The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait for the result of the investigation — that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward,” Ida B. Wells wrote in The Red Record in 1895. However, similar words could have easily been uttered after the Missouri execution of Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams, a 55-year-old Black father and poet, Tuesday evening. Despite compelling evidence supporting his innocence in the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, neither Governor Mike Parson, the Missouri Supreme Court, nor the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to save his life. This decision has left many in the black community grief-stricken and outraged at the injustice. “Missouri lynched another innocent Black man,” the NAACP responded, clarifying that “when DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice — it is murder.” To add salt to the wound, so-called pro-life Supreme Court justices are the ones who refused to grant Williams a stay of execution.
Pro-life justices failed to intervene to save the life of a Black man who even prosecutors believed was innocent, and in doing so, exposed the irony in their position. It seems their support of life is limited to “potential life” rather than actual life. Of course, this isn’t the first time a contradiction was laid bare. Despite conservatives claiming to pass state-wide abortion bans to protect life, these policies have contributed to a callous disregard for the lives of mothers. In ProPublica, Kavitha Surana revealed that two Black women became the first preventable deaths following a statewide abortion ban in Georgia. Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year old Black woman, and 41-year old Candi Miller lost their lives because doctors refused to quickly administer life-saving care in fear they would break the law and be criminally punished. And yet, another layer of irony is added by conservatives’ position on the death penalty.
The fact that pro-life conservative justices refused to intervene to save a life exposes this political attitude as shallow and not reflective of a deep, comprehensive worldview. When passing abortion bans throughout the country, conservatives argued these laws protect potential life. Before signing the Georgia abortion ban, Governor Brian Kemp suggested the bill “is very simple but also very powerful: a declaration that all life has value, that all life matters, and that all life is worthy of protection.” However, we’re left to wonder, given the Black women who’ve died unnecessarily following the abortion ban, whether such statements are any more than empty platitudes. If someone had a consistent pro-life worldview, it would stand to reason they’d care about protecting women’s lives and oppose the death penalty, especially in cases where evidence raises doubts about a guilty verdict. The jury never had an opportunity to consider all the evidence, for instance, that the DNA of the perpetrator didn’t match Williams. And yet conservative Supreme Court justices upheld the conviction, allowing the state to carry out capital punishment. In Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, justices spoke loftily about protecting “potential life,” but their decision in this case ended the very real life of Williams.
America has a shameful legacy of punishing Black people regardless of their innocence or guilt. As Ida B. Wells said in a 1900 Chicago speech, “Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people.” These extra-judicial killings not only inflicted horrors upon an individual but terrorized the black community. While the Emmett Till Antilynching Act now offers federal protection against extra-judicial killings, it fails to address modern-day lynchings carried out under the color of law. By analyzing Mapping Police Violence data, C.J. Lyons found that lynchings were associated with present-day lethal police shootings of Black people, suggesting that lynchings shape law enforcement practices through their legacy of racialized threat, brutalization, and legal estrangement. Another study noted that in places where lynchings of Black people occurred frequently, capital punishment was more readily applied (Rigby and Seguin, 2021). Indeed, historical lynchings statistically predicted contemporary executions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina established that “racial hostility translates directly into more death sentences, particularly for Black offenders.”
The youngest person ever executed in the United States was George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black teenager falsely accused of killing two white girls in South Carolina. The all-white jury took only ten minutes to consider the case in 1944. Since then, his conviction has been vacated, but it doesn’t change the fact that the state killed an innocent person. And it’s not a coincidence that person was Black. The implementation of the death penalty continues to reveal racial disparities. Despite Black Americans making up 13% of the population, they represent 41% of those on death row. And innocent Black people are seven times as likely to be convicted when compared with innocent white people. Consequently, the tragedy of Williams’ execution is more than a single injustice — it’s reflective of institutional racism that disproportionately punishes Black people. This legacy undoubtedly impacted the injustice suffered by Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams. As J. W. Clark described, “state executioners replaced lynch mobs in carrying out the will of the white majority.”
Johnathan Potts, one of William’s attorneys, said in an interview Monday, “The public doesn’t want this execution to move forward. The victim’s family doesn’t want this execution to move forward and the St Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office doesn’t want this execution to move forward.” In the aftermath of his execution, we’re reminded that the pro-life position does not as Governor Kemp once suggested, treat all life as “worthy of protection.” Indeed, when the person is Black, their life is often treated as inconsequential. Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams would still be alive today if so-called pro-life justices intervened. We’re left with the uncomfortable reality that our criminal justice system fails to treat Black citizens equally and that some lives are considered more important than others. Far too often justice delayed is denied.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Allison Gaines' work on Medium.