A St. Louis County judge has rejected an attempt to free a man who prosecutors now believe is innocent of a 1998 murder.
Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton on Thursday declined to throw out the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who was sentenced to death for the killing of Felicia Gayle. Without intervention from a higher state court, Gov. Mike Parson or the U.S. Supreme Court, Williams will be executed Sept. 24.
“There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding,” Hilton wrote in his opinion. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and has been sentenced to death.”
St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, whose office filed the motion to vacate the conviction in January, said in a statement he was “immensely disappointed” in the ruling.
“I believe that those who are convicted of committing crimes should be brought to justice. And, for something as consequential as the death penalty, the evidence must prove the defendant to be guilty without a shadow of a doubt,” Bell said. “There are detailed and well-documented concerns regarding the integrity of Mr. Williams’ conviction.”
Bell said he would continue to work to prevent Williams from being executed. Under state law, he has the authority to appeal Hilton’s decision.
The Midwest Innocence Project, which represented Williams, said in a statement that it would continue pursuing every option to halt what it called a wrongful execution.
“There is overwhelming evidence that Marcellus Williams’ trial was constitutionally unfair,” said Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the organization’s executive director. “There is still time for the courts or Governor Parson to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”
Michelle Smith, co-executive director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, called the ruling a “devastating blow to justice.”
“It is clear our state continues down a path of reckless disregard for human life, especially Black life,” she said. “This is not justice. It is state-sanctioned murder.”
Williams had always denied that he played any role in the stabbing death of Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. Although police would later find some of Gayle’s belongings in a car belonging to Williams, and he pawned a laptop of her husband’s, there was no forensic evidence like DNA, hair or fingerprints linking him to the scene.
Bell’s motion cited that lack of forensic evidence, questions about the two witnesses who linked Williams to the crime and the performance of Williams’ attorneys at trial. Williams had made similar arguments in state and federal appeals, all of which had been rejected.
Bell’s office also argued that DNA testing of the murder weapon would completely exclude Williams as the suspect. But just days before an initial evidentiary hearing, testing revealed that what was thought to be unknown male DNA on the knife was consistent with the profile of Edward Magee, an investigator in the prosecutor’s office at the time. Keith Larner, who tried the case at trial, also could not be excluded.
That was the moment, Hilton said, that Williams’ freestanding innocence claim “unraveled.”
In an effort to address those findings, Bell received permission to file additional claims that the failure of the state to wear gloves while handling the evidence back then represented a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence,” in violation of Williams’ rights. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office disagreed, saying that back in 2001, no one knew that simply touching an item could leave enough DNA to be tested.
Hilton agreed with Bailey, writing that Williams did not present “any evidence from which this court could find that the State destroyed potentially useful evidence in bad-faith, let alone clear and convincing evidence of the same.”
Hilton limited testimony in the Aug. 28 hearing on the motion to just six hours, something attorney Kent Gipson said “did not reflect well on the integrity of Missouri’s criminal justice system."
“It’s very disappointing that the whole process was compressed with an execution warrant hanging like a sword of Damocles over everybody's head,” said Gipson, who has represented Williams since 2006. “It's not a day to be proud of if you're a citizen of Missouri and if you believe in the rule of law.”
Williams’ case marked the first time Bell had used a 2021 law that gave prosecutors a mechanism to correct what they saw as wrongful convictions. It was also the first time the process had been used for an inmate on death row.
Gipson said he filed a request with Bell’s office as soon as that law took effect in August 2021. He said he believed that if Bell had acted sooner than January 2024 to file the motion, the process would have at least been more fair.
Williams had twice avoided execution as he fought to prove his innocence.
The state Supreme Court first set Williams’ execution date for Jan. 28, 2015. But on Jan. 22, 2015, it granted a motion for a stay. It later appointed a special master to look into the DNA evidence on the murder weapon.
After rejecting Williams’ efforts to review that DNA evidence in 2017, the judges again set an execution date, this time for Aug. 22 of that year. Just hours before Williams was set to die, then-Gov. Eric Greitens issued a stay and appointed a Board of Inquiry to look into whether Williams deserved clemency.
The board held a closed hearing in 2018. One member told St. Louis Public Radio in 2022 that its members met for the last time on July 21, 2021, and made oral recommendations to Parson.
Parson dissolved the board on June 29, 2023, seemingly without taking action on those recommendations. Williams’ attorneys sued, arguing that Parson did not have the authority to take that step. The Supreme Court disagreed in a unanimous ruling issued June 4 and promptly set a third execution date — Sept. 24.
That ruling kicked the proceedings in Bell’s motion to vacate into gear. Hilton initially scheduled an evidentiary hearing for Aug. 21. That afternoon, prosecutors and attorneys for Williams announced they had 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, leading to the hearing a week later.
A no-contest plea means a defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges there would be enough evidence at trial for a jury to convict.
That effort to save Williams’ life may ultimately lead to his execution, said St. Louis University law professor Anders Walker.
“I don't know if as a matter of law it could be considered, but it certainly doesn't help the argument, which is that Mr. Williams is innocent,” Walker said. “I think it's on everybody's mind, and I think everybody knows that Bell tried to have the sentence commuted.”
Hilton’s ruling does not reference the deal other than as part of the case’s procedural history.
Hilton, a Greitens appointee, faces a vote in November to determine if he will remain on the bench. On Wednesday, 12 individuals, many of whom appear to be students at Washington University, submitted nearly identical letters to Hilton saying they would not vote to retain him if he failed to vacate Williams’ conviction.
“There is not a single person who will benefit from the killing of Mr. Williams,” the letters read. “Ms. Gayle's family does not want him to be executed. If Ms. Gayle's survivors are not calling for this execution, and the death penalty has been proven not to be a deterrent to murder, I have to ask whom this execution would serve.”
This story has been updated.
