The Death Penalty Is Always an Atrocity, Not Just for the Wrongfully Convicted

Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville gave a warning about the United States. “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty,” Tocqueville said, “the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.” Tocqueville’s words still hold true to this day — the prison is a cruel place and the extensions of it, including the death penalty, are no different.

On September 24, at around 6:00 pm Central Time, the State of Missouri executed Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels, whose legal name was Marcellus Williams, by means of lethal injection. Khaliifah spent almost 24 years of his life in prison, many of those years on death row awaiting his imminent execution.

Khaliifah’s case had become a symbol of injustice and the urgent need to abolish the death penalty. Convicted in 2003 for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a social worker and reporter in St. Louis, he was sentenced to death based largely on testimony from his girlfriend and an alleged confession to a cellmate. But Khaliifah may have been innocent.

Newly discovered DNA evidence suggested that someone else, not Khaliifah, may have been responsible for Gayle’s murder, challenging the integrity of his original conviction. Additionally, allegations of racial bias surfaced when it was revealed that the prosecution improperly excluded Black prospective jurors, undermining the fairness of his trial.

And still, despite overwhelming public support for clemency, with over 1.4 million citizens petitioning to spare his life, Gov. Mike Parson denied clemency, and Khaliifah remained scheduled for execution.

Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels should still be with us today.

Instead, his execution has become another product of an unjust system. His execution is a devastating reminder that our criminal legal system is deeply unjust and must be transformed. Where can we start? By abolishing the very practice used to end Khaliifah’s life — the death penalty.

Abolishing the death penalty is not a rhetorical or utopian demand. For decades advocates and organizers have been calling for its end, highlighting its deep-rooted injustices, racial biases and the irreversible mistakes that have led to innocent people being executed.

And while the United States should not be comfortable with wrongfully sentencing incarcerated individuals to death — as in the case of Khaliifah and countless others — we need to push the conversation several steps further. Relying on the binary of innocence versus guilt as the prerequisite for the death penalty only serves to justify its continued existence. This framework implies that executing someone who is actually guilty of their crime is acceptable. Let me be clear: The death penalty should not be an option, regardless of innocence or guilt. The reason, in part, lies in historical injustices.

Modern-Day Lynching and Racism

Khaliifah is not an outlier among victims of the death penalty. As a Black man, he fits neatly within a punishment apparatus through which people of color are more likely to be prosecuted for capital murder, sentenced to death and executed, especially if the victim in the case is white.

The death penalty in the United States directly traces back to the era of lynching. From the enslavement of Black people all the way through the Jim Crow era, lynchings became a form of public execution that promoted racial terror to maintain white supremacy. Though estimates of these numbers vary, between 1882 and 1968, roughly 4,743 lynchings occurred throughout the U.S.

Yet it’s important to note that by 1915, the number of court-ordered executions exceeded lynchings for the first time. Black people soon comprised two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s, a disproportion that persisted over the years.

In the South, racial disparities in executions were abundantly clear. Even as Black people made up only 22 percent of the southern population by 1950, they accounted for 75 percent of executions in the region.

In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in the landmark case Furman v. Georgia, highlighting its similarities to “self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law.” The court noted that if there was any discernible pattern in who was sentenced to die, it was based on race — a basis that is constitutionally unacceptable.

Southern legislators accused the court of destroying the governmental system and quickly passed new death penalty laws. Advocates for Georgia’s revised statute called for more hangings and even suggested public executions as a deterrent. And while the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s new death penalty law in 1976, ruling that capital punishment did not violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, racism and racial bias have continued to be baked into the death penalty.

A decade later, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the court reviewed evidence showing that defendants in Georgia were over four times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white rather than Black. While the court accepted the data to be true, it refused to overturn death sentencing, stating that racial bias in sentencing is “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” From the court’s perspective, proving racial bias required showing intentional discrimination rather than a broader pattern of it. With this decision, the court effectively closed its doors to claims of racial discrimination in sentencing. So long as capital punishment exists, the state will continue to take lives under the guise of justice — but it does not have to be that way.

Normalizing Violence

Supporters of the death penalty often stand on the side of retribution as a true measure of justice. They might say that the death penalty makes communities safer because it ensures that violent people will never return. This perspective, however, fundamentally misunderstands the essence of justice.

The death penalty fails to deliver true justice or enhance safety. Instead, it operates as a form of politically motivated state terror, having claimed the lives of 1,598 individuals in the U.S. since 1973. This misuse of justice does not translate into safer communities but rather perpetuates a cycle of violence and fear.

Many countries worldwide have recognized the failings of the death penalty, leading over 70 percent of nations to abolish it in law or practice. So why has the United States — a nation that purportedly prides itself on upholding human rights — lagged behind, especially when evidence indicates it fails to make our communities safer?

Current statistics surrounding the death penalty reveal its profound flaws. Two hundred people have been exonerated and released from death row since 1972 — individuals who were innocent and on the brink of having their life taken away by the state. Inflicting the death penalty was not only a moral and societal failure, but a miscarriage of justice.

The death penalty not only fails as a deterrent to crime or a means of keeping communities safe — it actively perpetuates cycles of violence. It is murder. By valuing vengeance over rehabilitation and institutionalizing killing as a form of punishment, the state legitimizes the very behavior it seeks to condemn.

The U.S. is sending a dangerous message that taking a life is an acceptable response to wrongdoing, effectively normalizing violence within society. We must ask ourselves: Why are we okay with the state killing someone when the same act is illegal for everyone else?

Justice Is Restorative

It is long overdue to not just acknowledge that the death penalty is an archaic, cruel and inhumane practice that undermines the very principles of justice it purports to serve, but to abolish it. The death penalty has always been — and will forever remain — a tool of oppression. The underlying premise remains rooted in power and retribution rather than rehabilitation.

This movement to abolish the death penalty is not just about opposing a form of punishment; it is about addressing a system that disproportionately affects marginalized communities, perpetuates cycles of violence and fails to provide true justice. It is to say that our definition of justice should not be in how we display our power through taking the life of someone by means of execution, but how we can nurture life in its presence.

Justice is restorative. It is forgiving. It heals, it transforms and it is graceful. We should believe that people can become better; that they should not be ascribed to a mistake of their past — whether innocent or guilty.

Our definition of justice must be grounded in healing, transformation and the reaffirmation of human dignity. That means continuing to build and create rehabilitative measures, like restorative justice, that address the needs of both individuals who have harmed and those who have been harmed.

At the same time, justice must reckon with the current state of violence in this country. It requires addressing the nearly 2 million people in jails and prisons, the millions of people who have been displaced, the legacy of slavery and the price of reparations unpaid, and centuries of disinvestment — organized abandonment — of Black and Brown communities which have left neighborhoods without the resources needed to thrive.

We must remember, too, that to advocate abolition of the death penalty and a better form of justice is not to say that communities should not be kept safe. It means, however, that we must go beyond attending to symptoms of inequity, racism and injustice. Safety then means ensuring that communities can access affordable housing, mental health services and health care, quality education, clean air and water, and a living wage that affords individuals the opportunity to care for themselves and their family.

By abolishing the death penalty and shifting our frame of justice, we can take a stand for human rights, affirming the value of every life — the life of Khaliifah and the countless others — and perhaps take a step toward a more just society.