to his cell 23 hours a day; is permitted one hour of recreation which consist of being allowed outside into a yard by himself for 60 minutes. He might have a small TV, if he makes it through the years on a waiting list. He might have a tablet so he can email, though everything is monitored.
Life on death row is basically just waiting in a small bathroom by yourself, to die.
Their belongings are given to their families if they want them after the execution. If they don't, then if the inmate has willed them to a person (although in some states, not another prisoner) they will be distributed according to the instructions in their will. If there is no one, they are often destroyed to prevent their resale as souvenirs.
It's not as if most death row inmates have a lot of belongings anyway. Most spend an average of 15-20 years on death row, meaning that they are not earning a living. Many (99%) were poverty-stricken before their incarceration.
Most have families on the outside who are also poor and cannot provide them with material items.
The death penalty costs more than life imprisonment. It costs taxpayers from $2 to $5 million per death sentence for the trials and appeals. Life in prison averages $1 million. And of course death penalties are invoked most often in Southern states that are already living in debt to the Federal government.
If we can assume an average saving of $3-million for each prisoner who has their sentence converted from death to life-in-prison, then the transformations of the executions since 1976 would amount to a savings for America of $4.8-trillion.
You could take a lot of desparate people off the streets for that kind of money!
Since the death penalty helps get Republican politicians get elected, it perpetuates violent crime in a violent society. The South has the highest murder rate despite the fact that it accounts for over 80% of executions. If executions worked, the South should have 80% fewer murders.
But Republicans are notorious for making decisions based on flawed emotions, rather than empathetic facts.
The death penalty is racist not only because fewer Whites are executed - blacks are three to four times as likely to be sentenced to death as whites charged in similar cases – but also because it gets applied most often to people who kill Whites. Whites are more valuable.
And Marcellus Williams’ case was not unusual in that family members often oppose the death penalty. Connecticut’s successful campaign to abolish the death penalty was led by family members of murder victims.
There are more Americans in prisons today than at any other time in history. There are almost two million people serving time in US prisons. The country with the second-highest prison count, China, has 1.7 million people in jail. And we think that they are repressive.
The numbers have not swollen in America because of a burst of lawlessness. The numbers grew because the government make imprisonment a profit centre for private enterprises. I am reviewing Timothy Snyder’s book “On Freedom” on Monday – he has some devastating things to say about the prison system.
In the meantime the man with all the advantages life could offer, Trump, ENJOYS the power of taking another life. And he can legally do it. He must have been getting a high every night thinking about what he was getting away with.
Many right-wing supporters in the United States applaud the continued use of the death penalty, but the nation as a whole has been moving away from it for decades. Most Americans believe the death penalty is unfairly applied. Racial bias is certainly one factor, with Black people overrepresented on death rows. Six of the 16 people already put to death in the US this year were Black, while two were Latino and one was Native American - 56% (the non-White population ratio is actually 39%).
Robin Maher, head of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, stated that "All the data indicates that the American public is increasingly uncomfortable with use of the death penalty, yet elected officials persist in scheduling secretive, costly executions that do not reflect accurately the priorities of the communities they serve.
"It shows a clear disconnect between the agendas of elected officials and the reality that Americans are turning away from the death penalty."
The eight states set to carry out executions this year are all in the South: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.
Inmates in five states were scheduled to be put to death over a week: Freddie Owens was put to death with a lethal injection in South Carolina; Marcellus in Missouri and Travis Mills died in Texas on Tuesday; and Alan Miller in Alabama. Miller was killed by nitrogen gas – not a poison in itself but an agent to deprive the body of oxygen and cause suffocation. Veterinarians have deemed unacceptable in the US and Europe for the euthanasia of animals. It was reported that “Miller shook and trembled on the gurney for about two minutes with his body at times pulling against the restraints, followed by about six minutes of gasping breathing.”
Emmanuel Littlejohn was also executed on Thursday despite a recommendation for clemency by the Parole Board and despite the fact that there was a lack of clarity about who actually performed the murder in question.
I take this verbatim from the AP News account:
Strapped to a gurney and with an IV line in his right arm, Littlejohn looked toward his mother and daughter, who witnessed the execution.
“Mom, you OK?” Littlejohn asked.
“I’m OK,” his mother, Ceily Mason, responded.
“Everything is going to be OK. I love you,” he said.
Mason sobbed quietly and clutched a cross necklace during the lethal injection
His breathing became labored and he died ten minutes later.
Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said before the execution: “As a law and order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision.” He has granted clemency only once out of the five times that the parole board has recommended it during Stitt’s nearly six years in office.
He could easily have overturned that decision…but he is a Republican and wants to get re-elected. I am sure Littlejohn’s widow and fatherless daughter are good with that.
The U.S has reached 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
I wonder if the death penalty would still be applied if the jurors and prosecutor were forced into the gas chambers in cases where they send an innocent person to die. Seems only fair, though.
Williams’ final words were "All praise be to Allah in every situation."
Faith held his hand in death.
That’s more than can be said for the Republican killers who have abandoned faith in life.