The Democratic Party was a proponent of abolishing the death penalty from 2016 onwards. The party’s platform in 2016 said that capital punishment was cruel and unusual and expensive to taxpayers, including the risk that the government can kill innocent people. During the 2020 presidential election, the Democratic platform again supported abolishing the death penalty.
Since Biden has gained office, he has shown little action in actually abolishing capital punishment. Now during the 2024 election, the Democratic platform makes no mention of the death penalty. Huffington Post reports that this year’s platform is the first time since 2004 that the platform has not mentioned the death penalty, although there has been an increasing amount of support for abolishing the death penalty. A poll found that 65% of Democrats oppose capital punishment.
Trump during his presidency federally executed 13 people. According to the Huffington Post, Trump allegedly plans to announce his support for expanding the death penalty to non-homicide crimes.
During the 2020 election cycle, when Kamala Harris was running for president, she called the death penalty “immoral, irreversible, and ineffective.” She also said, “the death penalty is far more likely to be carried out against people of color, people with mental illness, and people who could not afford to pay for legal counsel at trial.”
Many people are executed even though there is reasonable doubt that they did not commit the crime they are being killed for.
One such person was Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams.
The state of Missouri executed Williams earlier this year. Williams was a Black Muslim man, convicted of killing a white woman, Felicia Gayle. He was convicted based on the testimony of two eyewitnesses in 2001. Lawyers argued that there was no forensic evidence connecting Williams to the crime scene, and that there was no DNA evidence. Recent DNA testing has shown that the DNA on the knife that was recovered in the crime scene belonged to various members of the prosecturos’ office, who handled the evidence without gloves. The two eyewitnesses who testified against Williams included his then-girlfriend and Henry Cole, who was Williams’ cellmate in 1999 while Williams was jailed for an armed robbery of a donut shop. The eyewitnesses testified due to a $10,000 reward that was being offered at the time.
Despite the claims of innocence, despite the prosecutors’ charge to free him, and despite the hoards of people who rallied to stop the execution, the state of Missouri killed a man.
