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He was fourteen years old when they took him in and questioned him, and he came out of that room having confessed to a double murder. There was no lawyer. There was no parent. Johnnie Savory spent the next thirty years inside. Peoria, Illinois, January 1977. Two teenagers were stabbed to death. Johnnie Lee Savory was fourteen. He was a friend of one of the victims and he had been at the house. Police questioned him over an extended period. He was a child. He had no lawyer with him and no parent in the room. He confessed. He has said ever since — consistently, for decades, in filings and in interviews — that the confession was forced out of him, and that officers fed him the details. He was convicted. His first conviction was overturned on appeal because of how the confession was obtained. **He was tried again, and convicted again** — and the second time around the physical evidence included a pair of trousers said to carry blood, and testimony about a pocketknife. He was sentenced to fifty to a hundred years. He went in at fourteen and he was released on parole in 2006, aged forty-three. He had spent roughly thirty years in custody — his entire adult life up to that point, and the back half of his childhood. And he did not stop. He fought for decades to get the physical evidence DNA tested. Illinois resisted. He had been released, which legally made it harder, not easier — a man on parole has less standing to demand testing than a man still inside. Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Project took it up and pressed for advanced testing. In January 2015, Governor Pat Quinn pardoned him on the basis of innocence, on his last day in office. Savory then sued the City of Peoria. His civil case has been through the federal courts, and the Seventh Circuit revived it after it was initially dismissed. Now hold the two ends of this together, because it is the whole point. A fourteen-year-old was put in a room without his mother or a lawyer and came out confessing to killing two people. It took thirty-eight years from that room to a Governor signing a piece of paper saying he did not do it — and in between, the State of Illinois fought him at every single stage, including after he was already out.** The pardon is not the system correcting itself. It is one man refusing to stop filing for thirty-eight years.

The prosecutor's office that put him on death row asked the court to stop the execution. The victim's own family asked the court to stop the execution. Missouri executed Marcellus Williams anyway. Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter, was killed in her home in University City, Missouri, in 1998. Marcellus Williams was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to death. The case against him rested substantially on two witnesses — a cellmate and a former partner — both of whom stood to gain, including from reward money. No physical evidence tied him to the house. Hair and fingerprints recovered there did not match him. The murder weapon was a kitchen knife left at the scene. DNA testing conducted years later found male DNA on the handle that was not his. It later emerged that the knife had been handled by members of the prosecution team without gloves before trial — which contaminated the evidence and meant the one test that might have settled it could no longer settle anything. The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's office — the office that had obtained the conviction — moved to vacate it. The family of Felicia Gayle opposed the execution. They said they did not want it carried out in their name. The Missouri Attorney General fought to proceed. The Governor declined clemency. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. Marcellus Williams was executed on 24 September 2024. He was fifty-five. Count who was asking for it to stop. The prosecutors. The victim's family. Jurors from his own trial, who said afterwards they would have voted differently. And the state did it anyway. Everything else we post about the death penalty is an argument. This one is not an argument. It is a receipt. When even the people closest to the case ask the state to stop, and the execution happens anyway, what does justice mean? Read our book and join us to confront these cases that raise questions we cannot afford to ignore savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…