The Marcellus Williams case: a look into the problems with the death penalty

By Amirah Datwani

Marcellus Williams. (Image: Courtesy of Marcellus Williams’ legal team)

Despite efforts from organizations like the Innocence Project, a lack of reliable evidence, and his murder conviction being questioned by a prosecutor, Marcellus Williams, who was arrested for alleged murder in 2001, was executed on September 24, 2024. Williams was convicted of the murder in 2003, but plenty of reasonable doubt have been cast upon the accusation since then, such as alleged contamination of the murder weapon and racial bias in selecting the jury.

The USA is one of the countries that punish using the death penalty most often, ranked fifth worldwide. Situations like Williams’ happen far too frequently, so let’s dive deeper into the problems with the death penalty.

On the surface, it already seems like an unnecessarily harsh punishment. It’s hard to think of crimes that are so horrible that they are punishable by death, or those that wouldn’t be sufficiently punished by a lifelong prison sentence. However, the most common defense of the death penalty by its supporters is that some crimes are so unforgivable, their perpetrators deserve nothing but death. This argument is flawed in many ways, though.

Often, the crimes people cite as deserving of the death penalty are hard to get the exact details of. Murder, the crime that is most commonly punished by execution, can end in wrongful convictions and inaccurate charges. According to the Innocence Project’s data, 63% of wrongful convictions involved eyewitness misidentification, and over half involved incorrect application of forensic science. Evidence of a crime of this magnitude is so easy to fabricate, and it’s difficult to put enough trust in the justice system to make sure all evidence is correctly handled and interpreted, especially when it has a history of wrongful incarceration and unethical reasons for this.

There have been countless cases of wrongful convictions that led to executions all over the world. Apart from Williams’ case, which took place in the USA, there was the case of Huugjilt in China. In 1996, he was convicted of a murder that was later proven to be committed by Wang Shujin, a completely different man, but Shujin confessed years after Huugjilt was executed. This case provoked widespread criticism of the justice system and the death penalty.

There are too many problems with the death penalty to count, and due to the sheer amount of wrongful arrests that occur daily, as well as the serious, non-reversible consequences of execution, the punishment is both overly severe and ineffective. For this reason, the death penalty should be retired everywhere - only then can we ensure that people do not get punished for wrongdoings and crimes they did not commit.