A St. Louis man has been put to death for a 1998 murder that advocates say he did not commit.
Marcellus Williams was pronounced dead by injection at 6:10 p.m. Tuesday, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected several last-minute requests to halt the execution. The state Supreme Court allowed the execution to go forward on Monday, the same day that Gov. Mike Parson declined to grant clemency.
In a final statement, Williams, who became a devout Muslim during his time in prison, gave “all praise to Allah in every situation.”
Imam Jalahii Kacem, who spent time with Williams earlier in the day, was in the room with Williams as the execution was carried out. Media witnesses to the execution said Williams appeared calm.
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said in a statement: “Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue.”
Parson said he hoped the execution would give “finality to a case that has languished for decades.” He said the legal proceedings had “revictimized” the family of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was fatally stabbed in her University City home in August 1998.
Gayle’s family, while believing Williams was guilty of her killing, had come to oppose his execution. They did not make a statement, and no one from her family was present at the prison in Bonne Terre for the execution.
Williams had always maintained he had nothing to do with the murder of Gayle. Police would find some of Gayle’s possessions in a car that belonged to Williams, and he pawned a laptop belonging to her husband. But no forensic evidence like DNA, hair or fingerprints ever tied him to the scene. He was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.
In 2017, Asaro called an activist based in Kansas City, reportedly to recant her statements against Williams. But Asaro’s mother would allegedly not allow her to finish the call. Asaro and Cole have both since died.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell believed Williams was innocent of the crime, and filed a motion to vacate the conviction in January.
He said in a statement Tuesday that the execution did not serve the interest of justice.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said. “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option."
He 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 revealed that the DNA most likely belonged to two former employees of the prosecutor’s office. One would later admit in court that he touched the knife without gloves multiple times ahead of trial. While those findings meant the evidence had been contaminated, it also no longer pointed to an unknown killer.
In an effort to save Williams’ life, his attorneys and Bell’s office reached an agreement in which Williams would plead no contest to the murder charge in exchange for a life sentence. When state Attorney General Andrew Bailey objected, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton ended the deal and proceeded with a hearing on the motion to vacate.
With their proof of an unknown killer eliminated, Bell’s office and attorneys for Williams pivoted to arguing that the handling of the knife represented a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence.” They also asserted claims that prosecutors had prevented a juror from serving solely because he was Black, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky. But both Hilton and the state Supreme Court agreed that the “clear and convincing evidence” required under the state law governing motions to vacate a conviction was lacking.
“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 in Monday’s unanimous state Supreme Court opinion.
