Tangle - The state's right to kill its citizens.

On September 24, Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection in Missouri.

Williams was first convicted for the murder of Felicia Gaye in 2001. Gaye was a newspaper reporter found stabbed to death in her home in 1998. The evidence of Williams’s guilt was found convincing enough to convict him of murder and to withstand multiple legal challenges. Missouri’s governor, in defending his decision not to halt the execution, said that no jury or judge has ever found Williams’ claims of innocence credible, and further delaying closure would just retraumatize the victim’s family. 

However, before Williams was executed, questions about his case had caused an uproar and incited demands that his execution be postponed or halted. Williams’s attorneys claimed new expert testimony about the contamination of the murder weapon prior to the trial, as well as bias in the jury pool selection, could prove to be exonerating. In January, the county prosecutor filed a motion to vacate the case in consideration of that evidence. The victim’s family had also asked that Williams be spared from death, instead preferring he be imprisoned for life without parole. But the Supreme Court denied his appeal for a stay, and the 55-year-old was executed.

The case has reignited the debate about capital punishment, as has the recent execution of Alan Miller, whom witnesses said struggled against his restraints and gasped for air while being killed with nitrogen gas in late September.

In 2021, I wrote a piece about capital punishment — and made my case against it. Back then, the story was in the news because of a man named Zane Michael Floyd who was asking to be executed by firing squad to avoid lethal injection.

Tangle had just a few thousand subscribers then, and the story was not getting much national attention. In light of recent events, though, we’ve decided to rework and republish that piece today. As a reminder, this is my personal opinion — a personal argument I’m advancing in our members-only Friday edition — and not meant to be the final word on the issue. It’s also meant to offer some history, context, and helpful information on how capital punishment works and how it started. As always, we welcome feedback, disagreement, and discourse, and I promise to stay open-minded about changing my position.

The first recorded execution in America was in 1608 when Captain George Kendall was executed for acting as a spy for Spain. By 1612, Virginia’s governor had enacted laws that called for execution for crimes like trading with Native Americans or stealing grapes. Kendall, like many of the roughly 16,000 people who have been killed by a U.S. state since, was hanged.