US Death row list: the prisoners who are facing death penalty process like Marcellus Williams
Condemned prisoners are spending ever more time on death row. Marcellus Williams spent over two decades on death row before his execution on Tuesday.
Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri on Tuesday, the third in the state this year and the 100th since executions resumed in 1989. He was convicted in 2001 of the death of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former newspaper reporter at the St Louis Post-Dispatch. She was stabbed multiple times during a burglary at her home in 1998.
Williams, 55, long maintained his innocence and had asked for a stay of execution to be granted, he had been given two previously in 2015 and 2017, but it was denied by the US Supreme Court. However, the 3 liberal justices disagreed with the conservative majority but didn’t give the reason.
Nor was he granted clemency by the Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson. This was despite local prosecutors asking for his conviction to be overturned and the victim’s family supporting life in jail instead of the death penalty.
His case is not an outlier for those who have been condemned with the maximum penalty. The length of time that prisoners stay on death row has gotten longer, going from an average of five years in the 1980s to over 20 nowadays according to Fair Punishment.
This is in part due to states being unable to procure the drugs needed to make the lethal injection which in some of the 27 states that still authorize the death penalty is the only legal method. On the other hand, those who receive a sentence of capital punishment are allowed several judicial paths to appeal the sentence as once it is carried out there is no undoing the result.
US Death row list: the prisoners who are facing death penalty process like Marcellus Williams
Across the United States there were 2,213 prisoners on death row as of July 1, 2024. So far this year there have been sixteen executions and eight more are scheduled before the end of the year. Three quarters of those whose capital punishment sentence has been carried out had spent over 20 years in prison prior to their execution and the same goes for those pending.
In March 2017, the Fair Punishment Project estimated that over 40% of prisoners on death row had been there for more than 20 years. Death Penalty Information Center provides several “examples of prisoners with extraordinarily long stay on death row.”
The length of prisoner’s time on death row before their sentence is executed has raised constitutional questions among some Supreme Court Justices that it may violate their Eighth Amendment rights. However, no case specific to this issue has yet been taken up by the Supreme Court to date.