This post was updated Oct. 7 at 12:21 a.m.

Around 70 people attended a vigil Wednesday for Marcellus Williams, a Black man executed in Missouri despite doubts over his case’s legal proceedings.

The vigil, organized by the Black Law Students Association and the UCLA chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, was hosted at the Shapiro Courtyard in the UCLA School of Law. Following speeches from community members, including Muslim chaplain ​​Tabari Abdul-Zahir and law professor Sherod Thaxton, attendees were invited to share thoughts and messages – some reciting verses of the Quran and others talking about their own experiences with incarcerated family members.

Williams, an imam who also adopted the name Khaliifah after his conversion to Islam, was convicted in 2001 for the killing of Lisha Gayle in 1998 and sentenced to death. An appeal from the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office opposing Williams’ execution claimed that forensic evidence did not match him, and others questioned the choice to have multiple Black candidates struck from Williams’ jury, according to the Associated Press.

Gayle’s family and a Missouri judge had signed an agreement to commute Williams’ sentence to life without parole – but according to AP, it was blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court just a month before his execution on Sept. 24. Hundreds of thousands of people signed an online petition calling for a stop to his execution.

Malik Marshall, a law student and political activism chair for the BLSA, said the organizations chose to hold a vigil instead of a protest in order to start a conversation about Williams’ death and build momentum.

“We didn’t want to just let this go by,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t absolutely things to protest related to this issue – but again, that takes the focus away from Khaliifah Williams.”

As law students in particular, watching injustice take place while learning how to prevent it was incredibly frustrating, said Maahum Shahab, a law student who attended the vigil.

“How much do we value the sanctity of a human life?” Shahab said. “What’s the point of all these rules and orders and what we call civil procedures, if it inevitably cannot uproot injustice?”

The United States’ legal system is particularly harsh toward Black men like Williams who are accused of crimes against white women, Thaxton said during the vigil. For example, he said despite statistical evidence demonstrating that people – particularly Black people – charged with killing a white person were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty, the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 in McCleskey v. Kemp that the data was insufficient to prove the defendant had been discriminated against.

Additionally, multiple attempts by state and federal legislatures to pass racial justice laws, which acknowledge the presence of racial and ethnic bias in the courtroom, have failed, he said.

“We’re taught in law school: If you have a right, you have a remedy,” he said in his speech. “The question is: But where is the remedy?”

Speakers and attendees, some of whom wore keffiyehs, also pointed to the ongoing destruction of the Gaza Strip and Lebanon by Israel – which has received billions’ worth of weapons from the U.S. – as an example of what they saw to be state-sanctioned racial violence. One participant recited a poem Williams wrote titled, “The perplexing smiles of the children of Palestine.”

Shahab read the first chapter of the Quran, something that is done in the Muslim tradition when someone dies to help them in the afterlife. Having the space to mourn as a community gave people the time to pause and reflect on what needs to be done to ensure that such events do not happen again, she said.

Shahab added that Williams’ case and the movement it created have made her more determined to pursue social justice-oriented work in the future.

“You often don’t hear those names of the oppressed,” she said. “How can I take what he did and embody that in my life, so that when I die and I leave a legacy eventually, it’s like that?”

Similarly, Abdul-Zahir called on vigil attendees to recognize how oppression works against people of color on all sides of the law.

“We have a long history of this state-sponsored killing from the founding of this country,” he said in his speech. “When you go into those courtrooms – man, be humble, man. Because if you’re arrogant, somebody’s going to get hurt.”

Ultimately, Marshall said he hopes attendees understand that racialized violence is central to the current nature of the American government and cannot only be solved by lawyers in a courtroom. By recognizing that, people can push and hope for something better, he said.

Beyond voting or protest action, attending events like the vigil and being present with the greater community is a first step in taking action, Marshall added.

“Take in all of this violence, and don’t let yourself be desensitized to it,” he said. “It’s so important that we don’t look at senseless death and feel nothing. … We have to remember what it means to be human is to feel something.”