The US Death Penalty and the Pervasive Legacy of Lynching

Part of America’s history is that for hundreds of years, Black men, women, and children were lynched as a tool to enforce racial subjugation and terror. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), during the period between Reconstruction and World War II more than 4,400 Black men, women and children living in the South were killed. The organization—an Alabama-based nonprofit that provides legal representation to those who may have been denied a fair trial for being poor, Black, or both—defines these killings as racial terror lynchings. The EJI notes that an additional 300 people were killed in racial terror lynchings in states outside the South, including 60 documented in Missouri.

Though eventually, racial terror lynchings would become less frequent, some believe that the legacy of lynchings lives on through the death penalty. Indeed, Missouri serves as a grim bookend to this connection.

States that had a higher number of lynchings continue to impose the most death sentences today.

In 1897, Erastus Brown, a young husband and father of two, was lynched in Union, MO. He was arrested for hitting a White woman with a rock, though there was no evidence tying him to the crime. A mob of about 40 White men took him from jail and lynched him from a tree. Law enforcement did not intervene, or was complicit—such as the county prosecutor, who was present at the lynching. The local sheriff refused to investigate his death.

In September, 2024, Marcellus Williams, a Black man, was executed in Missouri for killing a White woman, despite the fact that evidence used in his trial has been called into question, prosecutors have been accused of racial bias, and doubt about his guilt has surrounded his case since the beginning.

The Connections between Race and the Death Penalty

Some see a throughline between the killing of Brown by vigilantes and the killing of Williams over 125 years later by the state. One such group is the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. A 2020 report by the organization found that states that had a higher number of lynchings continue to impose the most death sentences today.

The report found that almost 58 percent of death row prisoners were people of color, up from 45.6 percent in 1980. The report also found that 75 percent of murder victims in cases resulting in an execution have been White, even though only half of murder victims are White (recent studies have supported the finding that a death sentence is more likely if the victim is White); and that defendants of color are disproportionately more likely to be convicted of capital murder. Wrongfully convicted defendants of color spend an average of four years longer on death row than White defendants before being exonerated.

Studies have [found] that a death sentence is more likely if the victim is White.Soberingly, one of the individuals highlighted in the DPIC report was Williams, whose execution last month drew widespread protests across the country. Williams was convicted of the 1998 stabbing death of Felicia Gayle, a White journalist who was murdered during a burglary. Williams’s DNA was not found on the murder weapon. In fact, DNA on the knife was consistent with a prosecutor who worked on Williams’s case and a former investigator with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, calling into question how the evidence had been handled during and after Williams’s trial.

The Williams Case

Williams was convicted primarily based on the testimony of two witnesses—a former girlfriend and a jailhouse informant—whose credibility has come under question. Williams was ultimately convicted by a jury of 11 White people and one Black person. The trial attorney who tried the case admitted that he removed an additional prospective Black juror because he shared a resemblance with Williams.

Although he continued to maintain his innocence, he was subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection. Prior to his execution on September 24, Williams had faced two other execution dates, which had been called off. Williams was the 100th person executed in Missouri since 1989.

Since 1973, 200 former death row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the convictions that sentenced them to death.

In the years following Williams’s 2001 conviction, attorney Wesley Bell, the St. Louis prosecuting attorney, had sought to overturn the conviction, saying that it did not serve the interests of justice. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option,” Bell said in a statement released shortly after Williams’s execution. The execution was also met with opposition from members of Gayle’s family and jurors who had initially sentenced Williams to death.

The Missouri Supreme Court, Republican Governor Mike Parson, and the United States Supreme Court all denied final efforts to halt Williams’s execution, which was among five executions that took place across the country over a seven-day span.

In the wake of Williams’s execution, many across social media referenced the words on the flag that once flew from the NAACP’s New York headquarters during the Jim Crow period: “A man was lynched yesterday.”

The Case against the Death Penalty

For many, Williams’s execution and the fact that there is so much doubt surrounding his guilt point to why the death penalty should be eradicated. As the DPIC notes, with capital cases, there is always the risk of a wrongfully convicted person being sentenced to death: since 1973, 200 former death row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the convictions that sentenced them to death.

In roughly that same time period, 1,600 people have been executed. This means that one in nine people who have been sentenced to death in the last five decades have been exonerated.

Even beyond the fact that capital offense cases risk sentencing a wrongfully convicted person to death, organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative believe that it is morally wrong to sentence anyone to death.

The organization notes, for instance, that “in Alabama alone, over 160 death sentences have been invalidated by state and federal courts, resulting in conviction of a lesser offense or a lesser sentence on retrial.”

As the organization concludes, “A person doesn’t have to be innocent to be wrongly sentenced to death.”