Marcellus Williams & Travis Mullis: The Death Penalty in Black and White

Marcellus Williams (L) and Travis Mullis (R)

On Tuesday, within an hour of one another, two men were put to death by the states of Missouri and Texas. One was a black man that was convicted for the 1998 stabbing of a 42-year-old white female journalist, but whose case had such questionable evidence that the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney recently submitted a joint motion with the defense counsel to overturn a court decision to reject the defendant's appeal. The other was a white man who confessed to the killing his of his own son in 2008 and had waived his right to appeal. While the cases are vastly different in circumstances, they signify the current state of the death penalty and vast difference of how it plays out for black and white defendants. These are my reflections on the Marcellus Williams and Tavis Mullis cases, their significance as the current status of the death penalty in this country, and why they signify the need to end it.

The Cases of Marcellus Williams and Travis Mullis

Marcellus Williams was accused of the death of a 42-year-old journalist, who was found stabbed 43 times by a knife found in her home, just outside of St. Louis. The evidence used against him was primarily the confession of two witnesses that were both questionable due to incentives for leniency with their separate criminal cases, as well as reward money. In fact, although the reward was supposed to be paid upon conviction, prosecutors encouraged the family to pay one of the witnesses $5,000 upfront when it appeared that his cooperation might be waning.

There was no physical evidence to back up the claims of the witnesses, the bloody shoeprints found at the scene were a different size than Williams’s feet, and the fingerprints on the scene were deemed unusable by the state and then destroyed before the defense had a chance to analyze them. The only connection was the victim's husband's laptop, which one of the informants claimed Williams sold to his grandfather's neighbor for crack. The man denied this claim and stated Williams told him that he gotten the laptop from the informant and was selling it for her. Unfortunately for Williams, the prosecutors objected to the man's testimony, and the jury never heard it.

Williams did have a lengthy criminal history and had just begun serving a 20-year sentence for robbing a doughnut shop when he was charged with murder. Apparently, that along with the questionable witnesses was enough for a jury, of which only one was black due to a questionable selection process, and they found Williams guilty in less than 90-minutes of deliberation. Williams was denied DNA testing before his trial and it wasn't until 2015 that he was able to test the murder weapon, which revealed DNA that was not his. It was later found that the DNA belonged to someone previously in the prosecutor's office who handled the weapon without gloves after the initial testing. This led to both the Prosecuting Attorney's office and the family of the victim to agree to allow Williams to enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole, but the state's attorney general blocked it. Just before Williams was executed, he wrote "All Praise Be to Allah In Every Situation!!!"

In Travis Mullis' case, there wasn't much controversy on the evidence, seeing that Mullis confessed to the crime. In short, Mullis attempted to assault an 8-year-old girl, and hours later molested, strangled, and stomped his 3-month-old son to death. It was a horrific crime, to which Mullis, who himself had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child by his adoptive father, took full accountability for. Similar to serial killer Jeffery Dahmer, Mullis also asked to be executed in a letter he wrote to the Houston Chronicle for his execution to be carried out "ASAP."

Death Row Cases in Black and White

After years of casually paying attention to the details of capital cases I ran across, I noted that it seemed that white defendants only got the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, like Dylan Roof who killed members of a church to start a "race war" or stomping their infant children like Mullis, where black defendants seemed to end up on death row for things like a robbery that ended with someone dying. Upon closer examination, it appeared that death row was even more biased against black defendants than the criminal justice system at large. Even though blacks only make up about around 13% of the population, they constitute 37% of the people incarcerated, 41.9% of death row inmates, and 52.2% of death row exonerees.

If this extreme bias wasn't enough, the extreme error rate with the death penalty should make one pause. Bryan Stevenson notes that for every nine people we've executed over the last several decades, one person was proven innocent. Those are ridiculously high rates, considering a person's life is at stake. Also, it should be noted that these are just the cases where there was evidence available for the defendant to subsequently prove their innocence. Unfortunately, in Williams' case, he was unable to do so because the prosecutors mishandled the evidence in his case. But his case shows how many defendants find themselves trying to prove that they are not guilty, after already being convicted of a crime they did not commit. This in itself is an inversion of the law which is supposed to require the state prove the defendant is guilty, instead of the defendants having to prove themselves innocent. Combine that with the fact that black people are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of a crime, and you have a system which is far too inaccurate to literally put someone's life in the balance.

Finally, as I mentioned in a pervious blog, death penalty sentences are far more expensive than life sentences. The average death sentence costs an additional $2 million per inmate. This translates to more than $5 billion of tax money being spent on the more than 2,500 death row inmates. This extreme bias, error rate, and financial burden are all ample reason to end the death penalty immediately.

In Order to Prevent Killing Potentially Innocent People, We Have to Be Alright with Allowing "Evil" People to Live Too

Part of the issue some may have with abolishing the death penalty, is the idea that it will not be an option for the "evil" people, who commit the most heinous crimes. Even more, as I noted earlier in cases like Mullis and Dahmer, some of the defendants ask for the death penalty. I have considered that point long and hard but have concluded that it appears that a person is more likely to be wrongfully executed, than executed for a seriously heinous crime. In other words, since our criminal justice system seems to be filled with more cases like Marcellus Williams than Travis Mullis, it would make more sense to justify allowing the occasional clearly guilty Mullis to live, in order to keep from executing countless potentially innocent Williams.

In 2021, I wrote a blog where I noted my personal evolution on the death penalty and how Mullis' case was a part of the journey. My wife and I actually randomly had a brief encounter with Mullis with his then pregnant girlfriend in the maternal waiting room at the hospital here in Houston back in October 2007, when we were awaiting the birth of our children. As our daughter, is about to celebrate her 17th birthday, Mullis' son, who was born around the same time will be forever 3-months. What Mullis did to his son was beyond awful, and he even noted his remorse for his actions in his final words. He was clearly a troubled individual, who as noted earlier had experienced a long history of abuse himself as a child. That being the case, actions from troubled individuals like Mullis, as bad as they may be, don't compare to allowing the government to continue to kill people who are likely innocent of the crimes they have been convicted of.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Williams and Mullis cases are not anomalies, but the latest examples of the current state of death row. In the Williams case, biases and errors likely led to the death of a man innocent of the crime he was convicted of, whereas in the Mullis case a man who committed a heinous crime got his desired death to be carried out by the state. Both results seem to be unfortunate to me and furthers my belief that we need to abolish the death penalty immediately.