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Congresswoman Cori Bush delivered a speech on the House floor urging Missouri Governor Mike Parson to halt the execution of Marcellus Williams (above)… set to die by injection for the 1998 stabbing death of Felicia Gayle… “Taking the life of Marcellus Williams would be an unequivocal statement that when a white woman is killed, a Black man must die. And any Black man will do,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote. —KMOV, September 20, 2024 |
We’ll make them pay for what they haven’t done.
The stakes are life and death, not right and wrong.
Are you surprised? We’ve said it all along,
this slogan on which we have always run:
the innocent have got off far too long.
A war is on! Which side do you belong
to? If it’s ours, then shun all whom we shun:
the stakes are life and death, not right and wrong.
Or do you see yourself among the throng
that’s gathered there to shout he’s not the one?
Mistakes? It’s life and death, not right and wrong.
The swans will have to sing another song.
They say we’ve gone too far? We’ve just begun.
The innocent have got off far too long.
Above all else the law must show it’s strong
and if you’re stunned we mean to more than stun
the innocent—they’ve got off far too long.
The stakes are life and death, not right and wrong.
Author's note: Marcellus Williams, at the time of writing, is scheduled to be executed by the state of Missouri on Tuesday, September 24, for a crime of which he is now clearly not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but of which his actual guilt or innocence may be beside the point under US law. St. Louis prosecutors have been trying to get his conviction overturned. But as a lawyer for the state of Arizona argued before the US Supreme Court in 2021, in a case which may be decisive for Marcellus Williams's, "innocence isn't enough.”
Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville,” where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry.