My Reasonable Doubt about the Death Penalty

It’s impossible not to consider the futility of the death penalty after Missouri executed Marcellus Williams. He was convicted of murdering Felicia Gayle during a burglary of her St. Louis-area home in 1998, but serious questions about his actual guilt have persisted. Rather than staying the execution, as many hoped he would, Governor Michael Parson relied on the jury conviction and allowed Williams to be put to death on September 25.

Relying on a jury, whose members determine guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” – and thus life or death in capital cases – is not new. Understanding where this process comes from, and how it was intended to be used, makes it clear that Americans need to reckon with what legal scholar James Q. Whitman calls the “theological roots of the criminal justice system.”

This history tells us it’s long past time to abandon the death penalty.

In the medieval era, Christian Europeans used “the ordeal” to determine guilt or innocence of a suspected criminal. The accused endured a series of painful physical traumas, which judges hoped would extract a confession. God would save the innocent, and let the guilty perish.

That was probably of little comfort to the accused witches and heretics of the age.

Jury trials replaced this blood sport, and put the onus of determining guilt onto members of society. In England, whose common law system the United States inherited, jurors were reluctant to condemn someone to death because the prospect of killing an innocent person had real consequences for one’s soul. Even judging others – the requisite function of jurors – posed a threat to Christian theology. It was a sin that invited the wrath of God and eternal damnation.

But justice on earth depended on mere mortals. By the 18th century, the scholar Whitman tells us, reasonable doubt was firmly cemented as the way “to ease the fears of those jurors who might otherwise refuse to pronounce the defendant guilty.”

Essentially, reasonable doubt meant jurors could and should acquit defendants if they had good reason to doubt the evidence on which he or she was tried. They should ignore any “scruples,” or doubts raised by foolishness or propriety. It was, above all, about protecting the souls of jurors, and recognizing their status as fallible humans who did not have the omniscience of God, but nevertheless had the responsibility to mete out justice.

Perhaps most important for us today, the doctrine of reasonable doubt had nothing to do with determining truth.

In contrast, today’s criminal procedure is ostensibly dedicated to finding “the truth.” The development of forensic science and criminal justice education would be unrecognizable to those in earlier eras who worried about salvation. DNA testing, fingerprinting, psychological analysis of suspects, forensic analysis of evidence are, first and foremost, about establishing facts that can be used to determine who committed any given crime, and establish when, how, and why they did so.

Undoubtedly, the jurors who voted to convict Marcellus Williams believed that the evidence presented to them by the prosecution proved that Williams was guilty.

But what might have seemed reasonable at the time of the initial trial seems suspicious in light of new evidence. The Midwest Innocence Justice Project – part of the national organization that advocates for wrongly convicted people – says problems with the initial trial and newly provided exculpatory evidence all point to an unknown assailant as Gayle’s murderer.

The DNA on the murder weapon does not match Williams, there is no scientific or eyewitness evidence that places him at the scene of the crime, and the witness testimony on which jurors relied was allegedly paid for by the prosecutors in the case.

This is not to say that there is no evidence at all that links Williams to the crime. As Governor Parson’s statement notes, for example, he was found with Gayle’s property after her murder.

Despite this, neither the family of the victim nor the current St. Louis prosecutor, Wesley Bell, wanted the execution to go forward. At the very least, they believed more time needed to be spent determining the truth of the matter before a man paid for a crime with his life. Anything else would be, according to Bell, “manifest injustice.”

Ultimately, as Whitman’s assessment of reasonable doubt reminds us, “instructing jurors forcefully that their decision is ‘a moral one’ about the fate of a fellow human being, is…the only meaningful modern way to be faithful to the original spirit of reasonable doubt.”

But even with that heavy moral responsibility, mistakes can and do occur. Cases like Williams’s underscore the fallibility of the legal process and that there cannot ever be an absolute guarantee of guilt. That should trouble those of us living in a nation that largely supports the death penalty.

There are many good reasons to abandon capital punishment. It doesn’t deter crime and isn’t cost effective either.

But given the medieval origins of the doctrines that preserve the death penalty, that they are not based on finding the truth, and that even in the face of contradictory new evidence we can still use them to justify putting someone to death, it’s clear, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it’s time to abolish the capital punishment. It might just save some souls.