Reflections on Marcellus Williams and capital punishment in the U.S.
Two weeks ago today, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri for a murder conviction despite maintaining his innocence all along. His execution raises renewed questions about systemic bias and the death penalty.
By Sheridan Hunter
October 08, 2024 at 7:02PM PDT
USC Annenberg graduate student Kiya Young remembers when she heard the news two weeks ago.
“I had just gotten out of class,” she said. “Walking out of the building, one of my friends said they executed him... I just remember my heart sinking to my feet and just feeling so heavy, like my heart felt so heavy.”
Young is talking about Marcellus Williams, who was executed September 24. Williams had changed his name to Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels after converting to Islam.
He was convicted for the 2001 killing of Felicia Gayle, a newspaper reporter. But Williams maintained his innocence all along, and so did his legal team. The prosecution also supported his bid for clemency.
The legal advocacy group, The Innocence Project, which also represented him, asserts that Williams, a Black man, was wrongfully convicted — and that racial bias played a role.
“Black Americans have historically been targeted within the justice system,” said Dr. Cristina Visperas, an expert in carceral studies and assistant professor of communication at USC Annenberg.
“We really can’t talk about race and incarceration without talking about slavery,” she said. “It shouldn’t be a surprise that Black people, that Black Americans, are disproportionately incarcerated... because incarceration in the United States has always been racialized in that way.”
According to Visperas, the death penalty calls up a particularly horrific aspect of American history for Black Americans.
“Race in the death penalty, we can situate that in the history of lynching,” Visperas said. “In these widespread instances of white mob violence during the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, where on average, one Black American was lynched every week for those 50 years... you had angry white mobs storming jails and dragging out their victim to meet out the violence that they believe the state failed to deliver.”
According to Visperas, many efforts have been made throughout history to reform the prison industrial complex and make the death penalty more humane. But people still die, and people are wrongfully placed on death row who are later exonerated.
“It is an institution that has a failure rate that should make us all aghast,” Visperas said. “People who are sitting on death row could be innocent, right? I don’t think we should have this. I don’t think we should have that system at all.”
Young agrees that the system should be abolished. The cultural understanding that something similar could happen to her loved ones worries her.
“I have a younger brother, I have an older brother, and I have so many Black men in my life that I instantly just thought about them and thought that this could happen to any one of our Black men in America,” Young said. “It takes a village to provoke change and to get people talking... We have to do our research. We have to educate ourselves. Because we have to be the change that we want to see.”