Marcellus Williams deserves more than the justice we’d gladly give a dog | Opinion

I remember when I started doubting police and prosecutors were always the good guys. It was a day in 2008 or 2009 when a police officer gunned down a golden retriever. I noticed because I had started following a young libertarian writer on Twitter named Radley Balko who was writing impassioned articles revealing how police tended to fire first and ask questions later. His reporting revealed a nationwide epidemic of puppycide.

I had always trusted that the thin blue line was protecting me from the bad guys. Anyone shot by police, I comfortably believed, had it coming. But I had grown up with golden retrievers. They are God’s love distilled into a slobbery fur-wrapped package and stripped of all common sense.

If golden retrievers were dying, we had a problem. I am not alone in my affection for critters of the canine sort. People love them so much that a single death can change the law. When a police dog was killed in Kansas last year, the Legislature rewrote the law to make killing a police dog a felony. Today, Sturgeon, Missouri, is in an uproar because a police officer shot a blind, deaf shih tzu last month. The video is all over social media and is making international headlines.

But let me suggest a radical idea: People are more important than dogs. This month, a judge scheduled Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams to die in September. The judge knows Williams is innocent. Prosecutors told him that DNA evidence proves Williams couldn’t be guilty of the murder for which he faces the death penalty. But the judge scheduled him to die anyway.

The prison guards know the man is innocent, yet they keep him in prison. Police, prosecutors and judges know he is innocent, yet all act helpless to just let the guy out. That’s a sign that the system is messed up.

You would think that with the machinery of the state gearing up to take this man’s life, the howls for reform would be deafening. If the police were planning to execute a dog who was innocent of the crimes of which the pup had been accused, you can bet public pressure would open the kennel doors.

For a man like Williams, you can’t get people to pay attention.

I’m embarrassed to say that it took the deaths of dogs to make me think skeptically of the men pulling the trigger on guns more often pointed at people than puppies.

We should be embarrassed that we can change the law because an innocent police dog died, but we can’t do the same for an innocent man.

There’s a lot that needs to be changed to make our criminal justice system a little more sane.

First off — innocence should get you out of prison. If courts can’t do it under current law and governors won’t responsibly use their pardon powers designed with exactly this kind of injustice in mind, then we need to change the law. Gov. Mike Parson clearly isn’t, as he dissolved a state-appointed group of judges looking into whether Williams was innocent

Police need to be more accountable for missteps and deliberate acts that put innocents in prison. The “qualified immunity” that protects police from facing legal consequences should be removed. Lawmakers didn’t create that misbegotten right — the Supreme Court made it up. Qualified immunity works by shielding police from civil rights lawsuits unless a court in a different case already ruled that the exact police misconduct was illegal.

Prosecutors who hide evidence of innocence or threaten witnesses to force dishonest testimony need to face consequences, too. For them, the Supreme Court created “absolute immunity.” It should be reformed, too.

The evidence that puts people in prison needs to be improved as well. Early this century when the National Academy of Sciences looked at the forensic evidence used to put people in jail, it found much that was sloppy or not backed by science at all. In the 15 years since then, we’re still finding problems. Convicts should have the right to have the evidence against them reevaluated in light of advancing science.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams is not the only innocent man found in prison. Hundreds have been freed in recent decades after being railroaded through police and prosecutorial misconduct, mistaken or intimidated witnesses and questionable forensic evidence.

If this were happening to dogs, we’d change the law. What excuse do we have not to do it for Williams?

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com

This story was originally published June 11, 2024 at 9:07 AM.