Last Rites | Jack Hanson
On September 24 at 6:01 PM—still business hours for many Americans—Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, fifty-five, having been led in chains to a room and strapped to a table, was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that, at lower levels, induces sleep, treats seizures, and calms anxious patients before surgery. It is also used to euthanize pets. Williams was accompanied by his imam, while his son and attorneys watched from an adjoining room. He was declared dead nine minutes later. The execution took place at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, the state where Williams, a Black man, had been incarcerated for twenty-one years for the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former journalist who was stabbed to death in her home. He had always maintained his innocence, and his trial had been obviously deficient. A racist jury selection process that reduced the number of Black jurors from seven to one (the prosecutor Keith Larner said that one prospective juror and Williams “looked like they were brothers”), unreliable and incentivized witnesses, …