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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

> Greitens set up a panel to review the case but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed.

> In January, Wesley Bell, the Democratic prosecuting attorney in St Louis who has championed criminal justice reforms, filed a motion to overturn Williams’s conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA testing finding that Williams’s fingerprints were not on the knife.

> The governor also rejected Williams’s clemency request on Monday, which noted that the victim’s family and three jurors supported calls to revoke his death sentence. The US supreme court denied a final request to halt the execution on Tuesday, with the three liberal justices dissenting.

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>Bell cited repeated DNA testing finding that Williams’s fingerprints were not on the knife.

Why would DNA testing have anything to do with fingerprints?

This is like using pylint to look for errors in your FORTRAN code.

> Why would DNA testing have anything to do with fingerprints?

Just the Guardian being the Guardian. Fortunately, they link to their source which states "three DNA experts examined testing from the knife 'and each has independently concluded that Mr. Williams is excluded as the source of the male DNA on the handle of the murder weapon'" [1].

[1] https://apnews.com/article/missouri-death-row-inmate-dna-evi...

Thanks for that. Wow, that's some shoddy journalism: does the Guardian writer not know the difference between DNA and fingerprints?

Apparently "staff with the prosecutors’ office had mishandled the weapon after the killing – touching it without gloves before the trial," which "made it impossible to determine if Williams’s fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier." Looks like wires getting crossed and nobody editing.

(Of course, that comes from the same Guardian article.)

Maybe a clumsy attempt at referring to DNA fingerprinting [0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling

Ok, so in this case it's party politics after all. Which means Mr. Williams might still be alive if this wasn't an election year?

> Mr. Williams might still be alive if this wasn't an election year?

Parson isn't running for governor this year [1]. He's focussed on his legacy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Missouri_gubernatorial_el...

Thanks for the info, but it's still an election year, in which Republicans generally want to demonstrate how "tough on crime" they are, so in this case they are more likely to set an example, especially if a Democrat opposes it?

> are more likely to set an example, especially if a Democrat opposes it?

This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis--everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. What we can say is the people involved have had consistent positions for years as this case snaked its way through Missouri's and our nation's highest courts.

To the extent there are near-term electioneering interests, it's on the part of the prosecutor who sought to overturn the conviction: Mr. Bell is the Democrats' Congressional candidate for Missouri's 1st District [1].

[1] https://missouriindependent.com/2024/08/06/wesley-bell-defea...

Killing someone on flimsy evidence while being fully aware that it’s incredibly flimsy evidence in order to “win votes” is some of the most abhorrent shit of all time.

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