In 2017, Tory Sanders was extra-judicially murdered in a Mississippi County jail by law enforcement officers who have not been prosecuted or even arrested. We demand justice in his murder.
Discussions about racial justice have swept the nation in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. Missourians must acknowledge the role the death penalty continues to play as an agent of racial discrimination and as a beacon in identifying law enforcement and judicial practices in need of abolition or reform. The death penalty has been a symbol of racial oppression since slavery, through the Jim Crow era and endures today.
Missouri has a long history of demonstrating racism in the prosecution of African Americans. Prosecutors such as Bob McCulloch and Mark Richardson are examples of how racism has infected Missouri’s prosecutor offices. The racially biased culture and practices that underlie the death penalty’s application across the United States symbolize and embody the worst in the American legal system.
For these reasons, the death penalty is an essential element of any meaningful discussion on police reform, prosecutorial accountability, and the criminal legal system as a whole, because it is inextricably linked to police violence, mass incarceration, lynchings, and slavery.
The Death Penalty Information Center has released a new report, Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. This report demonstrates that the victim’s race is most likely to affect whether defendants are charged with a capital crime and sentenced to death, especially when the defendant is African American, and the victim is white.
Missouri’s current death row population reflects the patterns of racial disparity found in research. Homicides involving white victims are seven times more likely to result in execution than those involving Black victims. Homicides involving white, female victims are 14 times more likely to result in execution than those involving African American male victims. The vast majority of defendants on Missouri’s current death row had white victims, although white victims are less than 40% of all murder victims in the state. This shows how Missouri’s death penalty values some lives as more worthy of justice than others.
Even now, Attorney General Eric Schmitt wants to prosecute murders in St. Louis that are presumed to be committed by people of color. Still, he refuses to argue for justice in the murder of Tory Sanders, who is dead at the hands of ill hearted white police officers. He has failed to enforce the law when it comes to Black people murdered by whites. We must end this racist framework of law enforcement on the streets and in the courts.
Missouri’s pattern of racial disparities is highlighted in the Marcellus Williams case. Williams was sentenced to death in 2001 for stabbing a white woman more than twenty times. Williams was prosecuted by Bob McCulloch, whose office had a history of excluding African Americans from juries, and struck six of the seven Black prospective jurors. In the end, Williams was tried by 11 white jurors and one African-American juror. Williams was represented by an attorney who admitted he was unprepared for trial. No physical evidence or eyewitness linked Williams to the crime, and the prosecution’s case relied on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses.
Fifteen years after his conviction, new DNA testing showed that Williams’ DNA was not on the murder weapon. Despite this evidence, the state went ahead with plans to execute Williams. His execution was only halted by Missouri’s governor’s last-minute intervention, who convened a Board of Inquiry to review the case. Three years later, Williams remains on death row.
Missouri’s death penalty is broken for many reasons, including but not limited to racial injustice, disparities in representation and sentencing, and prosecutorial misconduct. Understood in this context, attention to the death penalty’s racial operation becomes even more important as the embodiment of whose lives matter more and whose lives are devalued. Missouri’s history of devaluing Black lives through the use of police and the criminal courts is alive and well today and persists legally and systemically through the use of the death penalty.
Nimrod Chapel Jr. is president of the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP.