Why Are Innocents Still Being Executed?

On Tuesday night, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, a man who may well have been innocent of the crime he was convicted of. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in her Missouri home, and his trial was marked by a shoddy defense and a jury-selection process that empaneled 11 white jurors and only one Black juror (Gayle was white; Williams was Black). Williams’s execution had been scheduled and halted twice before amid concerns about his guilt; Missouri’s prior governor, Eric Greitens, not only granted Williams a day-of stay but also appointed a committee to investigate his case. The committee was dissolved by the current governor, Mike Parson, in 2023 without ever issuing a report.

Earlier this year, Wesley Bell, the current prosecutor of the district where Williams was convicted, filed a 63-page motion in court seeking to set aside Williams’s death sentence on grounds of possible innocence, and later offered Williams a deal that would have commuted his sentence to life without parole. But Missouri’s attorney general rejected the plan, and Williams is now dead. Bell issued a statement after the execution, saying, “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”

Why are innocent people—and those with a good chance of proving their innocence—still being executed? A death sentence does not necessarily reflect guilt, which is why death-row exonerations are not uncommon. By the Equal Justice Initiave’s count, one person is exonerated for every eight people executed. And not everyone who is innocent is exonerated. The Death Penalty Information Center maintains a list of executed people who had “strong evidence of innocence”; it numbers 20 cases, almost all of which are from the past few decades. Other sources offer higher estimates. “At least 30, and likely more, innocent people have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s,” Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me.

The likelihood of executing innocents has moved several state legislatures to end the death penalty within their borders. As the governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley cited innocence in his 2013 decision to sign a bill abolishing capital punishment. So did then-Governor Pat Quinn in 2011 in Illinois. “Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death-penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it,” Quinn said. “With our broken system, we cannot ensure justice is achieved in every case.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Not that innocent]

Surveys suggest that supporters of capital punishment are aware of the possibility of executing innocent people. According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of Americans acknowledge that there is some risk that innocent people will be executed; only 21 percent say that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent it. Moreover, only 30 percent of death-penalty supporters say that the criminal-justice system successfully prevents the execution of innocents. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 59 percent of respondents said they believed that innocent people had been executed within the previous five years.

It’s not possible that current supporters of capital punishment simply don’t realize that the death penalty occasionally results in the execution of innocents. They must know, and they support it anyway. I suspect this is because capital punishment serves a variety of purposes; carrying out justice is merely one. Perhaps death-penalty advocates don’t care about the lives being extinguished, innocent or not—death-row prisoners are disproportionately Black and poor. And perhaps others are loath to admit that the criminal-justice system is prone to error. But for some, the death penalty offers another major benefit: It is an opportunity for the state to exhibit ultimate force, the destruction of a human life. From that perspective, innocence versus guilt only distantly matters. Some people welcome displays of state power—think military parades—because a government capable of destruction is also one strong enough to offer protection. That many small-government conservatives nevertheless wish to see that kind of power in the hands of the state is not just ironic; it is a major obstacle to the abolition of the death penalty.

America is currently experiencing an execution spree: One person was executed the week before last, four this past week, and three more are scheduled for October. Maybe all of the people being put to death now are guilty, but there’s more than a sliver of a chance that someone among them is or was innocent—that’s eight executions, after all. For some, that falls between a worthwhile risk and a necessary evil. For others, it’s just murder.