Stop the execution of Marcellus Williams! Abolish the death penalty!

As the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party for US president, I unequivocally oppose the execution of Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, an innocent man on Missouri’s death row, set to be put to death September 24. His execution must be stopped!

Williams is one of a five death row inmates scheduled for execution between September 20 and 26. The other four are Freddie Eugene Owens, September 20, South Carolina; Travis James Mullis, September 24, Texas; Alan Eugene Miller, September 26, Alabama; and Emmanuel Antonio Littlejohn, September 26, Oklahoma.

This staggering assembly line of deaths over the course of a week demonstrates the barbaric nature of capital punishment in America, which is still allowed in 27 states, the federal government and the US military. His case, like those of the more than 2,200 men and women languishing on death rows across America, epitomizes what passes for the criminal “justice” system in America.

Williams, a 55-year-old African-American man, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1998 stabbing death of St. Louis reporter Felicia Gayle. He has consistently maintained his innocence.

Williams’ jury included only one black juror. Two witnesses implicating Williams in the murder, including a former cellmate of Williams and his ex-girlfriend, both sought $10,000 in reward money for information leading to a conviction. The jury never heard evidence that Williams’ former girlfriend may have planted Gayle’s laptop in his car.

There is no forensic evidence tying him to the crime. Physical evidence left at the scene—bloody fingerprints, footprints and hairs found—do not match Williams.

The Socialist Equality Party stands for the abolition of the death penalty in all cases. Those put to death comprise the most vulnerable in society and are overwhelmingly working class and poor.

Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 1,595 individuals have been executed, including 22 sentenced for crimes committed as juveniles, 34 foreign nationals, 18 women and 16 federal prisoners. Human Rights Watch says at least 35 individuals with intellectual disabilities have been put to death.

Since 1973, at least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US have been exonerated of their crimes, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). There is no way to determine how many of the 1,595 people executed since 1976 may have been innocent and wrongly convicted, but DPIC estimates that at least 20 people with strong evidence of innocence have been put to death.

The death penalty is the most abhorrent expression of the American gulag that imprisons more than 2 million citizens and residents in its prisons and jails. There is no civilized way to carry out a state killing, but that hasn’t stopped authorities from devising new, supposedly “humane” methods.

The last death by hanging took place in 1996, generally giving way to the gas chamber and the electric chair. Lethal injection has been used in 1,414 of the 1,595 executions carried out since 1976. There have been numerous cases of “botched” executions by lethal injection, in which prisoners have writhed in agony on the execution gurney as the executioners try to insert IV lines, or the patient is not adequately sedated.

Most recently, Alabama authorized the use of nitrogen hypoxia, which should be more correctly called suffocation or asphyxiation. The state has already carried out one execution by this gruesome method, leaving witnesses horrified as the prisoner thrashed against his restraints and attempted to remove his mask.

The entire US political establishment supports the death penalty, including the two big-business parties and the US Supreme Court. While the nation’s high court has ruled the execution of juveniles and the intellectually disabled unconstitutional, its support for the practice of capital punishment has remained intact since 1976.

The Democratic Party’s 2016 and 2020 platforms paid lip service to halting executions, but its program in 2024 makes no mention of the death penalty or capital punishment. This is not an oversight. The Democrats’ support for the death penalty is of a piece with its embrace of violence and death on both a domestic and global scale.

The US and Russia are on the verge of open warfare as reports surface that the US and UK will soon allow Ukraine to use NATO missiles to strike deep into Russian territory. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has repeatedly stressed her ironclad support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, which has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands.

Trump and the Republicans, meanwhile, are engaged in a campaign of fascist incitement targeting immigrant workers. Donald Trump ran on the Republic Party’s platform in 2016, which decried the “over-federalization of criminal justice” and said that the constitutionality of the death penalty had been “firmly settled.” It condemned the US Supreme Court for what is described as the “erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment.”

Capital punishment must be abolished as a barbaric and anti-democratic relic of the past and outlawed as a violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The defense of democratic and social rights, including abolition of the death penalty, is inseparable from the fight for socialism and raises the necessity for the political organization of the working class, independent from the Democrats.

The fight to end the death penalty must be developed as part of a movement of the working class against the entire apparatus of state repression—a monstrous expression of the reality of class rule in the United States—and the capitalist system that it exists to defend.

The Socialist Equality Party, as part of an international movement, fights for the abolition of the capitalist state and establishment of a workers government, which will be tasked with abolishing capital punishment along with defending the right to a job, a livable income, high-quality healthcare and other basic social rights.

Stop the execution of Marcellus Williams!
Abolish the death penalty!
Build a socialist movement to defend the basic social rights of the working class!