On September 24, the state of Missouri executed 55-year-old Marcellus Williams. Convicted of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, Williams had been on death row since 2001. Gayle was white and Williams, a Black man, was convicted by a nearly all-white jury (eleven out of twelve jurors were white, and a prosecutor admitted to striking down a potential Black juror on the basis of race).
No physical evidence
No DNA, fingerprints, or shoeprints linked Williams to the scene of the crime. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Williams’s previous convictions as a burglar, his possession of items stolen from Gayle, the testimony of Williams’s former cellmate, and his ex-girlfriend. Williams’s defense alleged that both witnesses sought a $10,000 reward put up by the Gayle family. In fact, Williams’s former cellmate was paid $5,000, although Williams’s ex didn’t receive anything.
In the years following the verdict, both the Gayle family and the prosecutor raised doubts about the case and called for Williams’s sentence to be reduced to life imprisonment. Civil rights activists worked tirelessly to raise awareness, collecting more than 600,000 signatures on an online petition demanding clemency. Thousands of phone calls and emails were sent to the Missouri state capitol pleading for Williams’s life. Despite multiple court appeals, both Republican Governor Mike Parson and the US Supreme Court approved the execution.
Pillars of American capitalism
The death penalty and the racist “justice” system are key pillars of American capitalism—a system built on the brutal foundations of slavery and colonialism. The capitalist class secured and maintains its rule by dividing the workers and poor against each other along racial and other lines. Capitalism needs a repressive state apparatus to stomp down on the workers, even in periods of relative class peace. Without understanding this basic fact, America’s racist policing, mass incarceration, and “justice” system are incomprehensible.
The United States holds more than 1.9 million people in prisons and jails, more people per capita than any other country in the world—583 per 100,000 according to the Prison Policy Initiative. As many as 800,000 state and federal prisoners make up a slave labor force paid on average between 13 and 52 cents an hour. Most of their work goes towards prison maintenance, but prison labor generates $2 billion every year for capitalist corporations. The ACLU estimates that 8% of incarcerated workers are assigned to public works, including dangerous jobs like fighting wildfires.
Fulfilling dual roles of dividing the workers and providing a potentially lucrative source of labor to exploit, the “justice” system cares very little whether prisoners are guilty or innocent. A 2018 study cited by the Innocence Project estimates that as many as 6% of convictions are wrongful, meaning that more than one in every 17 prisoners did not actually commit the crime they are imprisoned for—with fatal repercussions for Marcellus Williams and others on death row.
The “justice” system does not exist to stop crime. Capitalism generates crime by keeping tens of millions of people impoverished in the wealthiest imperialist power on Earth. The wealth exists in society to provide a decent standard of living for everyone. Communists fight for a workers’ government—a government without brutal police, racist courts, and mass incarceration—and a democratically planned economy, so we can harness society’s resources toward building a world where no one will have to turn to crime to survive. There is no other way to consign racist miscarriages of justice like the execution of Marcellus Williams to the dustbin of history.