Marcellus Williams (55) was killed by lethal injection by the state of Missouri last week despite the protests of a state prosecutor and the family of the woman he was convicted of murdering.
For 17 years on death row he had protested his innocence after a conviction in a flawed trial that relied on contaminated DNA and the evidence of two paid witnesses. But the state attorney general maintained Williams guilt and persuaded the governor to reject his appeal for clemency.
Williams was the 13th death row inmate this year to be executed by the US; such prisoners on average spend 23 years awaiting their fate. Now the majority of states have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions. In part that reflects growing public unease at the constitutionality of the “cruel and unusual” penalty, but largely out of concerns that a notoriously imperfect, racially biased, and slow-moving judicial system has been condemning and executing the innocent.
Since 1992, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, newly available DNA evidence, unavailable at trial, has led to the exoneration and release of more than 20 death row inmates. Three death row inmates have been exonerated and spared this year alone. Yet far from showing the system working, it simply highlights the terrifying numbers of innocents caught up in its web, the majority of whom will never be cleared.
The US remains in very dubious company in preserving this barbaric form of “justice”. Although the geographic scope of capital punishment has narrowed worldwide, the total number of known executions last year increased, not least because of a surge in Iran, which has reportedly surpassed 700 executions. China is believed to have executed thousands, although the number is a closely guarded state secret.
Japan retains its own somewhat more limited system. The complete exoneration last week, however, of 88-year-old Iwao Hakamada, after a world record 46 years on death row for murders he did not commit, is hardly reassuring. Justice delayed is justice denied.