The death penalty in Missouri doesn’t always seem like justice. Even if you’re a supporter of capital punishment in theory, the Show-Me State’s real-life track record is troubling, reported The Kansas City Star. Missouri officials often seem too eager to carry out executions, too slow to give credit to claims of innocence.
It’s only been a few months, for example, since Missouri put
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams to death. Williams had long maintained his
innocence of the 1998 killing that sent him to the death chamber, and his
efforts to avoid execution were backed by both the prosecutor’s office and the
victim’s family.
“If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the
death penalty should never be an option,” St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley
Bell said at the time. That’s right. To execute an innocent man — or even a
potentially innocent man — is horrifying. Or it should be. Missouri executed
Williams anyway.
So it’s troubling that the Missouri General Assembly is now
considering a bill that would actually expand the use of capital punishment.
The bill, S.B. 196, would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for
people accused of statutory rape and the sex trafficking of a child. It’s a bad
idea.
Dispensing with the moral math Right now, capital punishment
in Missouri — and across the country — is based on a simple “life for a life”
math that might be morally debatable, but at least makes a certain amount of
intuitive sense when it comes to the crime of murder: The taking of a life ends
up being both the crime and the punishment.
The new bill, introduced by state Sen. Mike Moon, and Ash
Grove Republican, dispenses with that logic. It would empower the state to
execute people convicted of crimes where no death at all occurred. Again, bad
idea. Make no mistake: Child sex crime cases are heinous, a shock to the
conscience. I’ve personally seen a fellow journalist weep in court while
listening to testimony in one case.
In another trial, I witnessed a prospective juror thrown off
the panel after she started yelling in outrage about a father accused of
molesting his daughter. It’s easy to see the appeal of applying the most
extreme punishment to such terrible crimes. But executing somebody for a sex
crime upends capital punishment’s moral math, doesn’t it? It’s a step away from
“life for a life” territory that — whatever its merits and faults — at least
puts pretty strict bounds on the legal ability of the state to kill its
citizens.
If you’re a limited government fan, you probably should want
to keep those particular limits in place. Death ‘reserved for the worst crimes’
The more immediate challenge, though, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has long
since ruled that it is unconstitutional for states to execute people convicted
of non-homicide crimes.
Capital punishment “must be reserved for the worst of crimes
and limited in its instances of application,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony
Kennedy wrote in 2008. In most cases, Kennedy ruled, “justice is not better
served by terminating the life of the perpetrator rather than confining him and
preserving the possibility that he and the system will find ways to allow him
to understand the enormity of his offense.” He was right. It was a good ruling.
And it would seem to block the bill being considered in the Missouri Senate.
The Supreme Court is much more conservative now than it was
in 2008, though, so who knows? Missouri, of course, has its own problems with
the fair administration of justice. A 2023 report from the Death Penalty
Information Center found that 40% of Missouri executions since 1972 were of
Black people, who make up just 12% of the state population.
And of course, Missouri’s attorneys general — not just
Andrew Bailey, the current holder of the office — are notorious about resisting
every innocence claim that comes down the pike, no matter the merits. Which
means the question, then, is this: Do you trust Missouri officials with even
more death penalty powers? Maybe you shouldn’t.
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