Capital Offense

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

When I lived in Springfield, Missouri, the city had some sort of marker commemorating what it claimed was the last public lynching in the United States. It’s hard to know if that’s true, because there were so many: only seven of our fifty states have never recorded a lynching. We’ve mostly lynched black people. But we’ve also lynched white people — mostly for helping, or trying to help, black people avoid being lynched. We’ve lynched immigrants, too.

Now, thanks to some vigorous incitement from some well-known loud if not particularly respected political figures, immigrant lynchings may not remain a relic of the past. Another Springfield may soon be able to make that claim.

But the president of the NAACP says “Missouri lynched another innocent black man” just a couple of days ago. It wasn’t by a mob, unless you want to call a bunch of lawyers and judges a mob, and I know many folks who might want to do that.

Marcellus Williams didn’t die at the end of a rope, but at the end of a tube through which a possibly failed legal system pumped poison into a vein to end his life. Even the county prosecutor pleaded with the Missouri Supreme Court and the Missouri governor to stop the execution, because he believed evidence uncovered after the trial cast grave doubt on its fairness. It’s hard to find more than three votes these days, of the five justices of the United States Supreme Court it takes to stay an execution, and that’s all Williams’s lawyers found Tuesday.

The family of the murdered woman had asked that the sentence be commuted instead to life imprisonment.

Williams was convicted for the stabbing of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reporter in 1998, during a robbery at her home. None of the forensic evidence gathered there, including DNA, pointed to Williams. Other evidence did point to him.

I don’t know whether Williams did or did not commit the murder; I believe he probably did. I don’t, however, believe in a system of capital justice that essentially leaves things to God to sort them out.

My old home state’s next scheduled execution is for 3 December, not so far from Christmas.