The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday. He was almost certainly innocent, and his own prosecutors, as well as the family of his alleged victim, had tried to spare his life. The St. Louis District Attorney’s Office urged the court not to put Williams to death, arguing that his conviction was fatally undermined by a startling lack of evidence, racial bias during the trial and the results of recent DNA testing. But the Supreme Court ignored those pleas: The justices refused to stay his execution in a brief, unsigned and ill-considered order Tuesday, with all three liberals dissenting. Williams was strapped to a gurney and put to death by lethal injection shortly afterward.

The doubts about Williams’ guilt are simply overwhelming. They stand as a testament to everything that is wrong with the capital system we have erected under a regime that prizes certainty and finality. Everything that could possibly go wrong with a death penalty prosecution is on display here: Williams’ conviction rests on the testimony of wildly unreliable witnesses who were motivated by promises of clemency and cash payments to accuse him of murder. No physical evidence connects 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 the prosecution sought to exploit race against him during his trial: Williams, a black man, was accused of murdering a white woman, and prosecutors disqualified six of seven potential black jurors. And while the Supreme Court has ruled that racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional, the conservative supermajority on Tuesday seemed unconcerned that Williams was found guilty by an almost entirely white jury or that glaring due process concerns underlay his punishment.

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

The extreme concern for Trump shown by these six justices in last term’s horrific immunity decision stands in stark and alarming contrast to their bloodless, wordless rejection of Williams’s last request for relief. The far-right bloc fell over itself to demonstrate its deep concern for the former president’s rights, concocting a brand-new law out of thin air to give him every last benefit of the doubt, every conceivable tool to defeat his criminal charges. It drew on a skepticism about the legitimacy of our criminal justice system that seems to disappear when the petitioner is a powerless person of color rather than one of the most powerful men in the world.

There is far more, more irrefutable evidence of Trump’s guilt in the Jan. 6 cases than there is of Williams’ guilt in a murder. Yet Trump avoids even a trial on the merits, while Williams is sent to the death penalty chamber. Arguments in defense of Trump’s immunity have been filled with allegations of bad faith by prosecutors. The court is unlikely to accept that Williams received an impeccable trial.

But this inconsistency, this selective application of turbocharged due process, runs much deeper than the court’s immunity decision. It’s revealed itself every time Republican-appointed justices confront a party they sympathize with, for personal reasons, political reasons, or both. Since Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the conservative bloc has consistently given the green light to executions based on questionable facts and twisted applications of the law.

Yet this bloc has happily twisted the same law into knots to rule in favor of the January 6 rioters charged with obstruction. Conservative judges who seem to automatically rule against ordinary criminal defendants, or even against people forced to sleep in parks, will stretch words beyond their meaning to give Trump, his allies, and his gang a victory. When this select group is faced with the prospect of consequences for their actions, every argument and utterance from prosecutors must be scrutinized for deep state bias, dark agendas, or legal weakness. When a man with strong claims of innocence asks for a stay of execution to support his claims of actual innocence? Those same judges can’t be bothered to intervene.

We see this pattern repeat itself ad infinitum in a series of low-profile cases that illustrate who benefits from the highly selective empathy and interest of this Supreme Court. Corporations damaging our health with demonstrably dangerous pollution? SCOTUS will comb through the record to find a ridiculous excuse to avoid punishment. Corrupt government officials taking bribes for personal enrichment? The conservative justices will do everything in their power to let them off the hook. Fraudsters stealing hardworking people’s money to enrich themselves? Their The right to escape punishment is paramount to constitutional liberty. Arms dealers who profit from illegal mass killings? This court will shamelessly rewrite a law to protect them from prosecution.

The conservative justices make no attempt to hide what’s happening here. When this bloc gutted the Clean Water Act in 2023, allowing wealthy landowners to destroy crucial wetlands, it had the audacity to base its decision on due process. “A staggering number of landowners are at risk of criminal prosecution or heavy civil penalties,” the court worried. The environmental protections at issue were unconstitutional, the court reasoned, because their definition was too “vague,” potentially encouraging “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” The simple mandate Do not destroy wetlands without a permit did not pass the test of a fair trial in court, but the execution of innocent people does not meet that test.

Similarly, when the government sought to ban bump stocks—replacement stocks that effectively turn AR-15s into automatic weapons—the move prompted an outpouring of empathetic concern from conservatives. These justices were appalled by the possibility that some hapless and well-meaning gun owner might be unaware that this device, whose sole purpose is mass murderwas illegal under federal law. During oral arguments, they poured out their hearts to bump-stock enthusiasts who might be “ensnared” in vindictive prosecution without knowledge of the ban, as if ignorance of the law guarantees innocence. (It doesn’t.) Incredibly, these justices have ruled that people who are literally innocent of a crime can remain in prison under an unlawful sentence. A typical criminal defendant is forced to spend decades behind bars despite his innocence, but a defendant favored by this Supreme Court? Due process demands that they be given all the relief they seek.

It is now beyond any doubt that the six justices of the conservative supermajority have created two classes of Americans who receive two kinds of judicial help: one class that looks like them and shares their values, and one class that provokes no empathy, concern, or even curiosity.

In a few weeks the court will hear the oral arguments in Glossip vs. Oklahomaa case with another high-profile defendant who was given none of the perks and benefits and advantages afforded to the special defendants most cherished by the judges. Like Williams, Richard Glossip had a trial rife with prosecutorial errors, deceit and misconduct that a fair court would have prohibited. Like Williams, Glossip’s potential prosecutors are no longer even seeking his execution and are actually fighting to stop it; the Supreme Court had to hire someone to argue the case that his murder was by a state that decided, once the misconduct came to light, that it would rather not have it. Like Williams, Glossip has made strong claims that he did not commit this murder. And yet the Supreme Court’s fatal rejection of Williams on Tuesday suggests that a majority of the justices will conclude that the world would be a better place if Glossip, too, were executed before we can sort out what went wrong with his deeply flawed prosecution.

Some of the justices who have created this two-tiered system have used every legal tactic at their disposal to ensure that their own misconduct is not subject to broad public scrutiny and review, thwarting ethics rules to keep their unjust loot secret from the public, denying congressional requests, and ignoring invitations to testify. This week, these justices rejected the proposition that Williams’ life, like Glossip’s, is important enough to warrant a trial that would expose unconstitutional inequities. We recently learned from the New York Times that Chief Justice John Roberts believed that if he were to hide the court’s reasoning for Trump’s impunity behind abstractions and jargon, Americans would not care that his court was designing a system that would allow a guilty ex-president to walk free. Apparently, when it comes to executing a black man, the majority can’t even be bothered with abstractions and jargon. An unsigned order will Doing.