The death penalty is disappearing in America
THE MURDER of Felicia Gayle, a reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1998 was one of those crimes almost perfectly calibrated to shock. In the evening of August 11th that year, Gayle’s husband returned home from work to find the back door of their house in University City, a suburb of St Louis, wide open. Inside, he found his wife dead in the blood-spattered hallway, wearing only a T-shirt, with a kitchen knife sticking out of her neck. It was, the police guessed, a botched burglary. The killer had taken a purse and a laptop, but left behind many other valuables. Bloody fingerprints marked the wall and footprints the floor. Gayle had been stabbed 43 times, seemingly after coming out of the shower and interrupting the thief. “He was probably just as surprised to see her as she was to see him,” said the local police chief at the time.
Twenty-six years later, another killing has shocked people in St Louis. This one however was no surprise: it was announced in advance. On September 24th Marcellus Williams, the man who was convicted in 2001 of Gayle’s murder, was injected with lethal poison by prison officials. The execution—one of a recent spate across several states—has raised questions about the future of the death penalty in America.
Williams always maintained his innocence. Many thought he was telling the truth. “Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent black man,” thundered the NAACP in a post on X, a social-media website. Williams was “an innocent man”, claimed Cori Bush, the outgoing Democratic congresswoman who represents St Louis. Gayle’s family were among those requesting mercy; so, oddly, was Sir Richard Branson, a British businessman. The state of Missouri ignored their pleas.
That the execution went ahead was at least in part the result of a deepening partisan divide over the death sentence. In the past two decades a majority of Democrats have turned against capital punishment: polling by Gallup in 2023 suggested that just 32% back it, down from 65% in 2002. But Republicans remained practically as keen on it as ever, and their politicians are eager to protect it. Every state to have executed somebody this year (there are eight of them) is a Republican stronghold. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, not only backs killing murderers but wants the range of federal capital crimes to be expanded to include drug dealing.
Yet the reality is that capital punishment is getting rarer. Indeed, in time it seems likely to all but die itself.
Until recently it looked as if Williams’s efforts to escape death row might succeed. In January the St Louis county attorney, the office which originally prosecuted the case against him, tried to quash his conviction. That job is now held by Wesley Bell, who defeated Ms Bush in a primary earlier this year, and is running for Congress in November. In a 63-page brief, the office outlined why the original conviction should have been considered unsafe. None of the forensic evidence, such as the fingerprints, collected at the scene was proved to have come from Williams. His conviction relied on the testimony of two witnesses, an ex-girlfriend and a jail cellmate, who both said Williams confessed to them, and on the recovery of the stolen laptop, which Williams had sold. The girlfriend, Mr Bell’s office suggested, citing new witnesses, may in fact have given Williams the laptop to sell, and was concealing her own involvement in the murder. The cellmate told detectives he came forward to get a cash reward. (Both have since died).
But the effort to have the case thrown out failed dramatically when a key piece of new evidence expected to help exonerate Williams—male DNA found on the handle of the murder weapon that was not his—turned out to be that of investigators, who had evidently mishandled the knife, rather than of an alternative suspect. In the aftermath, Williams offered an “Alford plea”, whereby he agreed to plead guilty without admitting to the crime, and a judge agreed to spare his life. But Missouri’s Republican governor and attorney-general insisted that the execution go ahead. Williams, they argued, had exhausted the appeals process, and the justice system demands sentences be carried out. The Supreme Court split six to three—along its usual ideological lines—in declining to stop it.
The decision reflects a newfound Republican commitment to the death penalty. Last year Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, signed a law lowering the requirement from a unanimous jury decision to impose death to a majority of eight out of 12. Several Republican states have moved to come up with alternatives to lethal drugs, which have become hard to acquire. Last year a judge in Utah ruled the state can use firing squads as a backup to the lethal injection (an option legislators restored in 2015). In 2021 South Carolina passed a law reintroducing the electric chair and firing squads as an alternative, and on September 20th executed its first convict in 13 years (with a needle). And on September 26th Alabama killed a man by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen until he suffocated—only the second time that method has been employed in America.
But such killing is bucking the national trend. So far this year, only 18 people have been put to death. The annual number of executions has fallen by four-fifths since the late 1990s. Whether because of drug shortages or legal challenges, executions take decades to be scheduled, so few of those condemned to death are actually executed. More die naturally waiting. Of 2,200 or so people now on death row, over a third are in states like California and Pennsylvania where Democratic governors have declared moratoriums on executions. And almost nobody is being newly condemned. Last year just 21 new death sentences were passed across the country (see chart). In the 1990s the annual total climbed over 300. That implies that a further collapse in the number of executions is coming.
“People who philosophically are not opposed to capital punishment are finding reasons to give life sentences, even [for those] convicted of terrible crimes,” says Robin Maher, of the Death Penalty Information Centre, an NGO. One reason is a greater fear of executing innocents, she says, and a loss of faith in the justice system. Since 1976, 200 people on death row have been exonerated. The killing of Marcellus Williams, who was not proven innocent but whose guilt many people reasonably doubted, is hardly likely to restore trust.■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important electoral stories, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.