Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mike Parson, the governor of the benighted state of Missouri, committed a murder on Tuesday. He allowed the state to kill a fifty-five-year-old man named Marcellus Williams in retribution for a murder that Williams almost surely did not commit. Parson did so with the support of the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court and against the opposition of, among other people, the local prosecutor and the family of the victim. From Parson’s chair, it was an altogether imperfect crime.
On August 11, 1998, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Felicia Gayle was brutally stabbed to death in her home. It was a terrible, messy crime scene thick with biological evidence. DNA abounded. There were bloody footprints all over the kitchen floor and bloody fingerprints everywhere else. The knife was still in the victim’s neck.
Williams, a career criminal who was already serving a long prison term for a robbery, was fingered for the crime by a jailhouse informant and a former girlfriend. The jury took less than an hour to convict Williams of the murder.
But...DNA. Years after the conviction, a test of DNA found on the murder weapon revealed that the prosecutors’ team had mishandled the knife. The only evidence on it was from them. Seven years ago, then-governor Eric Greitens, whom nobody ever confused with Clarence Darrow, was so shaken by this that he triggered an obscure Missouri statute and created a board of inquiry to study the evidence from the trial. But Greitens lost his gig due to a baroque welter of personal scandals. Upon ascending to the governorship, Parson simply dissolved the panel that Greitens had created and rescheduled Williams’s execution, which took place this week.
When he dissolved the board of inquiry, Parson explained that the search for truth in the case of Marcellus Williams had gone on long enough to suit him. From The Washington Post:
“We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing,” Parson said in a press release last year. “This administration won’t do that.”
Thus we have yet another example that the death penalty is inconsistent with all the constitutional guarantees that exist in our criminal law, that it is a surrender to passion and not to reason, that it is entirely an act of vengeance, not justice, and therefore it is in every way anti-American. As Albert Camus wrote in 1957:
Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm; whoever has put out my eye must lose an eye; and whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it.
