More context:
Marcellus Williams was charged with the murder of Felicia Gayle. Prosecutors based evidence mainly on alleged confessions Williams had made, including one alleged by a jailhouse snitch.
In August 2001, Williams was sentenced to death. On appeal, he raised several issues, including claims of errors in evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, and victim impact testimony. He also challenged the use of his prior criminal history and alleged improper prosecutorial comments during closing arguments.
The death sentence was controversial, as DNA evidence had been claimed to prove his innocence, and the family of Gayle repeatedly stating they did not want Williams executed.
Despite pleas from the public and the family of Gayle stating they were opposed to the execution, on September 24, 2024, 55-year-old Williams was executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT.
So, even the family of the victim was against it. An innocent man died while the real criminal is out there.
Reading about it I am not completly convinced that he is innocent, but I think that there is 100% plausible reason to doubt that he is guilty. This should defintly be enogh to stop an execution.
I’m convinced he is innocent. If he was not they would have evidence instead of paid testimonies against him.
Reading about it I am not completly convinced that he is innocent
After the reams and reams of verifiable miscarriages of justice against Black people, after 160 years of carceral slavery being the law of the land, after 50+ years of the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately affecting Black people, you still trust the settler’s ‘court of law’???
That’d be laughable if it wasn’t so damn typical.
They just said they do not trust it though.
“Not completely convinced of his innocence” even in the face of DNA evidence invalidates everything else they said. Like, you do not get to couch white moderate “oooooh, I don’t know” bullshit when the DNA already exonerated mans. Fuck outta here.
I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.
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Is “almost” anywhere in your definition of conviction? If so, you lack conviction.
The cruelty truly is the point.
Call me radical, but I don’t think any government should be killing people.
Do you think prisons are okay and killing isn’t?
There are a lot of governments in the world that agree with you. Not the US government, not at all.
show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?
Compared to China…
inb4 China bad
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For the record, the super majority of pro-life Christian, patriotic judges in SCOTUS voted against stopping this on a 6-3 ruling.
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This kind of thing makes me go into denial. I hate my country, but this absolutely cannot be real. It’s horrible clickbait, or propaganda supporting my existing beliefs about how inhumane it is here.
I struggle to imagine someone administering a needle for an innocent man to die, rather than quitting on the spot. I struggle to imagine someone certifying paperwork to appove this to happen. But I am entirely incapable of imagining the number of human cogs that would need to be similarly compliant for this to be followed through to completion. I am not interested in trying to imagine. This story is fiction because admitting otherwise will break what’s left of my sanity.
You can show me horrors and get me to admit and speak of them as reality, but you can’t get me to believe them.
A stunning number of people in the links of that chain could’ve stopped it, and none of them cared to risk their employment over it.
I’ve seen it said that if you live in the US, you can ask yourself a question: “If you lived in Nazi Germany, what would you have done to oppose that state?”
The answer: You’re doing it right now. Nazi Germany’s leaders explicitly stated that its model of colonialism and expansionism in eastern europe, eugenics practices, and its racial state, were all based on the US model, which nearly successfully carried out everything Nazi Germany failed to do: eviction and genocide of its indigenous inhabitants, stealing a continent, and erecting a white-supremacist state on top of it.
Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.
The Innocence project is real and they do incredible work. They rarely take cases that don’t have new DNA evidence due to the difficulty in overturning a conviction. They could probably use your financial support.
–The site which we don’t speak of had a mainstream news article to this story monday night explaining that the state was already refusing to grant a stay of execution even with prosecuting attornies new doubts.
it happens fairly often here. the u.s. is the most evil entity in the known universe
I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that’s fair and they’re OK with being the ones to do it.
I saw an Instagram reel the other day of someone in the military describing the best way to decide who to kill and who not to as you storm a civilian building, plus the latest Behind the Bastards about Yarvin’s affect on JD Vance and their belief that violence / killing and enforced poverty / slavery is not only a necessary but desirable method of governmental change - not as a reaction to oppression but as administrative.
The US government is horrible to people living within it and outside of it
Jesus fuck, they actually did it?
of course. and they will continue until we stop them with force.
The crimes of this guilty land will never be washed away. Period.
We should absolutely spill 'em, yes; but we should also never allow the world to forget what was allowed to transpire here.
his heart was undoubtedly in the right place, but jb was fatally optimistic. the u.s. was damned the second the very first human being was brought here in chains. redemption has never been an option.
there is only revenge.
This is not justice
Misleading title, this was a Missouri State case, not a federal one.
That being said, there are way too many innocent people getting killed for crimes they did not commit.
The only purpose of the death penalty is revenge. It has no place in a modern society.
Both the death penalty, and a system of slave labor camps, are allowed at the federal level:
- The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
How is this a misleading title? On the one hand, yes, the fed can carry out state-sanctioned murder too (and it’s something Trump resumed), but 1) it’s absolutely the case that the “death penalty” should and could be banned nation-wide but isn’t, and 2) this went before the SCOTUS for an emergency block, but it was voted 6–3 not to block (I’m guessing you know that all of the six were the treasonous fuckwits nominated by Republicans and all three were sensible jurists nominated by Democrats).
What happened here is absolutely still the fault of the federal government. Of course I still agree with the rest of your comment. I just mean to say that even if you somehow totally divorce a US state from the US itself, it’s still the US’ fault.
But officer, I didn’t punch him! My fist did!
I did not hit her I did Naaaaaht! Ohimark!
Freedom!! He is free of the prison industrial complex and had to pay withhold life…
Missouri speaks for the entire US now?
Sure, we’ll pretend that this hasn’t been happening here for hundreds of years across all 50 states.
The US can be judged by the actions of any single state. It’s all the same country 🙄
Like a book can be judged by its cover cause its all the same book?
Like a book can be judged by one of it’s 50 chapters.
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Do you need someone to explain how stupid this is, or have you calmed down since you reacted?
SCOTUS does
Actually SCOTUS speaks for Trump since he was the POS that installed them.
The fact that the US federal government has the power to outlaw this but doesn’t, that this specific execution was brought before the Supreme Court and they voted against blocking it 6–3, and the fact that the majority of US states (27) and the federal government have this on the books speak for the US now, yes.
Taken to an absurd extreme, let’s imagine that the US federal government and 27 of its states explicitly had statutes on the books stating “you can legally rape puppies”, and you stepping in and saying “Well that doesn’t speak for the entire US! Stop trying to make it sound like everyone condones puppy rape just because Missouri allows it!” Would you say that then? Because I feel like any rational person would be asking “Why does the US allow this to happen?” If not, why would you say it here? The US is simply backwards in this regard.
Puppy rape? Is that supposed to be an argument?
Would you come to the US’ defense in the same way that you are right now over state-sanctioned murder in the situation I outlined? It’s a very simple yes/no question that you’re tiptoeing around for seemingly no reason.
In saying that one state doesn’t speak for the entire country, YES. That was said in my first comment, maybe you should reread it.
Damn, last I checked, 27 plus the federal government was more than 1. Maybe the federal government expressed as an integer actually comes out to negative 26 and makes your ridiculous defense make any sense.
I didn’t mention numbers but you mentioned puppy rape. Stop drinking so early, it’ll rot your liver.
I didn’t mention numbers
One state
I think you got lost on the way to /c/preschool where they teach you what numbers are.
Missouri isn’t so different from everywhere else
Where are you from?
I’ve spent a lifetime traveling the united states. i originate from Appalachia. bad and racist judgements come all across the country. any state with the death penalty on the books will eventually do this, and any state that doesn’t have the death penalty on the books has around 30% of people minimum who think it should be. you’re deluding yourself if you don’t think everywhere is like everywhere else just with different ratios of who is around
This would also mean California is like Alabama which is like New York which going even farther because borders are man-made, exactly like London which is exactly like Israel, Gaza, Yemen…see how your argument is stupid or do I need to go on?
no actually. i don’t see how my view that people are all people and the things we do is all in response to the context we grow up in is stupid. so please keep listing places that we have both the potential to improve or to degrade into depending on what actions we take and if we can learn to empathize
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Just casually blaming a victim of lynching for being lynched. I bet you’re the type that peddled the George Floyd overdose conspiracy too. 🙄
I’m only posting some context from Wikipedia, I didn’t make a comment in either direction
