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Missouri Governor Mark Parson is Determined to Lynch a Black Man [1]

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Date: 2024-09-24  

To be fair, I am sure that Governor Parson is not using the words, “Black Man,” or, “Person of Color,” but rather he is using an offensive euphemism that begins with the 14th letter of the alphabet.

The short version is that Marcellus Williams is innocent. The prosecutors know this, and have asked that he not to be executed, and the family of the victim of this crime know that he is innocent, and have asked that he not be executed, but Andrew Bailey wants him dead, because he thinks that taking credit for murdering an innocent man will play well with the voters.

Missouri is slated to execute a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who have suggested he was wrongfully convicted. Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, is due to be killed by lethal injection at 6pm CT even after the office of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney, which originally convicted him, sought to have his case overturned. Prosecutors have raised concerns about the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle and have said that Williams did not get a fair trial. Although the prosecuting office and victim’s family backed an agreement to have Williams avoid the death penalty, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, has fought to allow the execution to proceed. “The public doesn’t want this execution to move forward. The victim’s family doesn’t want this execution to move forward and the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office doesn’t want this execution to move forward,” said Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’s attorneys, in an interview on Monday. “The attorney general’s office, who had nothing to do with this whatsoever, are the ones who are trying to lead him to the death chamber. It’s pretty startling and extraordinary.”

How bad is this? It’s so bad that it makes rapist former Governor Eric Greitens look good.

Williams, who has long maintained his innocence, was convicted of first-degree murder of Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch. Williams was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings, but no forensic evidence connected Williams to the knife or scene. Williams, who serves as the imam in his prison, and has dedicated his time to poetry, twice had his execution halted at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri state supreme court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, the Republican governor at the time, granted a reprieve hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’s DNA. Greitens set up a panel to review the case, but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed. ……… “Ms Gayle’s murderer left behind considerable physical evidence. None of that physical evidence can be tied to Mr Williams,” his office wrote, adding: “New evidence suggests that Mr Williams is actually innocent.” He also asserted that Williams’s counsel at the time was ineffective and that his predecessors in the St Louis prosecutors’ office had improperly removed Black jurors from serving on the trial. ……… On Monday, Williams’s lawyers pleaded for the execution to be stopped based on arguments that the prosecutor in the 2001 case had excluded a Black juror because he looked similar to Williams. But the state supreme court denied that request. The governor also rejected a clemency request, which emphasized that the victim’s family opposed execution and quoted three trial jurors, who said they had doubts about the case and supported Williams’s petition.

Even if I supported the death penalty, which I do not, this would stink.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/24/2272663/-Missouri-Governor-Mark-Parson-is-Determined-to-Lynch-a-Black-Man?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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