This is so painful, I delayed posting it. We need to re-think this barbaric practice...
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“Pro-life” Republicans keep killing innocent people. Marcellus Williams, who was put to death last week by the state of Missouri, is their latest victim.
It is widely acknowledged that the state’s governor, Michael Parson, committed murder when he allowed the execution of Mr. Williams to proceed. It is widely acknowledged that the corrupt illegitimate super-majority on the Supreme Court is, at the very least, an accessory—although I would say they are equally complicit in the murder. It is also widely acknowledged that that’s just the way it is in American now and there’s just nothing to be done about it.
As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate write, Williams “was almost certainly innocent, and his own prosecutors, as well as the family of his alleged victim, had sought to spare his life.” In addition, there was no physical evidence to link him to the crime scene, including DNA.
Despite all of this, Marcellus Williams was killed by lethal injection on Tuesday, not long after the Republican super-majority, partially engineered by Donald Trump, denied Williams’ request for a stay of execution. The three liberals on the court vehemently dissented.
Lithwick and Stern marvel at the degree to which the right-wing justices were “obsessed with due process and judicial review and the possibility of vindictive prosecution” when it came to Donald, but they gave no such consideration to Marcellus Williams.
“Indeed, these six justices’ extreme solicitude for [Donald] in last term’s appalling immunity decision stands in stark and alarming contrast with their bloodless, wordless dismissal of Williams’ final petition for relief,” Lithwick and Stern write, pointing out that there is far more evidence that Donald is guilty of inciting the Jan. 6th attack on our Capitol than there that Williams committed a murder. “Yet [Donald] evades even a trial on the merits, while Williams is sent to the death chamber.”
This, in the view of those who are wholly dedicated to twin objectives of perpetuating white privilege and the racist death penalty, is as it should be.
I have always been against the death penalty—because we so often kill innocent people, like Marcellus Williams; because the death penalty disproportionately impacts Black and poor Americans; and because killing another human being in the name of the state demeans all of us.
“It is now certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the six justices of the conservative supermajority have constructed two classes of judicial relief: one that looks like them and shares their values, and another that garners no empathy, concern or even curiosity,” Lithwick and Stern wrote.
The good news is Democrats are beginning to fight back. This week, Vice President Kamala Harris called for ending the filibuster in order to restore the rights that were stolen from us when Roe was overturned.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the far-reaching consequences of that corrupt immunity ruling.
And Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon on Thursday introduced a bill to reform the Supreme Court. Among other things, Wyden’s bill would add six justices.
It’s time. This court has lost its way. It is as cruel, uncaring, and un-American as the Republican Party which it now represents. It’s not just the death penalty, of course. The Republican Party no longer seems to value human life. We’re all expendable in the service of helping them prove a point.
From their indifference to gun deaths, especially from mass shootings at our children’s schools, to the unnecessary and avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because of Donald’s malicious mishandling of COVID, they just don’t care.
In order to save an embryo, they are willing to allow women to die. In fact, women are dying even when the fetuses they carry are unviable. And to prove their moral superiority, they’ll even sacrifice the lives and bodies of girls impregnated through rape and incest.
In the view of the 12th century legal theorist Maimonides, "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.” This principle, which has evolved over the centuries, is known in modern law as Blackstone’s Ratio which embodies the principal that, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
But not according to this Supreme Court. Not in America—not any more.
