Yes, Innocent People Have Been Executed. But the Death Penalty Is Also Slowly Being Phased Out.

The arc of history bends against state-sponsored executions.

Photo by Tamara Gore on Unsplash

Last night, the state of Missouri executed death row prisoner Marcellus Williams.

Williams spent over two decades behind bars, having been convicted of a 1998 murder.

His execution faced fierce opposition because of questions about his guilt. From the local prosecutor’s office that originally convicted him to the family of the murder victim, several key actors came to believe that the case against him was fundamentally flawed and that he really was, as he had always maintained, innocent.

But on Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a bid to delay his execution, settling his fate.

The execution of a man many believed to be innocent provoked understandable outrage. How could the state of Missouri move forward with the execution of a man so many people reasonably believed was innocent?

As I thought about the Williams case, I recalled when my state of Georgia executed Troy Davis. In Davis’s case, most of the witnesses ended up recanting their testimony. Everybody from former Republican congressman Bob Barr to the Pope called on the state to spare his life.

I recall asking then-Republican Senator Johnny Isakson about the Davis case when he appeared at an event at the University of Georgia. He told me, with all seriousness, that I needn’t worry — our criminal justice system is so thorough that it doesn’t make mistakes like that. He said he had “complete faith” in the system that ended up killing Davis.

Sadly, the execution of innocent people is not a rarity, whatever Isakson believed. In the past five decades, at least 200 people were on death row who were later exonerated after their deaths. Unlike other criminal penalties, the death penalty is completely irreversible. Even someone sent to wrongfully sent to prison can be monetarily compensated when they’re exonerated. But the death penalty offers no such chance for state repentance.

Yet the good news for the wrongfully convicted is that we’re we’re using the death penalty less and less. In 1999, almost 100 people were executed; in 2019, 22 people were executed. Many of the states that have the death penalty haven’t used it in more than a decade.

That’s probably part of why it’s never shown to be much of a deterrent — most people who commit even the most heinous crimes are never at risk of being executed. Yet some of those who do end up on death row often have few legal resources to get a fair hearing, which is part of why you get cases where there is a cloud of uncertainty like those of Williams and Davis.

For those who oppose the death penalty, the ever-vanishing use of the punishment has to be satisfying — it looks like it’s on it’s way out, as more and more states outlaw the practice and even those who do use it are handing down the sentence less and less.

And for those who support capital punishment, at least they can take some comfort in the reality that rarer use of the death penalty also means fewer innocent people potentially being handed a sentence that cannot be reversed.

*This post has been updated to correct the fact that 200 people have been exonerated who were on death row, not all were executed.