The Missouri Supreme Court will not stop the execution of Marcellus Williams.
In a unanimous decision handed down Monday just hours after oral arguments, judges said they saw no reason to send the case back to a lower court to hear claims from Williams’ attorneys that prosecutors in the original trial had improperly struck jurors solely because of their race, or that prosecutors had destroyed potential DNA evidence by touching the murder weapon with their bare hands.
“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,” Judge Zel Fischer wrote.
Without intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, Williams will be put to death by lethal injection sometime after 6 p.m. Tuesday. Gov. Mike Parson has already said he will not grant Williams’ clemency request.
Williams has always denied that he played any role in the 1998 stabbing death of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. 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. St. Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton denied that motion, which Bell appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Bell said in a statement that he would continue to do everything in his power to save Williams’ life.
“Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant's guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option. As the St. Louis County prosecutor, our office has questions about Mr. Williams’ guilt, but also about the integrity of his conviction,” he said.
No forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA had ever tied Williams to the crime, though detectives say the killer may have worn gloves. Police did find some of Gayle’s belongings in Williams’ car, and he pawned a laptop belonging to her husband. He was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.
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.
Larner admitted in an August hearing that he touched the knife multiple times without gloves, saying that it was standard practice for the office back in 2001.
While those findings meant the evidence had been contaminated, they also no longer pointed to an unknown killer. That was the moment, Hilton wrote in his Sept. 12 opinion, that the actual innocence claim “unraveled.”
The state Supreme Court agreed, writing, “This evidence undermined Prosecutor's claim of actual innocence and fully supports the circuit court's finding that this evidence neither shows the existence of an alternate perpetrator nor excludes Williams as the murderer.” The judges also rejected arguments from the attorneys that the contamination of the evidence was done in bad faith.
“The fact the protocols for handling evidence in 2001 differs from protocols today shows only that the scientific understanding of DNA transmission has evolved over the last 23 years,” Fischer wrote.
At that same August hearing, Larner admitted that “part of the reason” he struck a juror was because both Williams and the juror had similar “piercing eyes,” and he believed they looked like brothers. Prosecutors said that proved the juror was eliminated solely based on his race, in violation of a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Multiple appeals courts at the state and federal levels had already rejected those claims, but attorneys for Williams said the new evidence warranted a second look from a lower court.
The high court disagreed, accusing Bell and attorneys for Williams of cherry-picking the record. When asked directly if he struck that juror based on race, the judges wrote, Larner replied “no, absolutely not.”
Also on Monday, a federal appeals court rejected efforts by Williams’ attorneys to again raise the issue of jury selection at the federal level. His attorneys are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, allowing for a review of the jury issue and the decision by Parson to terminate a board of inquiry studying Williams’ conviction before the board had made any recommendations. The state’s high court had found that a board of inquiry is within the clemency power of the governor, which cannot be limited. The Midwest Innocence Project contends the decision violated Williams’ right to due process.
The Innocence Project’s executive director, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, said in a statement that the U.S. Supreme Court must step in to stop the execution, which she called an “irreparable injustice.”
“Missouri is poised to execute an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” she said.
