The fate of Marcellus Williams — who is set to be executed in less than a month — now rests with a St. Louis County circuit judge.
Judge Bruce Hilton took six hours of testimony on Wednesday in a hearing on a motion to throw out Williams’ conviction. He is under a court order to rule on the motion by Sept. 13.
“This is a difficult procedure for everyone,” Hilton said. “It is going to be a decision that I will weigh heavily.”
Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle and is scheduled to be executed Sept. 24. He has always maintained his innocence. Earlier this year, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell wrote that he no longer had confidence in the conviction and asked for it to be vacated.
No forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA had ever tied Williams to the crime, though detectives believed the killer may have worn gloves. Police did find some of Gayle’s belongings in Williams’ car. He also pawned a laptop belonging to her husband.
Bell initially focused on three experts who said unknown DNA found on the handle of the knife used as the murder weapon could not be from Williams. But further testing proved that those samples were consistent with the profile of Ed Magee, an investigator in the prosecutor’s office at the time. The review also found that Keith Larner, a veteran prosecutor who handled the Williams case in 2001, could not be excluded as a contributor.
While those findings meant the evidence had been contaminated, it also no longer pointed to an unknown killer. That contamination of the possible evidence became a key focus of arguments from prosecutors and attorneys for Williams.
Larner, the prosecutor, admitted in court that he handled the knife at least five times without gloves as he was showing it to witnesses before the original trial. He said it was standard for prosecutors at the time to handle murder weapons without gloves at trial.
“It was worthless in my view at that time,” Larner said of the knife. “I knew that I wanted no more testing. I assumed the lab did the most thorough job, I didn’t even know of any other [testing] that could be done.”
In an update to its motion, Bell’s office called the mishandling of the knife a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence.” Michael Spillane, with the attorney general’s office, disagreed sharply with that characterization.
Back at the time of the trial in 2001, Spillane said, no one knew that simply touching an item could leave enough DNA to be tested.
“I don’t like him being accused of sloppy evidence protocols because he didn’t do anything wrong,” Spillane said of Larner, who retired in 2014 after more than 30 years with the county prosecutor’s office.
Bell’s office and attorneys for Williams also used the hearing to raise their ongoing concerns about the two main witnesses in the case. Williams was convicted largely based on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole. Both Cole and Asaro had criminal backgrounds, and Cole had documented mental health issues. Family members swore in affidavits that he often made things up, and he asked about reward money before providing information to police.
State law governing the motion to vacate process says a judge must grant the motion when there is “clear and convincing evidence” of a person’s innocence, or an error at the original trial that undermines confidence in a judgment.
Jonathan Potts, an attorney for Williams, said that standard was clearly met on Wednesday.
“Marcellus Williams didn’t receive the defense he deserved,” he said. “Prosecutors deliberately tainted the evidence. Prosecutors deliberately ensured that he was not judged by a jury of his peers.”
Williams, Potts said, “will not wake up on Sept. 25 unless this court acts.”
As he has throughout this case, Spillane told the judge the issue came down to the rule of law.
“I don’t think dragging this out year after year on claims that are legally meritless does anything,” he said.
Gayle’s family has said it does not support Williams’ execution and is seeking finality in the case. In a letter submitted to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Aug. 14, Laura Friedman, the wife of Gayle’s then-husband Daniel Picus, wrote that the family was “exasperated and exhausted” by the ongoing court fight, saying it was “forcing the family to relive the worst days of their lives and denying them the closure they deserve.”
Prosecutors and attorneys for Williams previously reached a deal that would have seen him plead no contest to Gayle’s murder in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. Hilton accepted the offer at first but withdrew it after the Missouri Supreme Court halted it temporarily and scheduled Wednesday’s hearing.
Friedman and Picus were in court on Wednesday to observe the proceedings. They declined to comment to the media.
