Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.”

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.

Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching.”

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.

For Finkelstein’s repost of Kanazi’s words, the college determined that their employee of nine years had violated its equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policies.

“The College at all times follows its mission, policies and procedures with respect to matters arising under our Equal Opportunity and Nondiscrimination Policy and the Faculty Handbook,” said Todd Lineburger, Muhlenberg’s vice president for communications. “Per those policies and procedures, the College does not comment on confidential matters.”

“The First Case”

In this time of extraordinary repression in academia, Finkelstein appears to be the first professor to be dismissed from a tenured job over anti-Zionist speech. Her dismissal sets a grim new precedent against a backdrop of right-wing attacks on higher education nationwide. As The Intercept has reported, numerous professors without the protection of tenure have faced the loss of work in apparent retaliation for speaking out against Israel’s genocidal war and apartheid regime. Hundreds of students have faced and continue to face grave disciplinary consequences for participating in Gaza solidarity encampments and protests.

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In the last 11 months, other tenured professors have been suspended and investigated for making strong criticisms of Israel and Zionism in their extramural speech — statements made outside the classroom. In 2014, in the closest precursor to Finkelstein’s case, Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita sued the University of Illinois for revoking the offer of a tenured position after his tweets criticizing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza drew right-wing media censure. The university settled with Salaita for $845,000 after public records requests revealed that the administration had been responding to pressure from wealthy donors to rescind the job offer.

Until Finkelstein, however, no other tenured professor has reported losing their long-held job for speech or expression relating to Israel–Palestine, let alone sharing a social media post.

“This is the first case that we’ve seen,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit organization that advocates for faculty rights and academic freedom and seeks to hold higher education institutions accountable when standards are violated. “The apparent violations of her academic freedom are quite egregious, especially because they appear to primarily involve her posts on social media, what we would call her extramural speech.”

Levy said, “We are taking this case seriously.”

Repression and workplace retaliation are not somehow worse in Finkelstein’s case by virtue of her tenured position; all academic workers should enjoy the freedom that tenured faculty get. Yet the firing of a tenured professor over an anti-Zionist Instagram repost signals the extent to which institutions of higher education are willing to betray their own purported standards to bend to intellectually dishonest, conservative pro-Israel narratives.

Pressure Campaign

Muhlenberg’s decision to dismiss Finkelstein did not begin and end with the Kanazi Instagram story, which she posted in mid-January. It followed monthslong efforts aimed at pressuring the college to remove the professor, with online crusades primarily led by anonymous Muhlenberg alumni.

Finkelstein was the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school’s administrators — as well as local news outlets and politicians — demanding the professor’s removal and accusing her of “Jew hatred.” Finkelstein said she was told by college leadership that numerous families of students had called to express concern about her position. A Change.org petition started in late October by unnamed “Muhlenberg College Alumni and Supporters” called for Finkelstein’s firing over allegedly “pro-Hamas” rhetoric; it gained over 8,000 signatures.

“I think that the pressure from donors and alums was so intense that I became a huge liability,” Finkelstein said.

“I think that the pressure from donors and alums was so intense that I became a huge liability.”

The examples of Finkelstein’s allegedly “dangerous” speech listed on the petition include an email the professor sent to Muhlenberg students, staff, and faculty on October 10, in which she called the October 7 attacks “devastating” and wrote, “We must mourn all civilian deaths.” The focus of Finkelstein’s email, however, was to alert the college community that Israel was already bombing Gaza with “airstrikes of unprecedented intensity” and had threatened to cut off basic resources to the imperiled territory.

“For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s acts of revenge will likely result in absolute annihilation,” Finkelstein wrote. “Muhlenberg can be a hard space to talk openly about and grieve Palestine and Palestinians. Please know that there are safe spaces on campus – feel free to reach out to me if you need to.”

A screenshot of the email featured in the Change.org petition as a purported example of the threat Finkelstein posed to Jewish students.

The petition also featured screenshots of posts from Finkelstein’s personal social media accounts, none of which name Muhlenberg College. The posts decry Israel as an occupying force and accuse the state of genocide, a claim deemed plausible by the International Court of Justice. None of Finkelstein’s posts are directed at Jewish people — students or otherwise — for being Jewish.

Israeli Military Fundraising

The petition also drew attention to another key moment in Finkelstein’s tensions with the college in the previous 11 months: her reaction to a fundraising campaign for the Israeli military promoted on campus. Finkelstein told me that on October 17, on leaving her classroom, she was shocked by a display table newly laid out by Hillel.

“You can help raise money for various war efforts in Israel,” a sign on the table read, followed by QR codes linking to campaigns, including one to raise money for the Israeli military. Finkelstein did not immediately post publicly about the fundraiser, but emailed the school’s president, chaplain, and director of Hillel.

“How, in good conscience, can the college allow for this to be displayed to our students? The Israeli military just bombed a hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people,” she wrote. “I think this is an absolute disgrace. I hope it will be taken down ASAP.” Following several complaints to university leadership, Finkelstein was, she said, told that the Hillel students had a right to fundraise for whichever cause they wanted.

“I asked if, since students had the right to fundraise for genocide, whether I or anyone else — other faculty, students — had the freedom to write about it, and was told yes,” said Finkelstein. The following day, she posted a picture of the fundraiser sign to her X and Instagram accounts, without naming Muhlenberg as the location. “Students raising money for genocide,” she wrote. “Grief won’t be extinguished by revenge — ceasefire now.”

This post — a complaint about fundraising on campus for a foreign military that was already in the process of killing civilians en masse — was featured in the Change.org petition as an example of Finkelstein’s “pro-Hamas rhetoric and blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.”

“I was very overwhelmed by the petition,” Finkelstein told me. “People on social media were publishing where my office was on campus.”

She said she received anonymous rape threats and messages from people saying they watched her while she walked her dog.

Complaints

Throughout the fall semester, Finkelstein was called into regular meetings with Muhlenberg’s provost Laura Furge and Jennifer Storm, the school’s Title IX officer. “I was constantly being asked to tell them what I have been teaching in my classes, what I have been saying to my students, and that students are feeling really unsafe,” Finkelstein said.

Administrators told her that “multiple” students from her classes complained, she said. Finkelstein told me that she later learned, however, through an independent investigation ordered by the college into her conduct, that only one of her previous students had complained about her, and that complaint was never pursued.

The formal complaint that was pursued — and eventually led to her termination — was filed by a student Finkelstein said she had never taught or even met. This complaint focused solely on Finkelstein’s temporary Instagram story, which reposted Kanazi’s call for people to “shame” Zionists.

According to Finkelstein, the meetings with the provost and Title IX officer felt like facing a series of moving goalposts in which she struggled to gain clarity. On top of questions over her teaching content, Finkelstein said she was asked about her extramural writing, including a short essay published in late October titled “Never again means never again for anyone,” speaking from her position as an anti-Zionist Jew.

“Never forget,” she wrote of the central demand of Holocaust memory, “should turn all Jews into activists on behalf of the Palestinian people.” She told me that the provost called the essay “biased” and asked her to ensure that her extramural writing of this sort never mentions her affiliation with Muhlenberg, which it had not. 

“It felt as though the administration needed to get rid of me, and they were trying to first build a case around my teaching and that fell apart,” Finkelstein said. “Then all of a sudden there was great concern over things that I had published.”

“An Icy Tundra”

Finkelstein believed her troubles with the school had “fizzled out” over the winter break, especially with international criticisms of Israel growing. On January 17, however, the first day of the spring semester, she was informed by the provost that she was named in a federal Department of Education complaint against the college.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights currently has 118 open Title VI investigations based on complaints filed since October 7, which fall under the category of “shared ancestry” discrimination. These cases cover alleged incidents of antisemitism, as well as anti-Muslim and other religious discrimination.

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To file a complaint, a person doesn’t need to be affiliated with the institution in question. As The Intercept previously reported, one man, Zachary Marschall, the editor of the right-wing site Campus Reform, is responsible for over 10 percent of the open case complaints, according to a database of the complaints and investigations put together from public data by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

As listed in the database, the investigation into Muhlenberg dates to January 16 and remains open. The complaint, as summarized in the database, is attributed to a “Jewish member of campus” who is not named. Finkelstein is not explicitly named in the investigation description either, but the database says, “The complaint letter concerns a Jewish anti-Zionist professor on campus who has written articles praising Hamas and engaged in other behavior that Jewish students and alums find harmful to Jewish students. The letter seeks the professor’s removal.”

Finkelstein shared Kanazi’s “do not cower to Zionists” post on Instagram on the evening of January 17, after her call with the provost informing her about the Department of Education investigation. A week later, Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave.

“I was barred from classes, locked out of my Muhlenberg email account, and prohibited from teaching for the remainder of the semester,” Finkelstein said. At this point, in response to an internal complaint with the college’s Title IX office, Muhlenberg hired a third-party investigator to carry out an investigation into whether the professor violated the school’s policies.

According to an article in the Muhlenberg student paper at the time, students enrolled in Finkelstein’s classes were given scant information about her suspension, aside from an email from the provost on January 24 saying their professor was on leave.

“I was immediately upset with the college, as there were zero updates as to what was happening,” one anonymous student told The Muhlenberg Weekly. “[F]rom the limited information that I do know, it seems like a heinous violation of Dr Finkelstein’s academic freedom, something which Muhlenberg claims to pride itself on having.”

Faculty colleagues who sought further details on the situation also reported feeling left in the dark.

“We weren’t allowed to ask questions, we weren’t given information,” Muhlenberg professor of sociology, Janine Chi, told me.

“It has been chilling,” she said of the school’s treatment of Finkelstein, then reconsidered: “I used the word chilling in the Fall. I think at this point I will call it an icy tundra.”

“Didn’t Seem to Understand”

While Finkelstein was put on leave, the third-party investigation into the case was conducted by D. Stafford & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in campus safety and law enforcement. The investigation, which concluded in April, found that Finkelstein’s Instagram repost rose to the level of violating the school’s equal opportunity, nondiscrimination policies, which can police extramural speech in addition to classroom conduct.

According to Finkelstein, the investigation deemed that the shared post “encouraged discriminatory behavior,” but that her posts did not amount to “severe, persistent, or pervasive” criteria necessary to constitute harassment.

For any conduct to count as a violation of the equal opportunity, nondiscrimination policy, it must relate to a protected class. The third-party investigators did not themselves conclude that Zionists constitute a protected class per se, but that it was Muhlenberg’s responsibility, using guidance from the Department of Education, to decide in the specific case whether the complainant identifying as a Zionist should be considered a part of a protected class “based on race, color, or national origin, including shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

“I explained to her that Judaism is a religion and Zionism is a political ideology.”

To find Finkelstein worthy of just-cause dismissal, Muhlenberg’s leadership had to infer that the professor was talking about a protected class — that when she talked about Zionism, she really meant Israelis and Jewish people.

Finkelstein told me that she had been explicit in meetings with administrators about what she meant when she used the term “Zionist”: that she strongly rejects claims that the term represents Jewish people, and that anti-Zionist Jews like herself oppose the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish-supremacist ethnostate.

“She didn’t seem to understand what I meant by Zionist,” Finkelstein said, recounting her experience of an October meeting with Furge, the provost. “And so I explained to her that Judaism is a religion and Zionism is a political ideology.”

Instead, Muhlenberg’s position aligned with a growing consensus of educational and governmental institutions that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Palestine Exception

The findings of the third-party investigation were sent to a panel of three ostensibly impartial college staff and faculty, selected by the Title IX office and tasked with making recommendations. The panel found Finkelstein responsible for four counts of discrimination and harassment, and recommended “termination for just cause.” (The panel overturned the investigation’s finding that Finkelstein’s conduct did not constitute harassment.)

University leadership informed Finkelstein that her last day of employment would be on May 30. Finkelstein lodged two appeals through separate channels. In one case, an appeals officer appointed by the school administration upheld leadership’s decision in a September 16 ruling. School policy, according to the appeals officer’s letter, states that “the decision by the appeal officer is to be deferential to the original decision” — even prior to considering the evidence of the case. Finkelstein has also started an appeals process, to which she is entitled, through the school’s Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee.

“We do think that there would be a strong basis for litigation,” said Stacey Leyton, an attorney representing Finkelstein. “We would also look at other claims, including failure to protect Maura when she was herself being harassed for her views.”

“I have represented professors many times,” Leyton told me, “I’m not aware of any case that resembles this.”

By comparison, Leyton raised the cases of professors who had made objectionable claims and kept their jobs. One was tenured University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who drew public ire, and even sanctions from her employer, following years of explicitly white supremacist, anti-immigrant extramural speech, including the claim that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” (Wax was suspended this week over her comments.)

Leyton said, “You can see where that would directly affect the educational experience of her students. And she is still employed after three years of proceedings.”

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The AAUP’s Levy sent a letter to Muhlenberg’s president on September 24, conveying concern about Finkelstein’s treatment by the college, questioning whether the school has adhered to its own regulations, and noting that “issues of basic concern to our Association remain, especially with regard to academic freedom.” The association is sending a committee of three consultants to Allentown, according to the letter, “to discuss the situation with Professor Finkelstein, other involved faculty members, and key members of the administration and board of trustees before preparing a report of findings.”

While other professors have unambiguously maligned protected classes and remained employed, Finkelstein lost her position for decrying an ideology and its adherents — and at a time when that ideology is used to justify an ongoing genocide, repress Palestinian freedom struggle, and silence criticism of Israel. Activists and scholars have long dubbed this the “Palestine exception to free speech.” 

“As someone who has been active in support and solidarity of Palestinian people and Palestinian self-determination for decades, part of me is not surprised that this happened,” Finkelstein told me. “And part of me cannot believe that this happened.”

The post Meet the First Tenured Professor to Be Fired for Pro-Palestine Speech appeared first on The Intercept.

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After a string of courts failed to intervene and the state’s governor declined to offer clemency, Missouri prison officials executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday evening for a 1998 murder he said he did not commit.

The state-sanctioned killing was not supported by the family of the victim, former newspaper reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, who was stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. In August, Picus’s husband Dan told court officials and representatives of state Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office that while he believed Williams was guilty, he did not want to see Williams executed.

It was Bailey’s actions that cleared the way for Williams’s execution. In mid-August, a St. Louis County Circuit Court judge approved a deal between Williams and the county’s prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, that would have resentenced Williams to life in prison. Bailey scoffed at the deal and intervened to stop it.

On Monday evening, Gov. Mike Parson declined to offer Williams clemency, and, over the dissent from the court’s three more liberal justices, on Tuesday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.

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Missouri’s execution of Williams puts the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: With four states slated to conduct four executions by the end of this week, the country will soon reach its 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. While public support for capital punishment continues to decline and juries are voting far less to impose capital punishment, officials in states like Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma continue to schedule executions — including in cases like Williams, where questions about the underlying conviction and its fairness persist — Democrats scrubbed their long-standing goal of ending capital punishment from their platform this year. To date, 200 people on death row have been exonerated: a rate of 1 exoneration for every 8 executions carried out.

In the days leading up to Williams’s execution, more than 1 million people contacted Parson’s office asking that he spare Williams’s life, and billionaire abolitionist Richard Branson took out a full-page ad in the Kansas City Star asking readers to do the same. In denying to offer clemency, Parson criticized the media as biased and said that nothing from the “real facts” of the case lead him to believe Williams was innocent.

Rage at the execution bubbled up online Tuesday evening, with Williams’s last statement and pieces of his poetry going viral after he was killed. “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!!!” Williams wrote.

Missouri killed Williams despite lingering questions about the fairness of his 2001 trial. In January, Bell filed a motion seeking to vacate Williams’s conviction, saying that the paucity of evidence against Williams had “cast inexorable doubt” on the case. 

Among the issues that Bell has cited was the handling of the murder weapon without protective gloves by the prosecutor who tried the case, which tainted the evidence and made it impossible to extract from it any potential DNA left by the killer. None of the crime scene evidence linked Williams to the killing. The prosecutor’s contamination of the evidence unconstitutionally deprived Williams of a fair trial, Bell argued.

During an evidentiary hearing in August, that now-retired prosecutor, Keith Larner, admitted to handling the weapon barehanded on at least five occasions before the trial, which he said was his normal practice. Larner said he thought it was acceptable to do so because he had decided, based on an investigator’s assertion, that whoever killed Picus had worn gloves during the attack. There is no evidence in the case to confirm this suspicion.

Bell also pointed to Larner’s striking of potential jurors at least in part because they were Black. Using race as a basis to strike jurors is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said. Court records reveal that Larner struck six of the seven Black potential jurors from service. In explaining his decision to strike one of them, Larner testified last month that he did so because the man and Williams “looked like brothers, like familial brothers, not like Black people.”

At every step of the way, Bailey has intervened to argue that the conviction was righteous, that Larner had done nothing wrong, and that Williams should be executed. Williams’s ordeal is just the latest in a string of cases where Bailey has deployed the power of his office to defeat claims of wrongful conviction and even to keep court-exonerated people locked in prison.

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Despite Bell’s concession that constitutional error had rendered Williams’s conviction unreliable, and despite Dan Picus’s desire that the state not go through with its plans, Bailey has insisted that his actions represent justice and that Williams and his lawyers have been on a crusade to mislead the public and free a murderer. “The public has been deceived every step of the way,” the attorney general said in an August press release. “That is why the truth of this matter must get out.”

On September 12, Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton ruled that there was no legal reason to vacate Williams’s conviction.

In a flurry of subsequent legal action, lawyers working with the Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, along with attorneys representing Bell sought relief in a series of other courts, including the federal district court, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Missouri Supreme Court, to no avail.

Although the federal appeals court denied Williams’s attempts to appeal a lower court decision based on procedural rules, Judge Jane Kelly wrote a concurring opinion, expressing concern that the underlying issues in the case “call into question the fundamental fairness of Williams’ proceedings.”

In a statement after Williams’s execution, attorney Larry Komp, with the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Kansas City, which also represented Williams, highlighted the ways the system failed to address serious issues raised in his case. 

“It is hard to explain how admitted racial discrimination is ignored and never meaningfully addressed. It is hard to explain how a prosecutor can admit that he contaminated evidence his entire legal career … but nothing is done,” Komp said. “The hardest thing to explain, and what we cannot understand, is how rote application of a process to protect finality outweighs finding truth and achieving fairness.”

The post Missouri Kills Marcellus Williams Over Objections From Prosecutor and Victim’s Family appeared first on The Intercept.

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As the leader of Alabama’s execution team, Brandon McKenzie is sometimes the last person to touch a prisoner while they’re still alive. He has played a key role in executions, directing a team of around a dozen prison guards on execution nights and performing tasks that can impact how long it takes for someone to die or whether they feel pain. 

Alabama prison officials gave McKenzie these responsibilities even after a prisoner accused the guard of smashing his head through a window, then driving him head-first into a concrete floor. 

The injuries McKenzie inflicted were severe and lasting, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the prisoner, Lawrence Phillips, in May 2020. Phillips lost consciousness and was taken from Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore to a Mobile hospital. Medical records show he was treated for bleeding in his brain and received sutures, staples, and a neck brace. 

“I’ve not been the same since, and my memory fades in and out at the time,” Phillips wrote in his complaint. “I have nightmares, accompanied with post traumatic stress from the fears of this happening to me again.” 

McKenzie, who was promoted to captain two months after Phillips filed the lawsuit, claimed that he was acting in self-defense; attorneys from the state who represented the officer wrote in a legal filing that Phillips “angrily lunged” at McKenzie, who reacted by “using his elbow to protect himself and push inmate Phillips away, and they then collided with a glass window nearby.” Another incarcerated person who witnessed the altercation submitted an affidavit supporting Phillips’s account.

McKenzie didn’t respond to questions from Bolts and The Intercept about his role in executions or the allegations of abuse from Phillips.

While the Alabama Department of Corrections, or ADOC, ultimately concluded that the use of force was warranted, Katherine Nelson, a federal magistrate judge, thought the lawsuit against McKenzie should proceed. In a report and opinion denying the officer’s effort to resolve the case before trial, she wrote that a reasonable jury could conclude “that the force was applied maliciously and sadistically to cause harm, rather than in a good faith effort to restore or maintain order.” Court records show that in August 2023, McKenzie’s state lawyers and Phillips settled the suit. The settlement terms were not disclosed.

Meanwhile, McKenzie kept his job as captain and has overseen recent executions. That position earned him more than $135,600 last year, according to pay records reviewed by Bolts and The Intercept. 

An investigation by Bolts and The Intercept into Alabama’s execution team shows that McKenzie isn’t the only execution team member who has previously been accused of violent behavior or mistreating incarcerated people. Earlier this year, Bolts and The Intercept were given a list of names of ADOC staff members on the execution team from a lawyer who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. Bolts and The Intercept have independently verified 14 names on the list through interviews, court records, and personnel files. 

The records reveal that one officer on the team previously faced discipline for leaving a man hanging in his cell instead of cutting him down. Another member drunkenly attacked a jail guard in Florida. ADOC found that both of those men violated department policy.

Even after these incidents, ADOC allowed both of these officers to participate in executions, each earning more than $100,000 last year in a state where the median household income is around $62,000. One of them has been promoted since his infraction. The other was demoted.

Death penalty experts say that even these officers’ role on Alabama’s execution team raises questions about how incarcerated people are treated in their final moments. They say the officers’ backgrounds also hint at a culture of impunity among prison staff tasked with carrying out death sentences and reinforce concerns about Alabama’s ability to conduct executions as a regulated legal proceeding.

Allowing these men to work executions “shows a disregard for the sanctity of the task of carrying out an execution,” Brian Stull, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, told Bolts and The Intercept. “A system that cannot be trusted to keep prisoners safe is a system that should not have the right to kill,” said Alison Mollman, legal director at the ACLU of Alabama.

Problems with the conduct of those who carry out executions in Alabama extend to leadership at Holman, a maximum-security prison that houses death row inmates and the state’s death chamber. In 1999, the prison’s warden, Terry Raybon, was fired from his job as a state trooper after two women accused him of domestic violence. No charges were filed against him. Under state law, Raybon is the executioner and is responsible for pushing lethal drugs and starting the flow of nitrogen gas. 

Pointing to Raybon’s history, Mollman called the findings of Bolts and The Intercept’s investigation “unsurprising.”

ADOC did not respond to questions sent for this article, nor did the state attorney general and governor’s office. The execution team members named in this article also did not reply to requests for comment. Isaac Moody, another execution team member whose personnel record contained no history of violence or mistreatment, picked up the phone but was quick to end the call. 

“We’re not allowed to talk to any media,” Moody said. “There’s an oath, code, we take. We don’t speak about it. I could lose my job.” When asked if the code was administered by the department, he said “yeah” and then hung up.

A History of Secrecy

The identities of the people involved in executions are a well-guarded secret. 

Fourteen states have enacted secrecy statutes to shield information about executions from the public since 2010. While Alabama has not passed such legislation, it remains “among the worst” states for execution transparency, says Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.

ADOC has kept details of how Alabama carries out executions and the people behind them hidden. The state did not release its execution procedures until 2019, when it was ordered to do so by a judge. Even then, it only released a heavily redacted copy of the process the execution team is supposed to follow. State officials still continue to tightly guard records detailing the actors who carry out executions and fight in court against releasing information about their capital punishment practices. 

The members of Alabama’s execution team are not medical or science professionals, and they work among the people they execute. Together, the team is supposed to ensure that death sentences are carried out as outlined in the state’s execution procedure manual by performing a series of tasks. In lethal injections, for example, some of these team members will secure the person to a gurney before a separate team, composed of medical personnel, sets IV lines. Despite their significant roles, the majority of their activities are performed in secret without witnesses. 

Dale Baich, a federal public defender who represented death row prisoners for more than 30 years, stressed the importance of knowing the identities and personal histories of execution team members. “You don’t want someone who has a history of being abusive toward prisoners,” he said. “You don’t know if the person who is assigned to do the job is qualified.” 

The backgrounds of execution team members have taken on more importance as the state argues to the courts that it should be allowed to continue to carry out death sentences with nitrogen gas, a method it first used when it executed Kenneth Smith in January. Under the method, the execution team carries out technical responsibilities such as monitoring oxygen levels and assembling equipment used to administer lethal gas, according to the state’s execution protocol.  
Smith’s execution did not go as promised. Officials had said in court that Smith would lose consciousness “seconds” after the nitrogen began flowing. Instead, he writhed and thrashed in “seizure-like movements” for two minutes, according to The Associated Press, which was present. Another witness called it the “most violent” execution he’d ever seen. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had a different opinion, calling the execution “textbook” and a “historic achievement.”

Alabama is now poised to conduct a second death sentence with nitrogen on September 26, when it will execute Alan Eugene Miller, a man the state tried and failed to execute via lethal injection in 2022. 

Miller’s lawyers have claimed the nitrogen method violates their client’s constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The state has responded by relying on testimony from McKenzie, the execution team captain, to argue that the state’s first nitrogen execution went as planned. 

McKenzie, who was inside the death chamber for Smith’s execution and fitted the respirator mask to his face before the nitrogen gas started flowing, submitted an affidavit in July. Contrary to the statements of media witnesses, McKenzie wrote in his legal filing that “I did not see Smith make any violent or convulsive movements.” Miller’s lawyers later poked holes in McKenzie’s account, noting that the guard “miraculously” made very specific claims about Smith’s oxygen levels seven months after the fact, despite “routinely not remembering other information related to the execution during his deposition,” and questioning whether he could have even seen the levels during the execution.

McKenzie is also involved in ensuring that executions do not violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. During lethal injections, for instance, a team member is tasked with ensuring the person being executed is unresponsive after a sedative is administered so they don’t feel the pain of the following two drugs that will paralyze them and stop their heart. To do so, the team member is supposed to say the person’s name, brush their eyelids, and pinch their arm to determine whether they need more of the sedative before receiving the lethal drugs — a process that Bolts observed McKenzie perform during the execution of Keith Gavin in July.

As ADOC proceeds with nitrogen executions, Dunham, of the Death Penalty Policy Project, noted that the inconsistencies between the department’s narrative and witness testimony in executions over the last few years underscores the need for more transparency. 

“Alabama officials have shown significant impairment in telling the truth that other people observe,” Dunham told Bolts and The Intercept. “When you have a state that has a history of secrecy and a history about lying about things that other people have seen with their own eyes, that tells you that oversight is critical.”

Dereliction of Duty

When Tarji Jackson’s nephew, Jamal Jackson, died by suicide on Alabama’s death row in 2020, she said Alabama prison officials didn’t call her about it, even though she was listed as next of kin. Instead, she learned the news through another family member. When Tarji called Holman, she was connected to the prison’s chaplain. “All I know is that Jamal hung himself,” she told Bolts and The Intercept. “They told me no details on nothing.”

An ADOC investigation later concluded that Christopher Earl, a then-lieutenant and member of the state’s execution team, had disregarded protocol for prisoner suicides. ADOC demoted Earl in 2020, finding that he did not immediately cut Jamal down or seek medical assistance, despite department policy instructing guards to first cut the ligature and give medical workers a chance for lifesaving measures. According to department records, Earl first ordered a nurse to go back to the infirmary before asking him to return to the cell, where Jamal’s body was left hanging for nearly 12 minutes after Earl first spotted him.

Afterward, Earl left work before Jamal’s body was picked up by the ambulance service, in violation of ADOC’s protocol for the deaths of incarcerated people.  

Then-ADOC Commissioner Jefferson Dunn determined that Earl had committed four infractions including inattention to the job, noncompliance with policies and procedures, serious violation of the rules, and “disgraceful” conduct. 

Since Jamal’s death, much of Tarji’s family has died, including her younger sister. She is still trying to understand what happened to her nephew but does not think Earl should have kept his job.

“For him to see my nephew in there, hang in and not do anything, and he’s still working. He should not be working. He shouldn’t even be at a desk in there,” she told Bolts and The Intercept.

Earl again was found to have violated ADOC policy a year later after he left three incarcerated people unsupervised in outdoor cages for three hours. He was suspended for three days. “The intent of this action is to emphasize the necessity for you to follow rules and regulations,” wrote Dunn in another letter to Earl. “Any similar infractions after this incident will result in further corrective action. Hopefully, your actions in the future will meet standards.”

Earl made more than $127,000 last year, according to pay records. 

Bolts and The Intercept sent questions about Earl’s conduct to an email account and phone number associated with him. The email went unanswered. In response to the text messages, someone who identified herself as his wife said she would not ask Earl to get in touch and threatened a lawsuit if the news organizations contacted other numbers associated with his name. 

“Sure we can set that up sometime between the hours of fuck off and never,” she wrote. “In case you didn’t know with the exhaustive amount of information you are able to access at the click of a button, members of an execution team don’t usually go on record.”

None of Earl’s violations have prevented him from participating in executions. Prior to the state’s attempted lethal injection of Alan Miller in 2022, Earl stood outside of Miller’s cell and alerted him that it was time to go to the execution chamber, according to a legal filing.

Miller is one of six U.S. prisoners to have survived his execution in the modern death penalty era. Three of those failed executions occurred in Alabama since 2018. 

During the state’s attempt to execute him, a prison guard hoisted the gurney vertically, leaving Miller, who weighed around 350 pounds, hanging in the air for 20 minutes. Eventually, Earl approached Miller and told him the death warrant had expired and guards ordered him to get off the gurney, according to a legal filing detailing the events of that evening. His body was so stiff that he asked the officers to help him bend his arms. Alabama officials never explained the maneuver, but it was not sanctioned in the state’s execution protocol that’s been publicly released. 

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Alabama Plans to Carry Out the First Execution Using Nitrogen Gas. A Lot Could Go Wrong.

In July, Miller sat for a deposition as part of a lawsuit he filed over Alabama’s plan to kill him with nitrogen. “I don’t concur with being gassed by incompetent people,” Miller told lawyers with the Alabama Attorney General’s Office. During the deposition, a state lawyer said that McKenzie, who had participated in the previous attempt to execute him, would be responsible for fitting the mask used to deliver the gas. Miller’s legal team has asserted that an improper fit would increase the risk of Miller suffering. 

“It’s incompetent people fitting it,” Miller said during his deposition. “They need to be professionals, medical professionals, a third party or somebody, you know, like — are these people that are going to fit it, what’s their training?”

Alabama started executing people with nitrogen gas after a series of long and bloody lethal injections that appeared to deviate from ADOC’s execution protocol. Days after officials called off the execution of Kenneth Smith in November 2022, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered a moratorium on executions and called for a review of the state’s capital punishment system. 

After just three months, Alabama wrapped up its “top-to-bottom” review of protocols in February 2023. In a letter announcing the evaluation had been completed, ADOC Commissioner John Hamm wrote that the department had reviewed its legal strategy on capital litigation, training procedures, and equipment on hand during executions. The two-page letter contained few details about the review and did not mention whether there would be increased oversight of ADOC staff who worked executions. One of the agency’s only significant changes was adding more medical personnel to participate in executions. 

The agency has refused to release its full assessment.

Enlisting in Executions

As a prison guard working on death row at Holman, Halle Lambert says she was given the chance to join Alabama’s execution team. She declined. “It was not part of my beliefs,” Lambert told Bolts and The Intercept. 

Lambert worked at Holman from September 2022 to November 2023, when she was arrested and fired for bringing in cigarette lighters and a cellphone. Prosecutors have alleged that she planned to sell those items. Lambert has pleaded not guilty, and the case is ongoing. 

During her time at Holman, Lambert learned who was on the execution team because she worked at the prison on execution days. In an interview, she confirmed the identities of team members whose names were provided to Bolts and The Intercept, including Bruce Finch, another officer with a history of arrests and discipline for violating ADOC policy. Finch also participated in the nitrogen execution of Smith in January, according to an eyewitness who asked not to be named out of fear of professional retaliation. 

Court records show that Florida police arrested Finch in November 2019 for trespassing outside a concert by heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch in Pensacola, just over the state line. According to a police report, Finch became “belligerent” with officers who had first given him a warning and ordered him to leave. Police took him to the Escambia County jail, where he grew so agitated that a guard eventually pepper sprayed him. 

Finch then charged at the guard and slapped him on the shoulder. The guard tried to handcuff Finch, but Finch “grabbed his face with his hand covering his nose and mouth,” making it difficult for the guard to breathe, according to the report. The fight escalated so much that another jail guard went into the room and tased Finch. 

Prosecutors charged him with battery on a law enforcement officer, a third-degree felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. 

Finch pleaded no contest to the charges, and four months after the arrest, a prosecutor agreed to not seek a conviction so long as he met certain criteria — such as undergoing evaluation for substance use, attending anger management, abstaining from alcohol, and paying a $100 fine. By mid-October of 2020, a probation officer said that Finch had completed his pretrial intervention program and sent the case back to prosecutors to dismiss the charges.

Finch, however, did not report the incident to ADOC, which eventually learned of the arrest. In May 2021, the department suspended him without pay for three days for failing to report it and other violations of the agency’s code of conduct.

Bolts and The Intercept found that Finch had been arrested other times as well. 

According to his personnel file, he was arrested for driving under the influence in Texas in 2017, for which he completed a pretrial diversion program. Another DUI, in Atmore in 2018, was dismissed. 

In January 2024, Florida police arrested Finch for drunk driving, writing in a report that he “continuously swerved” on the road and had an empty beer can in the center console of his car when they pulled him over. Records state Finch was “obviously unsteady on his feet” during a field sobriety test and blew .147 and .138 on a Breathalyzer. The legal limit is .08.

In May, he was sentenced to a year probation under the conditions that he undergo substance use evaluation, doesn’t drink alcohol, and submits to random urinalysis tests. His driver’s license was also revoked for six months. 

ADOC paid him more than $104,000 last year, pay stubs show. 

According to Lambert, Finch joined Alabama’s execution team after he was promoted to lieutenant at Holman in November 2022. She said some of the team members are retired prison guards who come back for executions. 

It was previously unknown how Alabama selects its execution team. No one on the state’s squad has ever gone public. The few available details about team members and their experiences have been limited to staff in other states who have spoken to the media. 

In Alabama, staff volunteer to be on the team and the existing group votes on who can join, Lambert said. She said there’s no financial incentive to join, aside from overtime pay. 

Curious about why her colleagues would be a part of executions, Lambert said she asked about their motives. She said one execution team member told her he could feign PTSD and retire early. She said another officer, who was a devout Christian, told her that he was “doing justice.” 

The post In Alabama, Officers Accused of Violence and Misconduct Carry Out Secretive Executions appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A St. Louis County, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure.

The ruling, issued on Thursday by Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton, dismantles Williams’s latest attempt to prove his innocence and paves the way for his execution on September 24. “There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent,” Hilton wrote. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder, and has been sentenced to death.”

The ruling comes three weeks after the judge had agreed to a deal between Williams and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s office that would have spared Williams’s life. The agreement, which would have seen Williams sentenced to life in prison, was based on the recent discovery that prosecutors had failed to adequately preserve the murder weapon used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus in 1998.

Lawyers representing Attorney General Andrew Bailey scoffed at the deal, arguing that Hilton didn’t have the right to resentence Williams. Bailey ran to the Missouri Supreme Court to stop the proceeding, which it did, ordering Hilton to hold an evidentiary hearing instead.

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His Best Chance to Get Off Death Row Was DNA on the Murder Weapon, but Prosecutors “Contaminated” the Evidence

During that hearing, on August 28, Bell and Williams’s attorneys maintained that the contamination of the murder weapon had violated Williams’s rights. Lawyers representing the attorney general meanwhile argued that handling evidence without protection was merely what the prosecutors did in St. Louis County at the time of Williams’s trial. Hilton has now agreed with that position.

In a statement following the ruling, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and one of Williams’s attorneys, emphasized how rare and meaningful it was for Bell’s office to seek to vacate Williams’s conviction. “The decision of a prosecutor to move to vacate a murder conviction and death sentence is not done lightly,” she said, but Bell had done so because “there is overwhelming evidence that Marcellus Williams’s trial was unconstitutionally unfair, including revelations that the State contaminated the most critical evidence in the case — the murder weapon.”

A Deal Undone

Keith Larner, a retired former prosecutor who handled Williams’s case, was a key witness during the evidentiary hearing. He admitted that, before Williams’s trial, he had repeatedly handled the butcher knife used to kill Picus without wearing gloves that would have preserved any biological material on it linking her killer to the murder.

Larner testified that after the local crime lab failed to find any fingerprints on the weapon and had matched blood found on it to Picus, he felt free to handle the knife without taking precautions because the testing was complete. Larner also said he had already concluded that Picus’s killer had worn gloves. There is no concrete evidence in the case record that Picus’s killer wore gloves. Nonetheless, Larner insisted that there “was nothing to link anybody to the crime on that knife.” Larner recalled touching the knife at least five times prior to the trial without wearing protective gloves.

Williams maintains his innocence in the killing. No crime scene evidence linked him to the murder inside Picus’s home, and Williams long argued that testing of the weapon used to kill Picus could prove he was innocent. The trial judge denied his attorneys’ request to test the knife for DNA before trial, and he was convicted in 2001 based on the questionable testimony of two informants. DNA testing done in 2016, however, revealed unknown genetic material on the knife’s handle.

Based in part on the unidentified DNA, Bell filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’s conviction, invoking a relatively new Missouri law that allows elected prosecutors in the state to undo convictions they believe their offices wrongly obtained. The court was scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing on the case, where a special-appointed counsel was slated to argue that Williams should be freed. Yet additional testing on the knife revealed at the last minute that neither Larner nor his investigator could be excluded as the source of the unknown DNA. In other words, whatever crime scene DNA might have been on the knife was irrevocably lost by the prosecution team’s handling of it before Williams’s trial.

Because of those findings, Bell admitted that the road to exonerate Williams would be steep. In mid-August, Bell struck a deal with Williams and his attorneys: The prosecutor would take the death penalty off the table if Williams would enter a so-called Alford plea that would allow him to maintain his innocence while conceding the state had enough to convict him. In exchange, Williams would be resentenced to life in prison. Picus’s husband, Dan Picus, had also approved the deal; he believes Williams is guilty, but told the court he does not want to see Williams executed.

Yet that wasn’t enough for the attorney general’s office, whose appeal to the state’s high court scuttled the agreement and prompted the court to schedule the evidentiary hearing the following week.

“There Is Still Time”

In his ruling on Thursday, Hilton concluded that because Larner’s actions weren’t intentional, under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Williams’s rights had not been violated. The handling of the knife had been part of the prosecution’s normal practices, Hilton found. Larner, the judge wrote, had a “good faith basis and reasons for handling the knife without gloves.”

Hilton also rejected Williams and Bell’s other claims, including that Williams’s previous attorneys were ineffective in representing him at trial, and that Larner had struck people from the pool of potential jurors on Williams’s case because they were Black, which is unconstitutional. During the hearing, Jonathan Potts, who is working with Williams’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, pressed Larner about his stated decision to strike one potential juror because the man “looked very similar” to Williams. Larner said that what he meant was that they looked like “brothers,” he said. “Like familial brothers, not like Black people.”

During his short tenure as attorney general, Bailey has spent a considerable amount of time fighting efforts to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Still, as of Thursday afternoon, his office had not released a statement regarding Hilton’s ruling.

Rojo Bushnell, of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Williams’s legal team would continue to seek relief via the courts and Gov. Mike Parsons, who could grant clemency. “We will continue pursuing every possible option to prevent Mr. Williams’s wrongful execution,” she said in her statement. “There is still time … to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”

The post A Prosecutor Wanted to Spare Marcellus Williams’s Life. Missouri’s Attorney General Got in the Way. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.