Abolition Now by Chris Byrd
Forty years ago this month, as recalled in Sister—a documentary about Sister Helen Prejean—I marched with others 77 miles over three days from outside New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s state capitol, to protest the state’s death penalty.
Ill prepared for our arduous enterprise, we didn’t apply enough sunscreen and discovered moleskin’s benefits belatedly. The 25 of us—including Sister Helen—who marched appeared to be, as the local reporter described us, “a rag-tag band of protesters.”
Recovering from each day’s walk, we liberally applied Bengay to our aching joints and joked about it smelling like an old folks’ home. On the last Sunday in October, sweaty, sunburned, nursing blisters and with very sore legs, we arrived at the capitol for a concluding late-afternoon rally.
That march transformed me into an abolitionist, but in that moment’s headiness I didn’t fully grasp how difficult it would be to move hearts and change minds on this issue. And I didn’t anticipate that I’d still need to make the case for abolition five decades later. Working in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and Washington, DC, to end state killing has often felt like “like pulling a piano through a plowed field,” as the late Jesuit priest, poet, and activist Daniel Berrigan famously said.
Consider the travesty that occurred when Missouri killed Marcellus Williams on September 24 of this year.
A 55-year-old Black man, Williams was on death row for 24 years for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. During a home burglary, the white journalist was brutally stabbed 43 times with her own kitchen knife.
The physical evidence didn’t link Williams to the murder, however. He was convicted largely based upon the conflicting, inconsistent testimony of two witnesses, who later indicated they were paid to testify against Williams.
This flimsy pretext for conviction appeared to collapse in 2016, when DNA testing pointed toward Williams’s innocence. Affirmed by three independent reviews, these tests determined that Williams couldn’t have been the source of the DNA found on the murder weapon. Earlier DNA testing had concluded that Williams’s DNA wasn’t discovered on the crime scene’s bloody footprints and hair.
Former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, appointed a board of inquiry to review Williams’s case and recommend actions for the governor to take. (Facing impeachment over public corruption and sexual assault allegations, Greitens resigned as governor in June 2018.)
Greitens’s replacement, Republican Mike Parson, improperly disbanded the inquiry board and lifted the stay on Williams’s execution in June 2023, clearing the way for September’s lethal injection.
More than one million petitions protested the execution. Felicia Gayle’s family stated that they didn’t support capital punishment for Felicia’s killer. St. Louis county prosecutor Wesley Bell filed suit to overturn Williams’s conviction. When the prosecutors’ appeal was denied, they offered Williams an Alford plea to reduce his death sentence to life without parole.
Despite these objections, pleas, and offers of mercy—offers that would still have kept the public safe—to save Williams’s life, Missouri’s Republican attorney general Andrew Bailey overrode Williams’s plea deal, thus sealing his fate.
We don’t know precisely how many executed individuals were likely innocent since the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1976, but the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) documents more than 20 people who were killed with credible innocence claims. For every 8.2 people executed, one person has been found innocent, and 200 death row prisoners have been exonerated since 1976, according to the DPIC.
Williams is one of more than 1,600 individuals killed by the state since 1977. Contending with his execution in a week when four other executions were happening nationally was especially dispiriting.
Yet remarkable change and progress convince me that capital punishment’s days are numbered. Public support for state killing has dropped dramatically. According to the DPIC, support for the death penalty peaked in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans favored it. Now, according to a 2023 Gallup poll, 50 percent of Americans believe capital punishment is applied unfairly.
Additionally, a majority of US states (26) don’t carry out executions. Twenty-three states have abolished capital punishment, including Virginia—once home to the former confederacy’s capitol, Richmond, and a state that has killed 1,390 individuals, more than any other state in US history. Oregon, California, and Pennsylvania have all imposed moratoria on executions.
Changes in Catholic teaching also reflect the movement toward abolition. The church once defended capital punishment as a legitimate exercise of the state’s authority, but in 2018 Pope Francis’s statements created a welcome catechism revision: “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
Encouraged by these developments, I still hope our movement will persuade enough people in death-penalty states to embrace this consensus: The death penalty doesn’t make us safer and better or bring victims’ families closure; we can be safe and hold murderers accountable without sinking to the perpetrator’s level; and our society won’t be whole until we end this cruel and unusual punishment. ♦
Chris Byrd is the author of Sisters: The Extraordinary Lives of Serena and Anna Marie Branson.
Great reflection, Chris. Thank you. Folks who want to help protest executions can start by singing the petitions at DeathPenaltyAction.org