Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite questions over evidence, after Supreme Court denies final bid for delay

The state of Missouri on Tuesday executed Marcellus Williams shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request to delay the execution. The state Department of Corrections said he was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. CT.

Williams, who had maintained his innocence in the 1998 stabbing death of Felicia Gayle in a St. Louis suburb, was put to death by lethal injection.

“We hope this gives finality to a case that has languished for decades,” said Missouri Department of Corrections Director Trevor Foley. 

But St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who had sought to have the conviction overturned, said, “This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”

“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said in a statement. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option.” 

Williams’ son, Marcellus Williams Jr., and two of his attorneys witnessed the execution, according to Dana Rieck of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Missouri Department of Corrections communications director Karen Pojmann noted no witnesses for Gayle’s family attended the execution; the family had previously said they opposed executing Williams.

Williams appeared to be talking with the imam, who was with him in the chamber, while awaiting execution, David Lieb of The Associated Press said. Lieb reported that following the injection, Williams wiggled his feet at one point and moved his head slightly, his chest heaved about a half dozen times and then stopped.

Earlier efforts to halt the execution were denied Monday by the Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson. His execution is the third in Missouri this year, and among five taking place nationwide across a seven-day span if the remaining three are carried out on schedule, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have granted the request to halt the execution.

“Tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man,” said attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project in a statement after the Supreme Court ruling. “…The victim’s family opposes his execution. Jurors, who originally sentenced him to death, now oppose his execution. The prosecutor’s office that convicted and sentenced him to death has now admitted they were wrong and zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life.”

“That is not justice. And we must all question any system that would allow this to occur,” Bushnell said.

Williams had been faced with execution twice before following his 2001 conviction for the murder of Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. First, in 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court halted execution plans and appointed a special master to review DNA testing on the handle of the murder weapon, the butcher knife that was used to stab Gayle 43 times and was left lodged in her neck.

Williams’ attorneys said DNA experts who reviewed the results determined that he was not the source of DNA found on the knife. But the special master sent the case back to the Missouri Supreme Court, and a second execution date was set for August 2017.

Then, hours before Williams was set to be executed, then-Gov. Eric Greitens called it off and appointed a panel of five retired judges to investigate the DNA evidence. The board, however, was dissolved by Parson in June 2023 and never issued its final report.

Faced with the DNA evidence and other new information in Williams’ case, prosecutor Wesley Bell sought to toss out the conviction on numerous grounds, including the results of the DNA testing and constitutional violations during the jury selection process. 

But the night before an evidentiary hearing was set to take place, Bell’s office received new test results indicating DNA on the knife handle was consistent with that of a prosecutor who worked on Williams’ case and a former investigator with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Williams’ attorneys said in a filing that the DNA results confirmed they handled the knife without gloves, contaminating the evidence. 

With the DNA evidence spoiled, Williams and Bell, the prosecuting attorney, reached an agreement under which Williams would enter a no-contest plea to murder in the first degree with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

Gayle’s family indicated they did not support executing Williams, according to court filings, and in August, a judge signed off on the agreement. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, objected to the plea.

The state supreme court went on to block the plan and ordered an evidentiary hearing on Williams’ claims of innocence.

During the proceeding last month, a trial attorney who tried the 2001 case said that he removed one Black prospective juror because he looked like Williams. When asked whether he struck the juror because of his race, the prosecutor, Keith Larner said, “No. Absolutely not,” according to court records. Larner said that he believed the jury, composed of 11 White people and one Black person, was fair. 

The prosecutor also acknowledged that he handled the murder weapon without gloves at least five times during witness preparation sessions before the trial, as he believed the investigation into Gayle’s killing was finished.

At the end of the hearing, the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office told the court that it conceded the “constitutional error of mishandling evidence” in Williams’ trial, and said “clear and convincing evidence” of numerous constitutional errors in his prosecution were presented.

Still, on Sept. 12, the judge declined to toss out Williams’ conviction and sentence. The Missouri Supreme Court then denied relief.

In urging the Supreme Court to intervene, Williams’ lawyers had asked the justices to wait until they have decided another death penalty case involving an Oklahoma inmate, which they said raises the same issues. The high court is poised to hear arguments Oct. 9 in Richard Glossip’s effort to toss out his conviction due to concerns about the fairness of his trial.

“The ever-present undercurrent of residual doubt as to Mr. Williams’ innocence plagues this case, even as his execution looms,” his attorneys wrote in a filing with the high court. “Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence were secured through a trial riddled with constitutional errors, racism, and bad faith, much of which only came to light recently.”

They called his conviction a “grave miscarriage of justice” and said executing him would be an “unthinkable, irreversible travesty.”

Top officials in Missouri opposed the request to call off the execution, claiming that Williams has engaged in a “strategy of extreme delay” in bringing the claims and accusing him of attempting to “manufacture another emergency through dilatory tactics.”

“The state of Missouri, crime victims, for whom the case goes on for decades without resolution, and the criminal justice system are all harmed by endless litigation of meritless claims,” Bailey wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.

In a statement following the execution, attorneys Laurence Komp and Laine Cardarella said, “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, including for over a decade after the passage of a DNA statute designed to prevent the contamination of evidence, but nothing is done.”

“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 lawyers added.

Williams’ was charged more than a year after Gayle’s death. Prosecutors claim that he broke into her home in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, and, after hearing water running in the shower upstairs, found a butcher knife and waited. After Gayle came down the stairs, Williams attacked and stabbed her 43 times, then left with her purse and husband’s laptop, law enforcement officials said.

Prosecutors said Williams also took a jacket that he used to conceal the blood on his shirt. His girlfriend later noticed that he was wearing a jacket despite the summer weather, and after he removed it, saw that Williams’ shirt was bloody, according to court filings.

The girlfriend also testified that she saw the laptop in the car and the purse in its trunk, and claimed Williams confessed to killing Gayle, according to court records. Roughly 10 months after Gayle’s death, and after her family offered reward money, a man named Henry Cole, who was a cellmate with Williams when he was in jail on unrelated charges, claimed he confessed to murdering Gayle, prosecutors said.

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