GIST: "For one week in September 2024, it seemed like everyone knew the name Marcellus Williams. Williams, a Black man who firmly maintained his innocence, was about to be executed by the state of Missouri for a murder that countless legal experts say there’s no evidence he committed.
On Facebook, our parents and grandparents shared posts about Williams being excluded as the source of the DNA evidence found at the crime scene. Instagram was alive with infographics, underscoring how prosecutors and even the victim’s family strenuously opposed Williams’s imminent execution. TikTok was trending with videos on the prevalence of racial bias in jury selection and untrustworthy witnesses offered incentives to testify, as prosecutors said there had been in this case. In the end, more than one million people petitioned Missouri governor Mike Parson to grant Williams clemency and save his life, flooding the lawmaker’s office with desperate calls and emails.
As always, it felt like there was a dash of hope. Even in the face of another grotesque ritual in which government officials would strap a person to a gurney and end his life, there was hope in the possibility of justice.
But then horror and shock spread as the United States Supreme Court and Parson declined to intervene and news of yet another state killing emerged. How could this happen? How could Missouri kill a man when all signs pointed to his innocence?
The answer: Because it is legal in the United States to execute an innocent person. Indeed, the Supreme Court has twice ruled that it is perfectly constitutional to do so because the value of expediency and finality in the legal process is more important than truth, justice, and even human life.
This distressing reality is no surprise to me. As a civil rights attorney who served as a public defender for nearly a decade in Brooklyn, I consistently saw how the legality of killing an innocent person was simply the most extreme example of a legal process designed not to achieve justice, fairness, or truth, but instead to enable unjust outcomes and erect every obstacle imaginable toward redress. In other words, the use of the death penalty in the US is not an exception but a natural outgrowth of the system as designed and deployed.
The Supreme Court’s devotion to finality in case outcomes is built upon the fiction that justice is not only possible but almost certain during the trial process. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As a public defender in one of the most liberal cities in the country, I saw how judges routinely ignored the few laws intended to limit the harm of the criminal legal system, scoffed at the presumption of innocence, and overlooked individualized facts to rule against the people I represented who were poor and predominantly Black and brown. The people sitting on the bench often seemed more motivated by the fear of appearing soft on crime than an adherence to the law.
Judges ordered mass pretrial detention by setting bail that was clearly excessive and unaffordable. They laughed off challenges to plainly illegal court decisions by other judges either because they didn’t care or claimed their “hands were tied.” They gave police officers every unearned benefit of the doubt and allowed prosecutors to delay and withhold key evidence while threatening the people I represented with more prison time if they dared to file additional legal challenges.
The result: a flood of meritless guilty pleas and convictions produced by interlocking laws and decisions that were designed to silence the truth—legal and factual errors be damned.
And get this: In many states, people are unable to get adequate representation because of a persistent refusal to fund public defense, per an essay published in the Harvard Law Review. According to Southern Methodist University’s Deason Center, in many places, people who cannot afford a lawyer are often not even appointed counsel until after a bail hearing has already taken place. And when a lawyer is ultimately appointed, they are often not full-time public defenders, who have chosen to dedicate their careers to serving people too poor to afford an attorney. Instead, judges often assign private attorneys, not financially incentivized to invest the same caliber of legal support they provide to their paying clients.
In Mississippi, for example, there are only about 32 full-time public defenders in the entire state, according to an NBC report from last year. Public defense funding in Pennsylvania is so dismal that, as a recent report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice found, only 6 of the state’s 66 counties have the staffing necessary to meet their caseload demands.
- The horror stories of public defenders refusing to file legal motions and appeals, failing to raise timely objections, and even sleeping during a trial are not the story of public defenders being bad. It’s a story of states unwilling to invest in robust, meaningful public defense.
As bad as this error-ridden nightmare of a legal system is, once there is a conviction, the prospects of justice somehow become even more bleak. For one, there is no recognized constitutional right to counsel in post-conviction proceedings. This means that the more than one million people currently incarcerated in our country’s prisons, untrained in the law and limited in legal resources and internet access, are largely left to fend for themselves in an intricate maze of legal obstacles against trained government lawyers.
It was always difficult to undo errors after the trial stage, but it got far worse during the Clinton administration. In the wake of the white supremacist Oklahoma City bombing, Congress took the opportunity to pass the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (commonly known as AEDPA), a cynical bipartisan bill that essentially foreclosed most avenues of relief for convicted defendants by dramatically limiting their ability to file successful habeas corpus petitions—a legal remedy that allows defendants to challenge wrongful convictions. As late federal appellate judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in 2015, while AEDPA was “misconceived at its inception,” an increasingly conservative Supreme Court has “repeatedly interpreted it in the most inflexible and unyielding manner possible” in subsequent years making it so the federal judiciary has practically no authority to review constitutional rulings made by state courts in criminal cases.
In short, the system, from beginning to end, is designed to secure convictions—and in some cases, ensure death, not justice.
And now, the system is gearing up to kill again: Robert Roberson, an autistic man whose murder conviction is based on the discredited shaken baby syndrome hypothesis, is set to be executed by the state of Texas on October 17 for a crime that even the lead detective in his case now says never happened. So what can we do?
We cannot rely on the court process as it now stands, but fortunately, we don’t have to.
- We must demand that our state leaders obey the Constitution and invest in robust, meaningful public defense. This requires at least as much investment as prosecutors’ offices get: budgets to pay competitive salaries, ensure reasonable caseloads for attorneys and resources for investigators, social workers, and paralegals, and funds for experts and lab testing. For those concerned about fiscal responsibility, investing in public defense is a front-end investment that will help make up for the sky-high costs of incarceration—without the devastating collateral economic and social consequences associated with the latter.
These efforts must include expanding the right to counsel for those seeking justice after they’ve been convicted. In small pockets of the country, a growing network of post-conviction attorneys, advocates, grassroots organizers, and pro bono programs within larger law firms represent people for free on appeal or during resentencing, clemency, and parole hearings, but these initiatives rely largely on private funding or volunteers. Meanwhile, an extraordinary community of thousands of “jailhouse lawyers” —incarcerated legal experts—has emerged behind bars to advocate for the freedom of themselves and their peers. But these advocates often face retaliation for doing legal work while facing limitations to legal resources and access to technologies.
While we push for greater investment, we must also direct our attention toward the decision-makers who have the power right now to prevent executions: the president and those governors who have the authority to grant clemency in individual federal and state cases, respectively, and the policymakers who can advance legislation to abolish the death penalty and fully fund public defense pre- and post-conviction.
We must demand that clemency—the legal process of reducing a convicted person’s sentence, sparing them the death penalty, or granting them a full pardon—no longer be a rare saving grace. To remedy the gross injustices of our criminal legal system, clemency must become a consistent part of the executive role in government. As long as it is not, we should understand the decision to refuse clemency as an affirmative decision to kill.
A recent Gallup poll indicates that support for the death penalty is the lowest it has been in five decades. As millions of Americans confront a criminal legal system designed to contain and sometimes kill people, and as men like Marcellus Williams and Robert Roberson are subject to state execution, political leaders at large must take a moral stand against the death penalty. The Republican Party under Donald Trump has, predictably, abandoned its moral obligation toward human life; Trump, in particular, has a perverse obsession with executions. But alarmingly, this year’s official Democratic Party platform failed to include an explicit opposition to the death penalty for the first time in eight years. While Kamala Harris has previously opposed the death penalty, she has refused to say whether or not she will oppose the death penalty as president. This is clearly unacceptable.
Most urgently, Texas governor Greg Abbott must grant Roberson clemency and save his life. Everywhere across the country, the elected officials who participate in the smooth functioning of the cruel and unusual US “machinery of death”, as the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously called it 30 years ago, must reverse course, acknowledge the power they have to intervene, and, ultimately, choose human dignity and life."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/robert-roberson-execution-innocentPUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
- SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
