Marcellus Williams has 5 hours to live

September 24, 2024

This past weekend, a number of friends and loved ones called to check on me after Birmingham made national headlines for a mass shooting that took the lives of four young folks and injured 20 more. All mass shootings are awful and tragic. Senseless. But in the days since, the city has nonetheless tried to make sense of it.

Birmingham's mayor wants the Legislature to ban switches, a device that turns a semi-automatic pistol that can fire a few bullets into a machine gun. Colleagues at AL.com have weighed in, one writing that "Birmingham’s blood is on the hands of Alabama Republicans and a silent Trump"; another puts blame squarely on the still-uncaptured perpetrators, "people so empty and unfeeling they’d fire 100 rounds into a crowd of people with a weapon made so imprecise it is fit only for terror."

On cue, the throng of armchair and social media pundits went to the most predictable of places: too few cops, too little trying (or caring) from Birmingham locals, as if would-be murderers stop to assess local law enforcement resources before deciding to shoot up the block.

Having lived in and covered Black-led cities, including in the South, for most of my life, accusing Black communities of indifference to, or even an embrace of, "a culture of violence" by some is about as inevitable as the Tide putting up a W at Bryant-Denny on any given Saturday.

This week, we're not talking about guns. We're going to talk about poverty, one of the leading indicators of whether Americans will be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated.

That includes people who are sentenced to the death penalty.

Tonight, unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes (as of publication they have not), the state of Missouri will execute Marcellus Khaliifah Williams for a crime where there is compelling evidence someone else committed.

Williams' supporters are doing everything they can to stop the execution. Visit the Innocence Project to learn more about the case.

Let's talk about it.

Marcellus Williams: A brief overview

In less than six hours, the state of Missouri could execute an innocent man.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 24 for the murder of a woman near St. Louis. Earlier this week, the state Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson refused to grant clemency even though Williams struck a deal with prosecutors to change his plea and receive life imprisonment last month.

The Innocence Project, which advocates to exonerate people wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, has a public-awareness campaign urging citizens to sign a petition and call on Parson to act. Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin Group and a British business magnate, placed a full-page ad in The Kansas City Star proclaiming Williams’ innocence and urging people to call Parson’s office and demand the execution be stopped.

Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Felicia Gayle. This, despite the fact that no hair or DNA evidence ever linked Williams to the scene.

Williams was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend and a jailhouse informant. Police also found Gayle’s purse and some of her possessions in Williams’ car, and he pawned her husband’s laptop.

Data points were made

Poverty is woefully misunderstood. It is not just brokenness. It's not just earning measly wages. It's not having an empty bank account. It's not simply about lacking material possessions (read: you can have a smartphone and experience poverty).

Broadly, poverty is lacking resources to meet basic necessities for survival, which can include food, shelter and clothing. It can also mean having limited access to education and jobs. It's hard to quantify or solve, which is why public officials seeking solutions to crime tend to look toward targeted local ordinances, state laws, congressional action and presidential executive orders. But a mountain of data exists supporting the strong link between poverty, crime, violence and incarceration.

In short: Address poverty, address violent crime.

—As of 2023, the official poverty rate is 11.1%, which translates to approximately 36.8 million people living in poverty, according to U.S Census Bureau data published in September

—The poverty rate for children under 18 years grew in 2023, at 15.3% in 2023, affecting about 11 million children (Census)

—In 2023, the poverty rate for African Americans was 17.9%, while for Hispanic individuals, it was 16.6% (Census)

—Women are more likely to experience poverty than men. In 2023, 11.9% of women lived in poverty compared to 10.2% of men; families headed by single mothers face the highest poverty rates, with 23.9% living in poverty in 2023 (PovertyUSA)

—People without a high school diploma have a poverty rate of 25.1%, while those with a bachelor’s degree or higher have a rate of only 4% (PovertyUSA)

—The South has the highest poverty rate at 12.4%, while the Northeast has the lowest at 9.8% (PovertyUSA)

—Adults living in poverty are three times more likely to be arrested compared to those who are not in poverty, according to a 2020 study published by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin

—People making under 150% of the federal poverty level are 15 times more likely to be charged with a felony than those with higher incomes (IRP)

—Approximately 40-50% of incarcerated individuals grow up in families in the bottom income quintile of income earners (IRP)

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