Marcellus Williams fell victim to the worst hypocrisy of the Supreme Court.

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday. He was almost certainly innocent, and his own accusers, as well as the family of his alleged victim, had sought to spare his life. St. Louis prosecutors urged the courts not to kill Williams, arguing that his conviction was fatally undermined by a shocking lack of evidence, racial bias in the trial, and the results of a recent DNA test. But the Supreme Court ignored those pleas: The justices refused to stay his execution in a brief, unsigned, and unsubstantiated order on Tuesday, despite all three liberals opposing the move. Williams was strapped to a gurney and executed by lethal injection shortly thereafter.

The doubts about Williams’ guilt are overwhelming. They are a testament to everything that is wrong with the capitalist system we have built under a regime that is supposed to uphold certainty and finality. Everything that can go wrong in a death penalty trial is on display here: Williams’ conviction rests on the testimony of highly unreliable witnesses who were motivated to accuse him of murder by promises of leniency and monetary payments. No physical evidence links him to the crime: no fingerprints, no footprints, no hair found at the crime scene, and no DNA collected from the murder weapon.

It also appears that prosecutors were trying to use racial discrimination at trial against him: Williams, a black man, was charged with murdering a white woman, and prosecutors rejected six of the seven eligible black jurors. And even though the Supreme Court has ruled that racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional, the conservative majority on Tuesday didn’t care that Williams had been found guilty by a nearly all-white jury or that his verdict was based on glaring due process concerns.

After the court cleared the way for Williams’ killing, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out an inconsistency worth pondering on Threads: It is remarkable, he wrote, “how obsessed the conservative justices were with due process, judicial review, and the possibility of vindictive prosecution” when they granted Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution, “and how little they seem to care” when a presumably innocent man is about to be executed.

Indeed, these six justices’ extreme care for Trump in last term’s appalling immunity decision stands in stark and alarming contrast to their anemic, wordless rejection of Williams’s final request for immunity. The far-right bloc fell over itself to express its deep concern for the former president’s rights, inventing a brand-new law out of thin air to give him the final benefit of the doubt and every means possible to thwart his criminal charges, drawing on a skepticism about the legitimacy of our criminal justice system that seems to disappear when the applicant is a powerless person of color rather than one of the most powerful men in the world.

There is far more and more irrefutable evidence of Trump’s guilt in the January 6 cases than of Williams’ guilt in a murder case. Yet Trump is even avoiding a trial on the case while Williams is being sent to death row. Arguments defending Trump’s immunity have been replete with claims that prosecutors acted in bad faith. The court is unlikely to accept that Williams was given a flawless trial.

But this inconsistency, this selective application of an expedited rule of law, goes much deeper than the court’s immunity ruling. It is revealed every time Republican-appointed justices face a party they sympathize with – for personal, political, or both reasons. Since Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the conservative bloc has consistently authorized executions based on dubious facts and twisted applications of law.

And yet this bloc has happily twisted that very same law to rule in favor of the January 6 insurrectionists accused of obstruction of justice. Conservative judges who seem to automatically rule against ordinary defendants, or even just people forced to sleep in parks, stretch words beyond meaning to hand a victory to Trump, his allies, and his mob. When those select few face the prospect of consequences for their actions, every argument and utterance by prosecutors must be skeptically examined for deep state bias, nefarious intent, or legal weakness. When a man who strongly protests his innocence asks for a stay of execution to push through his actual claims of innocence? Those same judges can’t be bothered to intervene.

This pattern repeats itself endlessly in a series of lesser-known cases that demonstrate who benefits from the highly selective empathy and interest of this Supreme Court. Corporations that harm our health through demonstrably dangerous pollution? The Supreme Court will scour the docket to find some ridiculous excuse to avoid punishment. Corrupt officials who accept bribes for personal gain? The conservative justices will do everything they can to absolve them of responsibility. Fraudsters who steal money from hard-working people to enrich themselves? Her The right to escape punishment is paramount to constitutional liberty. Gun dealers profiting from illegal weapons of mass destruction? This court will shamelessly rewrite a law to protect them from prosecution.

The conservative justices don’t bother to hide what’s going on here. When this bloc gutted the Clean Water Act in 2023, which allowed wealthy landowners to destroy important wetlands, it had the nerve to base its decision on due process. “A staggering number of landowners are at risk of criminal prosecution or severe civil penalties,” the court complained. The environmental protections in question violated the Constitution, it reasoned, because their definition was too “vague” and potentially encouraged “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” The clear mandate Do not destroy wetlands without permission has not passed this court’s fair trial test, but the execution of innocent people has not.

When the government tried to ban bump stocks—replacement stocks that effectively turn AR-15s into automatic weapons—it sparked a wave of sympathetic concern from conservatives. These justices were appalled at the possibility that an unfortunate and well-meaning gun owner might not realize that this device, whose sole purpose is mass murderwas illegal under federal law. During oral argument, they poured out their hearts to bump-stock enthusiasts who, without knowledge of the ban, could be “initiated” into a vindictive prosecution, as if ignorance of the law guaranteed innocence. (It doesn’t.) It’s hard to believe, but these same justices have ruled that people who are literally innocent of a crime can remain in prison despite a wrongful sentence. A typical defendant must languish behind bars for decades despite their innocence, but a defendant favored by this Supreme Court? A fair trial requires that they receive whatever compensation they seek.

It is now clear beyond doubt that the six justices of the conservative supermajority have created two classes of Americans who receive two classes of legal aid: one that looks like them and shares their values, and another that inspires no empathy, concern, or even curiosity.

In a few weeks, the court will hear oral arguments in Glossip vs. Oklahomaa case involving yet another capital crime defendant who received none of the perks and benefits afforded to the special defendants most prized by the judges. Like Williams, Richard Glossip had a trial riddled with errors, deceptions and prosecutorial misconduct that any fair trial would have prohibited. Like Williams, Glossip’s would-be prosecutors are no longer even calling for his execution, but fighting against it; the Supreme Court had to hire someone to argue his killing by a state that, when the misconduct came to light, decided it would rather not. Like Williams, Glossip has a compelling case that he did not commit the murder. And yet the Supreme Court’s fatal rebuff of Williams on Tuesday suggests that before we can untangle what went wrong with his deeply flawed prosecution, a majority of the justices will conclude that the world would be a better place if Glossip, too, were executed.

Some of the judges who constructed this two-tiered system have used every legal trick at their disposal to ensure that their own misconduct is not subject to widespread public scrutiny and evaluation. They have bypassed ethics rules to keep their ill-gotten spoils secret from the public, rebuffed congressional requests, and ignored invitations to testify. This week, those judges rejected the suggestion that Williams’ life, like Glossip’s, was important enough to justify a trial that would bring unconstitutional injustices to light. We recently learned from the New York Times that Chief Justice John Roberts believed that if he hid the court’s reasoning for Trump’s impunity behind abstractions and jargon, Americans would not care that his court was constructing a system by which a guilty ex-president could go free. Clearly, the majority can’t even bother with abstractions and jargon when it comes to executing a black man. An unsigned order will Do.