Many of the contributors to this thread are under the wrong impression that the police found the victim's laptop and other items in Marcellus Williams' car. This is not true. According to Wikipedia, the murder occurred in August 1998, but it was not until May 1999 that the victim's family "announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. In response, two individuals, Henry Cole and Lara Asaro, named Marcellus Scott Williams as the culprit."
The wikipedia article continues: "Lara Asaro, the girlfriend of Williams at the time of the crime, gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her... This is after she discovered evidence from the crime scene in Williams' car."
This is an important clarification: The police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car. Rather, Williams' ex-girlfriend, who was incentivized by reward money, claimed, more than 8 months after the crime, that she saw the victim's property in his car.
This is one of the the main reasons that the Innocence Project correctly argues that there is no reliable evidence linking Marcellus Williams to the murder.
"The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
Am i the only one in favor of capital punishment in this thread?
My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).
Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a "State Hospital" for rehabilitation. It's not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51/51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.
The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.
Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren't rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you've taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).
Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.
I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.
Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.
The right way to reduce the cost of incarcerating people is to end mass incarceration, not to kill people. Just shooting everybody on LWOP in the head won't do nearly as much.
Further, I think that we should have a high expense per prisoner. It should cost society something to imprison somebody, since crime is in many ways a product of society's systems and choices. A world with mass incarceration and a focus on reducing the cost of the prison system is a world that basically necessitates abuse.
Doesn't the US privatized incarceration so it's basically a _free_ market, where shady deals are made to funnel more public money to private entities, and many people are incentivized to have as many people in prison as possible?
In that case, the cost on citizens for incarceration of people shouldn't be taken into account in the discussion around capital punishment because it's another issue altogether?
Unfortunately cases like this come along where it is not applied correctly, forcing us to have to face the reality that we are not capable of using it as a proper tool.
I believe that people against it are either incredibly annoying idealists (who fail to understand that perfect is the enemy of good) or full-on barbarian who rejoices at the idea of wasting someone's life in a much worse way than just killing him.
I believe long-term imprisonment is much worse than death, especially since there is no real life possible after so much time in prison. It is truly worse than death from a humanity point of view.
I don't believe the nonsense about potentially innocent people, if justice isn't completely certain, then they can put them in prison awaiting more evidence.
But I think it is actually pretty rare, the problem is mostly lack of evidence; you don't get trouble with justice when you are a good citizen and juste mind your own business.
1. The witness who claimed Williams confessed provided non-publicly-available, but known-to-police, details about the case. This is very strong evidence that the confession was made to them.
2. The girlfriend's hesitation to go to police (she never asked for the reward money) is due to the fact that Williams threatened her family, which is a real threat considering his history of violence
3. The prosecution had several other witnesses that were not called to the stand to whom Williams told about the murder
4. Williams not only had Gayle's laptop, but had her husband's laptop and had sold it to someone. The police found the laptop and the owner identifier Williams as the seller.
5. Williams not only had her laptop but a bunch of household items. Tell me, when have you had several items from a murder victim in your car? Williams offers no explanation for where these came from.
Look... criminals are not the type to take responsibility for their actions. Williams criminal history and jailhouse violence indicate that this is not a man who learns from past mistakes, or who even think he needed reform of any kind.
If we aren't going to abolish the death penalty, we should at least require a higher standard of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt to carry it out. It should require incontrovertible proof. Circumstantial evidence should not be allowed. Expert testimony should be barred. The evidence must be conclusive, plain, and certain to every member of the jury. This would allow you to execute, e.g., mass shooters who give themselves up, but make it extremely unlikely to irreversibly kill someone on the basis of junk science, induced or extorted testimony, or other fallible evidence.
Instead, there is a very high burden of proof, there's a lot of protections built into the process, and, most important, it's an adversarial process in which one side is standing up for the defendant. If the evidence isn't good enough, the defendant's lawyer can and must show that to the jury, with them making the final decision on who is right.
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 in the USA, many innocent Americans have been executed by the state. There is a considerable literature of scholarly research documenting this issue. For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend the following books:
Justin Brooks (2023) You Might Go to Prison Even Though You're Innocent, University of California Press
> Even the victim’s family believes life without parole is the appropriate sentence
That is odd, if there is no evidence that links him to the crime why not argue to let him go? Is that just from a desire to have someone punished, no matter who it is.
There's plenty of evidence. He confessed to his girlfriend, and a cellmate. He pawned the victim's possessions. He was seen disposing of bloody clothes. He already had 15 felony convictions in addition to offenses related to Ms. Gayle's murder: robbery (2), armed criminal action (2), assault (2), burglary (4), stealing (3), stealing a motor vehicle, and unlawful use of a weapon.
Now, as to whether this evidence is solid enough for a death penalty conviction, that's tougher to say. But there's plenty of evidence.
Presumably they still think he’s (probably) guilty.
Victims and their family’s can and often do oppose capital punishment on moral grounds, same as anybody else.
They want him punished but believe that killing him is a moral wrong, or they’re more comfortable with the risk that he’s innocent if he’s in prison with the possibility of being exonerated rather than killed.
As far as I could find reading about this case, the “evidence of innocence” is very flimsy. But it’s a reasonable moral stand by the family to want to stay the execution if they think there is even a slim chance of innocence.
As I understand it, it's also extremely rare for a prosecutor to admit mistakes and that a convicted person is innocent, even when it is sufficiently proven, they tend to double down on bad convictions. In this case the prosecutor said the defendant didn't do it. Which makes this a very rare case.
Apparently the family believes that he is guilty but doesn't want him executed (but does want him in prison). In some countries the families wishes are enough to prevent an execution but not in the US.
Does anyone find it deeply disturbing that the justice system will just sit on its own hands when presented with new evidence? It seems like prosecutors are more interested in maintaining a hi conviction rate rather than seeking justice. Judges seem totally apathetic.
The justice system wasn't presented with any new evidence. Some DNA from the prosecution's office ended up on the weapon sometime in the preceding 17 years, big whoop. This isn't exculpatory and doesn't contradict a single claim made by the prosecution, and there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop and bragging about how he did it in words that included nonpublic details about the crime.
This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.
It is very hard to get cases reopened, it is true. Once DNA testing came about many convicts tried to get the evidence in their cases tested to prove their innocence, but this took many, many years in a lot of cases.
In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.
Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government.
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
That case is even worse as it rested fully on the testimony of the other robber, which he made to get a lesser sentence and later rescinded:
> Prosecutors had no forensic evidence connecting Allah to the shooting. Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable.
The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.
> Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening in Missouri after the US Supreme Court denied a stay.
> The 55-year-old was put to death around 6 p.m. CT at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
I am very happy when I see The Innocence Project taking on a case like this because it tells me they have already worked through the backlog of actually innocent people as well as the people who might possibly be innocent, and now have worked there way to the cases which are 1% flawed but in which the correct perpetrator has nevertheless been identified, tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, appealed, etc.
Still not sure with so many of the (esp right leaning) in the US claiming to be christian, can also accept this as a punishment. But I get nonsense begets more nonsense.
I was foreman of a jury on a murder trial once; it’s my signature on the verdict form that sealed the fate of a man. In an extremely real and personal sense, I am directly responsible for putting a man in prison, and given his age, health conditions, and the sentence that was going to be passed, that means I’m directly responsible for ensuring a human being dies in prison.
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.
It seems wrong, that the 2 major points of evidence against Marcellus are a testimony from his ex and cellmate. I don’t trust humans, to trust convicting people based on 2 hearsay sources of testimony. Maybe this worked in the past when America was smaller and the average morality of a person was very high, but now this just seems ripe for abuse.
I wouldn’t use this evidence to make a decision in an office dispute.
I applaud the Innocence Project for taking this case, but honestly, Missouri? What did they expect? This is the same governor that tried to prosecute a newspaper reporter after they uncovered social security numbers in the HTML code from a state-run website. Then, when the governor was informed about how stupid his claim was, he doubled-down, insisting he would seek prosecution.
which is (I think...) the decision of the state supreme court on the appeal. There are several points where it seems like there is some dispute about what exactly the evidence is tying Williams to the murder, and where the original trial transcript might help clarify things.
If you're wondering if the Missouri governor Mike Parson sparingly uses his clemency and pardon power, you'd be mistaken [1]:
> Parson, a former sheriff, has now granted clemency to more than 760 people since 2020 — more than any Missouri governor since the 1940s
including those who waved guns at BLM protestors [2] and the son of the KC Chiefs coach who caused grave bodiy injuries to someone in a DUI.
Available data shows a pretty clear trend [3]:
> An analysis of available demographic data conducted by the Missouri News Network indicates that almost 90% of those who have been granted clemency by the governor are white.
If you're wondering where the US Supreme Court stands on this, consider this quote from then-Justice Antonin Scalia [4]:
> [t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.
Also, consider this racial bias demonstrated in the exoneration for those sentence to death [5]:
> Since 1973, at least 189 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. 100 of the death row exonerees are Black.
Lastly, even if you want to ignore the immorality of the death setnence, look at it from the lens of cost [6]. Death penalty cases are substantially more expensive to litigate and death row inmates are substantially more expensive to incarcerate. A life-without-parole would be substantially cheaper.
Also, you can release someone from prison wrongly convicted. You cannot bring them back to life and there are multiple cases of people who were executed and later exonerated. Williams is sadly added to that list.
[+] [-] diogenes_atx|1 year ago|reply
The wikipedia article continues: "Lara Asaro, the girlfriend of Williams at the time of the crime, gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her... This is after she discovered evidence from the crime scene in Williams' car."
This is an important clarification: The police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car. Rather, Williams' ex-girlfriend, who was incentivized by reward money, claimed, more than 8 months after the crime, that she saw the victim's property in his car.
This is one of the the main reasons that the Innocence Project correctly argues that there is no reliable evidence linking Marcellus Williams to the murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Felicia_Gayle
[+] [-] MikeAmelung|1 year ago|reply
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...
[+] [-] satiric|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TrapLord_Rhodo|1 year ago|reply
My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).
Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a "State Hospital" for rehabilitation. It's not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51/51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.
The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.
Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren't rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you've taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).
Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.
[+] [-] calderarrow|1 year ago|reply
Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|1 year ago|reply
Further, I think that we should have a high expense per prisoner. It should cost society something to imprison somebody, since crime is in many ways a product of society's systems and choices. A world with mass incarceration and a focus on reducing the cost of the prison system is a world that basically necessitates abuse.
[+] [-] JellyBeanThief|1 year ago|reply
That's your life and your choice, which I think should be respected.
[+] [-] wiether|1 year ago|reply
In that case, the cost on citizens for incarceration of people shouldn't be taken into account in the discussion around capital punishment because it's another issue altogether?
[+] [-] widowlark|1 year ago|reply
To clarify, I vehemently disagree with your post and think that the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state.
[+] [-] anonCoffee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ratg13|1 year ago|reply
Unfortunately cases like this come along where it is not applied correctly, forcing us to have to face the reality that we are not capable of using it as a proper tool.
[+] [-] moi2388|1 year ago|reply
Put them in prison for life, make them work for food and housing.
[+] [-] seec|1 year ago|reply
I believe long-term imprisonment is much worse than death, especially since there is no real life possible after so much time in prison. It is truly worse than death from a humanity point of view.
I don't believe the nonsense about potentially innocent people, if justice isn't completely certain, then they can put them in prison awaiting more evidence.
But I think it is actually pretty rare, the problem is mostly lack of evidence; you don't get trouble with justice when you are a good citizen and juste mind your own business.
[+] [-] dangitman|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anon291|1 year ago|reply
1. The witness who claimed Williams confessed provided non-publicly-available, but known-to-police, details about the case. This is very strong evidence that the confession was made to them.
2. The girlfriend's hesitation to go to police (she never asked for the reward money) is due to the fact that Williams threatened her family, which is a real threat considering his history of violence
3. The prosecution had several other witnesses that were not called to the stand to whom Williams told about the murder
4. Williams not only had Gayle's laptop, but had her husband's laptop and had sold it to someone. The police found the laptop and the owner identifier Williams as the seller.
5. Williams not only had her laptop but a bunch of household items. Tell me, when have you had several items from a murder victim in your car? Williams offers no explanation for where these came from.
Look... criminals are not the type to take responsibility for their actions. Williams criminal history and jailhouse violence indicate that this is not a man who learns from past mistakes, or who even think he needed reform of any kind.
[+] [-] istjohn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] edanm|1 year ago|reply
There's really no such thing.
Instead, there is a very high burden of proof, there's a lot of protections built into the process, and, most important, it's an adversarial process in which one side is standing up for the defendant. If the evidence isn't good enough, the defendant's lawyer can and must show that to the jury, with them making the final decision on who is right.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|1 year ago|reply
- Williams GF witness testimony, that Williams confessed to her.
- Jailhouse witness testimony, that Williams had confessed to them.
- That Williams had items (purse, laptop, etc.) in his car, on the day or day after the murder.
But no DNA evidence?
A death penalty seems pretty egregious, when you have that kind of evidence. Seems like there's plenty of reasonable doubt in the picture.
(FWIW, I completely oppose the death penalty - on the grounds that innocent people have been executed. One is one too many)
[+] [-] diogenes_atx|1 year ago|reply
Justin Brooks (2023) You Might Go to Prison Even Though You're Innocent, University of California Press
https://www.amazon.com/Might-Prison-Though-Youre-Innocent/dp...
Brandon Garrett (2011) Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, Harvard University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Convicting-Innocent-Where-Criminal-Pr...
Mark Godsey (2017) Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions, University of California Press
https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Injustice-Prosecutor-Psychology...
[+] [-] rdtsc|1 year ago|reply
That is odd, if there is no evidence that links him to the crime why not argue to let him go? Is that just from a desire to have someone punished, no matter who it is.
[+] [-] knodi123|1 year ago|reply
Now, as to whether this evidence is solid enough for a death penalty conviction, that's tougher to say. But there's plenty of evidence.
[+] [-] DoughnutHole|1 year ago|reply
Victims and their family’s can and often do oppose capital punishment on moral grounds, same as anybody else.
They want him punished but believe that killing him is a moral wrong, or they’re more comfortable with the risk that he’s innocent if he’s in prison with the possibility of being exonerated rather than killed.
[+] [-] shusaku|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway314155|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asveikau|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] KenArrari|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chakintosh|1 year ago|reply
Can't really defend yourself if you're dead.
[+] [-] kergonath|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] game_the0ry|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pie_flavor|1 year ago|reply
This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.
[+] [-] DoughnutHole|1 year ago|reply
The blame for this lies squarely on the Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Parson (who has never once granted clemency in a capital case).
[+] [-] knodi123|1 year ago|reply
They weren't, for the record.
[+] [-] qingcharles|1 year ago|reply
In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.
[+] [-] trod123|1 year ago|reply
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
[+] [-] n1b0m|1 year ago|reply
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/20/south-caroli...
[+] [-] ruph123|1 year ago|reply
> Prosecutors had no forensic evidence connecting Allah to the shooting. Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable. The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.
[+] [-] CollinEMac|1 year ago|reply
> Marcellus Williams, whose murder conviction was questioned by a prosecutor, died by lethal injection Tuesday evening in Missouri after the US Supreme Court denied a stay.
> The 55-year-old was put to death around 6 p.m. CT at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-schedul...
[+] [-] lapestenoire|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|1 year ago|reply
Imagine we lived in that world.
[+] [-] anonzzzies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] olivermuty|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yapyap|1 year ago|reply
Sad shit, just as sad is the fact that it seems like nothing will change.
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yawpitch|1 year ago|reply
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.
[+] [-] sashank_1509|1 year ago|reply
I wouldn’t use this evidence to make a decision in an office dispute.
[+] [-] jimt1234|1 year ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper...
[+] [-] t-writescode|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nycticorax|1 year ago|reply
https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-... ,
which is (I think...) the decision of the state supreme court on the appeal. There are several points where it seems like there is some dispute about what exactly the evidence is tying Williams to the murder, and where the original trial transcript might help clarify things.
[+] [-] plandis|1 year ago|reply
I hope one day the people involved are prosecuted for this premeditated murder.
[+] [-] jmyeet|1 year ago|reply
> Parson, a former sheriff, has now granted clemency to more than 760 people since 2020 — more than any Missouri governor since the 1940s
including those who waved guns at BLM protestors [2] and the son of the KC Chiefs coach who caused grave bodiy injuries to someone in a DUI.
Available data shows a pretty clear trend [3]:
> An analysis of available demographic data conducted by the Missouri News Network indicates that almost 90% of those who have been granted clemency by the governor are white.
If you're wondering where the US Supreme Court stands on this, consider this quote from then-Justice Antonin Scalia [4]:
> [t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.
Also, consider this racial bias demonstrated in the exoneration for those sentence to death [5]:
> Since 1973, at least 189 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. 100 of the death row exonerees are Black.
Lastly, even if you want to ignore the immorality of the death setnence, look at it from the lens of cost [6]. Death penalty cases are substantially more expensive to litigate and death row inmates are substantially more expensive to incarcerate. A life-without-parole would be substantially cheaper.
Also, you can release someone from prison wrongly convicted. You cannot bring them back to life and there are multiple cases of people who were executed and later exonerated. Williams is sadly added to that list.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/kansas-city-chiefs-britt-reid-com...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/03/1024446351/missouris-governor...
[3]: https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/state_news/governors...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/associate-justice-anton...
[5]: https://www.naacpldf.org/our-thinking/death-row-usa/
[6]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...