The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday. He was almost certainly innocent, and his own prosecutors, as well as the family of his alleged victim, had sought to spare his life. The St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office urged the courts not to kill Williams, arguing that his conviction was fatally undermined by a startling lack of evidence, racial bias at trial, and the results of recent DNA testing. But the Supreme Court ignored these pleas: The justices refused to stay his execution in a brief unsigned and unreasoned order Tuesday, with all three liberals dissenting. Williams was strapped to a gurney and put to death by lethal injection shortly thereafter.
The doubts about Williams’ guilt are nothing short of overwhelming. They stand as a testament to everything that is wrong with the capital system we have erected under a regime that is meant to prize certainty and finality. Everything that could go wrong with a death-penalty prosecution is on display here: Williams’ conviction rests on the testimony of extremely unreliable witnesses who were motivated by promises of leniency and cash payments to accuse him of murder. No physical evidence connects him to the crime: not fingerprints, not footprints, not hair found at the scene, and not DNA collected from the murder weapon.
It also appears that the prosecution sought to exploit race against him at trial: A Black man, Williams was accused of murdering a white woman, and prosecutors struck six of the seven prospective Black jurors. And although the Supreme Court has ruled that race discrimination in juror selection is unconstitutional, the conservative supermajority didn’t care on Tuesday that Williams had been found guilty by a nearly all-white jury or that glaring due-process concerns undergirded his sentence.
After the court cleared the way for Williams’ killing, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out on Threads an inconsistency that’s worth reflecting upon: It’s notable, he wrote, “just how obsessed with due process and judicial review and the possibility of vindictive prosecution” the conservative justices were when they granted Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, “and how little they seem to care” when a likely innocent man is about to be executed.
Indeed, these six justices’ extreme solicitude for Trump in last term’s appalling immunity decision stands in stark and alarming contrast with their bloodless, wordless dismissal of Williams’ final petition for relief. The far-right bloc tripped over itself to reflect deep concern for the former president’s rights, fashioning brand-new law out of thin air to give him every last benefit of the doubt, every conceivable tool to defeat his criminal charges. It drew upon a skepticism toward the legitimacy of our criminal justice system that seems to disappear when the petitioner is a powerless person of color rather than one of the most powerful men in the world.
There is vastly greater, more incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt in the Jan. 6 cases than there was of Williams’ guilt in a murder. Yet Trump evades even a trial on the merits, while Williams is sent to the death chamber. Arguments in defense of Trump’s immunity were rife with claims of bad-faith prosecutors behaving badly. The court no presumably accepts that Williams received a pristine trial.
But this inconsistency, this selective application of turbocharged due process, goes far deeper than the court’s immunity ruling. It reveals itself every time the Republican-appointed justices confront a party with whom they sympathize, for reasons personal, political, or both. Since Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the conservative bloc has consistently greenlit executions that rest on dubious facts and contorted applications of law.
Yet this bloc gladly twisted the very same law in knots to rule in favor of Jan. 6 insurrectionists charged with obstruction. Conservative justices who seem to rule automatically against ordinary criminal defendants, or even just people forced to sleep in parks, will stretch words beyond all meaning to hand a win to Trump, his allies, and his mob. When these select few face the prospect of consequences for their actions, every argument and utterance from prosecutors must be skeptically scrutinized for deep-state bias, nefarious agendas, or legal frailty. When a man with robust claims of innocence asks for a stay of execution to press his claims of actual innocence? The same justices cannot be bothered to intervene.
We see this pattern repeat ad infinitum in an array of lower-profile cases that illustrate who benefits from this Supreme Court’s highly selective empathy and interest. Corporations that damage our health with provably dangerous pollution? SCOTUS will nitpick the record to identify some laughable reason by which they can escape penalties. Corrupt public officials who take bribes for personal enrichment? The conservative justices will bend over backward to let them off the hook. Fraudsters who steal hardworking people’s money to enrich themselves? Their right to evade punishment is paramount to constitutional liberty. Gun sellers that profit from illicit weapons of mass slaughter? This court will shamelessly rewrite a statute to shield them from prosecution.
The conservative justices don’t bother to hide what’s going on here. When this bloc gutted the Clean Water Act in 2023, allowing wealthy landowners to destroy crucial wetlands, it had the gall to root its decision in due process. “A staggering array of landowners are at risk of criminal prosecution or onerous civil penalties,” the court fretted. The environmental protections at issue conflicted with the Constitution, it reasoned, because their definition was too “vague,” potentially encouraging “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” The straightforward mandate Don’t destroy wetlands without a permit flunked this court’s test of due process, but the execution of innocents does not.
Similarly, when the government sought to ban bump stocks—replacement stocks that effectively turn AR-15s into automatic weapons—the move triggered an outpouring of empathetic concern from the conservatives. These justices were horrified by the possibility that a hapless and well-meaning gun owner might not realize that this device, whose sole purpose is mass murder, was illegal under federal law. During oral arguments, they poured their hearts out for bump-stock enthusiasts who might be “ensnared” by vindictive prosecution without knowledge of the ban, as if ignorance of the law guarantees innocence. (It does not.) Incredibly, these same justices have ruled that people who are literally innocent of a crime may remain in prison under an unlawful sentence. A typical criminal defendant must languish behind bars for decades despite their innocence, but a defendant favored by this Supreme Court? Due process requires that they get any relief they demand.
It is now certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the six justices of the conservative supermajority have constructed two classes of Americans who receive two classes of judicial relief: one that looks like them and shares their values, and another that garners no empathy, concern, or even curiosity.
In a few short weeks, the court will hear oral arguments in Glossip v. Oklahoma, a case involving yet another capital defendant who received none of the perks and benefits and advantages afforded to the special defendants who are most cherished by the justices. Like Williams, Richard Glossip had a trial riddled with prosecutorial errors and deceptions and misconduct that any fair court would have prohibited. Like Williams, Glossip’s would-be prosecutors do not even seek his execution anymore and are in fact fighting to stop it; the Supreme Court had to hire someone to make the argument for his killing at the hands of a state that decided, as the misconduct came out in the wash, that it would rather not. Like Williams, Glossip has strong claims that he did not commit this murder. And yet the high court’s fatal rebuff of Williams on Tuesday suggests that a majority of justices will conclude that this world would be a better place if Glossip, too, is executed before we can untangle what went wrong in his deeply flawed prosecution.
Some of the justices constructing this two-tiered system have used every legal stratagem at their disposal to ensure that their own misconduct isn’t subject to broad public scrutiny and evaluation, thwarting ethics rules to keep their ill-begotten spoils a secret from the public, rebuffing congressional requests, and ignoring invitations to testify. This week, these justices rejected the proposition that Williams’ life, like Glossip’s, is important enough to merit a process that would unearth unconstitutional inequities. We learned recently from the New York Times that Chief Justice John Roberts believed that if he hid the court’s rationale for Trump’s impunity behind abstractions and jargon, Americans wouldn’t care that his court was engineering a system by which a guilty ex-president could go free. Evidently, when it comes to executing a Black man, the majority can’t be bothered with even abstractions and jargon. An unsigned order will do.
