(((tedfrank))) on X - "Marcellus Williams was a guilty guilty murderer who should’ve been executed decades ago. I would flip the switch on the electric chair myself and sleep like a baby without second thoughts."
Bernard Stanford ✡︎ on X - "The Innocence Project et. al. could have chosen the posture of a neutral observer, carefully checking the legal system's work. But instead they've chosen to be just more defense counsel, totally willing to cynically argue in bad faith for their client. In every case I've looked into that they've surfaced in recent years, bar none, their position has distorted the facts, used specious logic, or simply ignored the key evidence of guilt. As best I can tell, the organization is largely staffed by people with ideological commitments against the death penalty or incarceration more broadly, who therefore don't actually feel a commitment to a factual state of innocence; they don't see innocence as a necessary component of the punishment being unjust. Getting the client out of punishment is a good in itself, by hook or by crook. Sure, sure, the evidence is overwhelming that Williams murdered Lisha Gayle, if you must be so small-minded about it, but after all, isn't there far more evidence that Williams is himself a victim of the true villain, America?
One other point. While the death penalty can be debated, separating this man from the public for good has almost certainly prevented serious harm or death from befalling further innocent people. We don't have any other solution for this."
Richard Hanania on X - "My inclination is always to trust the juries and judges who look at these cases and keep deciding these guys are guilty over anti-death penalty activists."
wanye on X - "Days like today are a demonstration of one of the most powerful arguments in favor of the death penalty, which is that leftists absolutely will not stop trying to free violent criminals from prison and the only way to guarantee that they won’t eventually succeed in any particular case is to kill them
One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is that we can achieve all of our policy goals with life in prison, but that ceases to be true if leftists are able to free violent criminals after their convictions"
Michael Tracey on X - "A few points on the execution yesterday of Marcellus Williams in Missouri, much of which seems to have been ignored in the social media commentary:
- The St. Louis County prosecutor, Wesley Bell, despite asserting deficiencies in Williams' trial, had expressly abandoned his argument for the "actual innocence" of Williams, since DNA re-examination last month showed DNA on the murder weapon that belonged to police investigators who handled the weapon at trial. In other words, there was no DNA of an "unknown person" found on the weapon, thus eliminating the possibility that the murder was committed by an unknown assailant. Williams was alleged to have worn gloves during the murder. (By ceasing to argue for Williams' "actual innocence," the prosecutor ceased to argue that there could be evidence that would affirmatively exculpate Williams)
- The girlfriend of Williams testified that Williams was wearing a stolen jacket following the murder to conceal blood on his clothing, that she found the victim's purse and ID in Williams' car, and that he confessed the murder to her. (See factual summary from circuit court ruling, excerpted below)
- The family of the victim advocated for his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. They did NOT argue that he was innocent of the crime -- they simply objected to the death penalty being imposed
- There may well have been evidentiary deficiencies and/or negligence by investigators at trial 24 years ago, and arguing against the death penalty on principle is a valid position, but to say flatly that an "innocent man" was executed goes against an overwhelming preponderance of evidence"
Meme - hasanabi @hasanthehun: "we are an insanely violent nation, truly broken."
wanye @wanyeburkett: "How anybody could possibly say this and not be referring to the woman who was stabbed more than 40 times in the middle of the day in her own home is something I’m probably just never going to understandJust take Missouri as an example. A couple hundred people are murdered in the city of St. Louis every year. The entire state executes like three people a year. Like half the states don’t do any executions at all. The notion that it’s the death penalty that’s a demonstration of our brokenness is just completely unserious."
Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior) on X - "Marcellus Williams is 100% guilty btw. History of home burglaries, he had property from the murder victim's home in his car, his cellmate, girlfriend & the man he sold the victim's laptop to testified against him. This isn't a remotely difficult case"
Eric on X - "1. Williams was a career criminal who was originally being sentenced to 20 years on separate crimes. He even tried to escape assaulting a guard with a metal bar shortly before the murder trial.
2. Someone who was freshly released from jail told police Williams had confessed the murder to him in detail. The details he revealed in court weren’t made public by police or the media beforehand.
3. The victim's items, a ruler and calculator, were found in Williams’ car.
4. The victim’s laptop was stolen by Williams and was sold to a person who testified, confirming the sale shortly after the murder took place. Williams tried to blame his girlfriend, saying it was her laptop, not his, but there wasn’t evidence to prove that."
Thread by @policelawnews on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Let me clear up the lies about the inevitable Marcellus Williams execution⚡️
1) He confessed to multiple people - including his girlfriend.
2) He had the victim’s purse, ID, clothes, and husband’s laptop in his car.
3) He was convicted. By a jury of his peers.
4) The defense has had over 20 years to produce NEW evidence that proves his innocence - the legal standard post-conviction.
5) DNA testing did not “clear” him.
6) The only DNA found on later testing belonged to members of the prosecution - not a possible other suspect.
7) The DNA was not mishandled by standards in practice 20 years ago.
8) The DNA evidence was collected, without issue, then after collection - the prosecution touched the knife without gloves - as was common - they just didn’t know.
9) The Missouri Supreme Court reviewed ALL of this information & found, “no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,”
10) The only Prosecutor with jurisdiction is the Missouri AG - who said it was a legal conviction, that Williams was found guilty, and petitioned for the execution to proceed.
11) The current local DA, has ZERO jurisdiction over the case. His opinion is irrelevant."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "I don’t care about Williams, he was a murderer and I don’t feel like wasting breath regurgitating the case against him, but here’s something I do find interesting. The innocence project defines racial bias in a jury as the jury being mostly white. What moral quality is the IP painting white people with here?"
wanye on X - "Three strikes law? At this point I’d settle for a ten strikes law, which would have guaranteed that Marcellus Williams, with his staggering 15 prior convictions, would not have been free to murder Felicia Gayle"
Thread by @L0m3z on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Marcellus Williams, Adnan Syed, Steven Avery, Central Park Five... all of these high profile cases where the guy is obviously guilty, why does the lib insist beyond reason the guy is not guilty and make impassioned moralistic pleas that we all submit to their delusion? At bottom, despite the trappings of cosmopolitanism, the lib is a provincial, small-minded creature. The lib, for all his openness and presumptions to empathy, cannot see beyond himself, beyond his own inclinations, cannot imagine there are people who are not at all like him The lib cannot imagine, because the lib is not like this, that people murder, savagely, and then act contrite, sad, can be "just a kid" and simultaneously be a sociopathic lunatic. They see these men and think, "He is just like me, my son. I wouldn't do that. How could they?" The lib, despite his the accusations of moral relativism, is in fact a universalist. "It is all the same everywhere and the human condition is fixed and true and I am at the center of it." This is their universalist fiction. This is the deep core of the globohomo worldview."
O̞͔͍N̝̙̦E̦͓͉ B̘͔̠I̢̠̠G̙̼͙ M̢͉͚O͇͙N͙̟̼S͎͚̫T͇͙̠E̡̺̟R on X - "WE GET IT YOU HATE BLACK PEOPLE AND WANT THEM TO DIE"
(((tedfrank))) on X - "Permanently locking up career criminals would save thousands of black lives a year. Both Marcellus Williams and his victim would be alive today if Missouri had a three-strikes law and he hadn’t been free after his fifteenth conviction to murder."
Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "People have just kind of gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s actually insane that it’s possible to get 15 convictions. Like that literally shouldn’t even be possible.
You really cannot overstate how completely our national conversation about crime has disconnected from reality. In no country that actually mass incarcerated its citizens would it be possible for someone to have 15 convictions and still be free on the street. Therefore, the United States quite plainly does not have a mass incarceration problem. You can’t have a reasonable conversation about this with normal people, because they all take for granted that we do. So basically everybody except me and like five other people on the Internet are wrong about the most basic facts of the case. It is my burden in life to know this thing nobody else knows and to be completely incapable therefore of having normal conversations with my neighbors. We of course do have a lot of people in prison, because we have a crime problem. Not a mass incarceration problem. A crime problem. But we are not in fact quick to put people in jail, which is how you have people with 15 convictions walking into peoples houses in the middle of the day and stabbing them 40 something times with their own kitchen knife. That’s a crime problem, not a mass incarceration problem. Even the mistakes our criminal justice makes I conceive of as downstream of our incredible crime problem. The fact is that the system is stretched way beyond its capacity, because we have so much crime. We get into these debates about whether there was more crime in 2024 or 2020 and how that relates to the peak crime rates in the 1990s, but the fact of the matter is that our crime rates were very high by the standards of our peers around the world in every single one of those years."
Crémieux on X - "DNA evidence in crime elicits a lot of magical thinking. It seems like many people think that if you find irrelevant DNA at a crime scene or you only implicate a few criminals in a group by DNA, that means criminals caught in the act or even people who confessed become innocent."
Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "Yes, you can protect your property from a riotous mob, you cannot murder a woman. The fact progressives can’t move beyond race on these two cases shows you everything about how much race dominates all of their thoughts."
Read Abolish Rent @JoshuaPHilll: "Look at who the state protects and who it murders."
AJ+ @ajplus: "Missouri's GOP governor has pardoned a white St. Louis couple who pointed their guns at anti-racism protesters in 2020. Mark and Patricia McCloskey had both pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. Mark McCloskey remained unapologetic after his plea hearing, saying: "I'd do it again.""
Meme - "Man, I can't believe Missouri just executed that innocent man"
"Oh, the innocent man that had some his victims belongings in his car, confessed to two people with info the public didn't know about, only the cops knew about the details of the murder. That innocent guy?"
"Ignore all of that"
Kim Kardashian on X - "Been crying all morning. Brandon Bernard will be executed in 6 hours."
Maarek on X - "There's no point arguing with progressives over the details of the latest murderer who was executed, they do not care. Brandon Bernard admitted he and his friends shot two youth pastors in the head and set them on fire and they still identified with him rather than his victims."
Will Chamberlain on X - "We need a new right-wing true crime series that does stories on the Innocence Project’s death row clients Libs love true crime, and they start thinking about these cases as though they were true crime docs it will solve much of the stupidity"
Richard Hanania on X - "All death row inmates get armies of leftists setting out to “prove” their innocence or if they can’t then make them appear sympathetic. They go harass the victims’ families, the jurors, the prosecutors, the witnesses, spend decades doing whatever they can to create a new narrative. The media credulously buys whatever they are selling. The story is told through these activists’ eyes. The murderer was abused as a child, he suffered from this or that mental illness, the prosecutor supposedly once said or did something racist, maybe the victim sort of had it coming. There is no equivalent right wing machine going about advocating for the victims and making sure these people get what they deserve. Sometimes justice is delivered anyway, but it’s unfortunately a constant uphill struggle, which is why the death penalty is so rarely carried out. We can’t give up on capital punishment though. As a matter of principle, some people deserve to die, and if we can’t acknowledge that then the world becomes uglier and our society becomes much less worth defending."
Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 on X - "It’s remarkable how every single black guy on death row is a gentle soul who either is completely innocent or just made an innocent mistake brutally murdering someone"
low time preference on X - "Um, that’s every black person ever, except Clarence Thomas."
Skye Luque 🇺🇸 on X - "Every Dateline and 48 Hours episode “He/She was the greatest person I have ever known.”"
Cowboy on X - "“Aspiring rapper, Turning his life around, Going back to college” etc etc etc 🤣 all the while, gang banging with his friends every night, But his mother and aunt said he was a good boy 😭🤣"
