Justice Was Served to Marcellus Williams

Missouri executed a black man this week for the brutal 1998 murder of a white woman. Marcellus Williams was clearly guilty of killing Felicia Gayle. However, the media and left-wing advocacy groups spread a false narrative that Williams was actually innocent. Helped by St. Louis’s progressive district attorney, this effort persuaded many Americans that Missouri killed an innocent man.

{snip} Williams was guilty and deserved the death penalty. The only reason why people believe otherwise is because we’re brainwashed to buy the false narrative that our racist justice system wrongly convicts innocent black men all the time. This warped view imagines that every black person on death row, no matter the overwhelming amount of evidence or the horrific nature of his crime, is a victim who deserves exoneration or clemency.

All evidence shows Williams broke into Gayle’s house on an August night in 1998 and stabbed her 43 times shortly after she got out of the shower. He then stole various items from her home. Prosecutors proved Williams’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in court. Police found stolen items from Gayle’s home in his car. He pawned off a laptop he stole from her residence, a fact confirmed by the person who bought the computer. Williams confessed to the murder to his then-girlfriend after she found Gayle’s purse in his car. He then threatened to kill her and her family if she told anyone. The girlfriend volunteered this information to police without requesting a financial reward. Williams also confessed to a cellmate, who was able to corroborate information not known to the public, and to other associates.

Williams fit the profile of a man capable of taking a life. Prior to his murder conviction, he had a lengthy rap sheet for multiple robberies and assaults. Authorities focused on him as the chief murder suspect after he was arrested for a string of break-ins in the area where Gayle was murdered. The evidence added up that he was the killer.

Gayle’s slaying, coupled with Williams’s long criminal record and his violent behavior, earned him a justifiable death sentence. He was scum. He didn’t even have the decency to atone for his murder. Instead, he lied, causing more pain for Gayle’s family. The only injustice here is that he wasn’t executed years ago.

The claims for Williams’s innocence are extremely flimsy. The chief claim is that post conviction-testing found other DNA on the murder weapon. However, there’s a good explanation for this. Crime scene technology hadn’t fully developed at the time of the murder, so police and prosecutors handled the weapon without gloves. The other DNA found on the weapon matched people investigating the crime. The prosecution never hid this fact. Additionally, the defense team’s experts admitted that they could not rule out that Williams’s DNA was on the knife, undermining this claim’s ability to exonerate.

The second claim of Williams’s innocence is that he suffered racial bias at his trial. The jury only included one black individual. A possible juror was excluded on the grounds that he looked too much like Marcellus. Williams’s defense team claimed that showed racial bias and that he deserved a retrial. Even if this act was somehow “racist,” it does not negate any of the facts of the case. The excluded juror doesn’t negate police finding Gayle’s stolen property in Williams’s car or the multiple witnesses who testified to his confession.

Several judges found these claims insufficient to warrant a retrial. The Missouri Supreme Court argued that the defense team “failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence Williams’ actual innocence or constitutional error at the original criminal trial that undermines the confidence in the judgment of the original criminal trial.” The state high court upheld the death sentence.

It should be noted that the Innocence Project took up Williams’s case. The group was founded by members of O.J. Simpson’s legal “dream team.” It’s fitting that men who made their names helping to acquit a clearly guilty black murderer have dedicated their lives to doing the same for other black killers.

How could a clear open-and-shut case generate so much outrage over an executed murderer? Much of the blame lies with St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell. Bell is a George Soros-backed progressive prosecutor who’s gone easy on criminals during his tenure. He came to office with the support of the Black Lives Matter movement and pledged to deliver “racial justice” in his role as the top prosecutor in the county. Marcellus Williams’s case was about fulfilling that pledge. Bell’s attempts to sow doubt in the case was all about politics. It gained him support among the black community and demonstrated his progressive bonafides. It had little to do with the facts.

His involvement allowed numerous outlets to claim the “prosecutor” cast doubt on Williams’s guilt. Bell was not the prosecutor in the case. He’s just the guy in charge of the office, and he has his own agenda.

Williams’s rightful execution was treated as a lynching by prominent black figures. The NAACP said Missouri “lynched another innocent Black man.” Rep. Cori Bush, who was recently defeated by Bell in the Democratic primary for her congressional seat, said the execution of an “innocent person” should aspire America to abolish the “racist and inhumane” death penalty. She memorialized the unrepentant killer with “Rest in Power, Marcellus Williams.”

This is an insane response, but it shouldn’t shock us. The same people crying over Marcellus Williams still believe Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were shot in cold blood. It’s easy for them to fall for any narrative that affirms racial dogmas.

Any time a black person is up for execution, we hear the same sob story. The condemned is presented as a gentle soul who is either completely innocent or just made an honest mistake. They are the true victims of this case and deserve our full support. Their advocates paint these murderers as harmless individuals who wouldn’t hurt a fly. They often circulate a picture with the killer in glasses to demonstrate their allegedly benign nature. It’s impossible for leftists to believe that black men would be guilty of such murders. And if they did such a murder, they deserve complete forgiveness of a sort not available to whites.

Along with Williams, leftists tried to save at least two other clearly guilty black murderers this year. Just last week, leftists unsuccessfully defended Freddie Owens, a man executed for the murder of a South Carolina store clerk. His accomplice tried to recant his confession, but the state Supreme Court ruled him an unreliable witness and upheld that other evidence conclusively showed Owens pulled the trigger in the killing. While awaiting trial for the murder of the cashier, Owens murdered another prisoner. This was no saint sent to an early grave.

Last spring, Georgia executed Willie Pye for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend over 30 years ago. His advocates tried to get his death sentence tossed out because he had an “intellectual disability” and “racism” undermined his trial. The courts dismissed these arguments, and the death sentence was carried out.

In 2020, Christopher Vialva and Brandon Bernard were executed for the brutal slaying of two youth pastors in 1999. The two black men were part of a gang that abducted the Christian couple, forced them into a trunk, shot them, and then set them on fire. Even though no one doubted these two killers’ guilt, they were made out to be children who made a mistake. They became a cause celebre, with celebrities and other public figures pleading for clemency. Fortunately, the two men received the same level of mercy they gave to their victims.

Unfortunately, justice was not served for Julius Jones the following year. Jones murdered Paul Howell, a white father, in front of his kids after they had just gotten ice cream. The evidence and eyewitness testimony convicted Jones. However, dubious claims that “racism” tainted Jones’s murder conviction turned him into a popular cause and led to Oklahoma’s Republican governor granting clemency in 2021. The announcement caused wild celebrations among protesters around the state capital and even drew praise from some conservatives. All this for an unrepentant killer.

White men, including Richard Rojem in Oklahoma and Travis Mullis in Texas, have been executed this year without any of the same hullabaloo. No one questioned their guilt or decried their deaths as lynchings. You only get turned into a victim of injustice if you’re black.

Proper societies require the death penalty to deal with the worst crimes. There are such heinous acts where only execution can satisfy justice. Allowing cold-blooded killers to live off the taxpayer for years is an outrageous insult. Sadly, America doesn’t have the stomach to kill the worst of the worst. The condemned spend 20 years or more awaiting justice. If they’re black, they will find plenty of advocates who will insist they’re innocent and fight for them.

Abolishing the death penalty announces to the world that your country is too queasy to deal with evil. America should keep it, but we need to cut down on the appeals process that allows monsters like Marcellus Williams to exploit it. There should only be a few years between conviction and execution. There is a pragmatic argument against the death penalty that stresses the cost of the lengthy appeals process. It may be cheaper to lock these criminals up for life, but it sends the wrong message.

If you shoot and burn alive youth pastors, or if you stab to death a woman getting in the way of your crime spree, you deserve death. A society afraid to impose the proper penalty is one in decline.