Marcellus Williams: Missouri death row inmate set to die today despite his innocence and efforts to overturn his conviction
CNN
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Marcellus Williams, the Missouri death row inmate who has maintained his innocence for nearly 24 years, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, a day after the governor and state Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Williams, 55, was convicted of the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former journalist found stabbed to death in her home in 1998, but he has long insisted he is innocent.
He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Central time Tuesday at Bonne Terre State Prison, unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.
The case raises the risk of putting an innocent person to death, a risk inherent in capital punishment. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have subsequently been exonerated, including four in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have called on Gov. Mike Parson to stay Williams’ execution.
Over the weekend, Williams’ attorneys and St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell filed a joint brief asking the state Supreme Court to send the case back to a lower court for a “fuller hearing” on Bell’s January motion to vacate Williams’ 2001 conviction and sentence.
The St. Louis district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Williams in 2001, argued in its January motion that DNA testing of the murder weapon could exclude Williams from Gayle’s list of killers. But that argument was rejected last month at a circuit court hearing when new DNA testing revealed that the murder weapon had been mishandled, contaminating evidence meant to exonerate Williams and complicating his quest to prove his innocence.
At Monday’s hearing, the Missouri Supreme Court refused to stay Williams’ execution.
Ultimately, the state Supreme Court unanimously decided not to stay the execution because the prosecutor “failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence either Williams’ actual innocence or a constitutional error at the original criminal trial that undermines confidence in the original criminal trial judgment,” the opinion reads. The opinion also states that “because this Court dismisses this appeal on the merits, the motion for a stay of execution is dismissed as moot.”
“Mr. Williams has exhausted every avenue of appeal and legal process, including more than 15 hearings, in an attempt to assert his innocence and overturn his conviction,” Parson said in a statement after the ruling.
“No jury or court, not even at the trial level, the appellate court or the Supreme Court, has ever found any basis for Mr. Williams’ claims of innocence. Ultimately, his guilty verdict and death sentence were upheld. Nothing in the actual facts of this case led me to believe that Mr. Williams is innocent. Therefore, the sentence imposed on Mr. Williams will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”
At Monday’s hearing, Williams’ attorney, Jonathan Potts, claimed that a prosecutor at his trial removed a juror from the jury pool “in part because he was a young black man wearing glasses.”
“There was a racial component to all of this,” Potts said.
But the Missouri attorney general’s office disputed that idea, saying the trial prosecutor’s intent to dismiss the potential juror was not based on race.
In a statement after Monday’s ruling, Williams’ attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell said “the courts must step in to prevent this irreparable injustice.”
“Missouri is about to execute an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” she said.
In his own statement Monday, Bell said he and other advocates will continue the fight to save Williams’ life.
“Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option,” Bell said.
On September 18, less than a week before the scheduled execution, Williams’ team filed a clemency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the petition, Williams’ attorneys argued that his due process rights were violated during the years-long legal battle to save his life.
They noted that former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens had previously indefinitely stayed Williams’ execution and formed a committee to investigate his case and determine whether he should be granted clemency.
“The board investigated Williams’ case for the next six years, until Governor Michael Parson abruptly ended the process,” the attorneys wrote.
Upon taking office, Parson dissolved the board and revoked Williams’ stay of execution, according to the petition. Parson’s decision deprived Williams of his right to due process, Williams’ attorneys argued.
“The Governor’s actions violated Williams’ constitutional rights and created an exceptionally urgent need for the Court’s attention,” the court documents state.
Then, just a day before the scheduled execution, Williams’ team also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution based on what it says is evidence of racial bias in jury selection.
The case pitted Bell, who took office in 2018 and is now running for Congress as a Democrat, against Republican state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is seeking reelection. Bailey had challenged Bell’s motion in January, saying new DNA test results indicated the evidence would not exonerate Williams.
Last month, Bell’s office announced it had reached a deal with Williams. Under the consent decree, approved by the court and Gayle’s family, the inmate would have pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and been sentenced to life in prison again.
But the state attorney general’s office opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the deal.
CNN’s Dakin Andone and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.
