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Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
This drives me nuts. We aren't playing "Reasonable Doubt" anymore. Reasonable Doubt ran out when he got convicted. The disrespect for the ordinary juryman, the sneering contempt which the intelligentsia holds for the idea of normal citizens being allowed to sentence them or their pet prisoners. The arrogance of the kind of person who thinks that they skim a Slate article or listen to a podcast and their judgment is suddenly superior to that of twelve people, sworn to a sacred and serious duty, who listened to evidence presented by professionals for days on end and considered it carefully in conference with each other. The hatred for the Public Defender, surely a useless waste. The assumption that the Prosecutor is surely biased, but the journalist surely isn't.
Legally we can talk about the standards behind various technicalities and whatnot on appeal and the systemic importance of those technicalities (one man's loophole is another man's subsidy), but if we're talking about actual innocence the standard has to be a lot higher than Reasonable Doubt before I'm gonna give a damn. One has to be presenting evidence that no reasonable jury could have convicted, or evidence that someone else did it beyond a reasonable doubt. In this case, no evidence has been offered that any other suspect is even reasonable, let alone likely, to have committed the crime. Nor has any alibi been offered. Nor is there even significant evidence offered of prosecutorial malfeasance, just that the evidence seems weak to somebody with an axe to grind.
I can respect the true anti-death penalty activists. One has to laugh at the continued ideological degradation of the Mises caucus into some kind of weird turbo-Reaganite party. There's nothing wrong with taking the position that the government shouldn't be in the execution business, and I tend to agree that our current system is a farce: either we should brutally and efficiently execute people within a year or two of the crime, or we shouldn't execute them at all. But don't pretend to me that you actually find it more likely than not that this guy is innocent, or turn him into some kind of moral paragon.
I think the case is even stronger for juries here: failure to convict requires just one out of twelve to hold out on voting guilty.
Jury dynamics of the "I just want to go home" variety make this weaker, but I think it's still quite strong. One in twelve gives you a good chance of drawing a concientious and disagreeable person that would always refuse to vote guilty if the evidence was unconvincing for them.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Non-unanimous juries are pretty rare for most things, so what do you mean by here?
I actually think that death penalty cases in most states (I'm not super familiar with Missouri) are weaker because of jury selection dynamics that allow prosecutors to strike jurors who aren't "death penalty qualified" from the jury. Meaning that if the prosecutor intends to seek the death penalty, he can ask the prospective jurors if they believe in the death penalty, and remove any jurors who wouldn't impose it. Naturally, just look at the thread, people who are pro-death penalty are also more likely to be anti-criminal and pro-police in general. So just by asking for the death penalty, the prosecutors are assuring themselves of a friendly audience for their whole case.
Conviction requires consensus. The system is biased strongly against conviction. The defense only needs one juror to take their side. The prosecution needs all of them.
Not really. A hung jury doesn't return ANY verdict, the prosecution can just try again, which in a murder they would tend to do.
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