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The Missouri Supreme Court has refused to stop the execution of a death row inmate on Tuesday, even though prosecutors believe he may be innocent, according to the governor’s office.
“Mr. Williams has exhausted all legal means and options, including over 15 hearings attempting to prove his innocence and overturn his conviction,” Governor Mike Parson said in a statement.
“No jury or court, at the trial, appellate, or Supreme Court level, has ever found Mr. Williams’ claims of innocence to be justified. Ultimately, his conviction and death sentence were affirmed. None of the actual facts of this case led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence, so Mr. Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”
Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of murdering Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was found stabbed to death in her home in 1998. Williams has long maintained his innocence. And in an unusual move, St. Louis County’s top prosecutor filed a motion in January to overturn Williams’ 2001 conviction and sentence.
But that request was denied. Based on new information about possible evidence tampering, prosecutor Wesley Bell and Williams’ lawyers recently filed a joint brief asking the Missouri Supreme Court to remand the case to a lower court for a “more comprehensive hearing” of the January motion filed by Bell, a Democrat who is now running for Congress.
Williams’ case raises the risk that a potentially innocent person will be executed – an inherent risk of the death penalty. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have later been acquitted, including four in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Williams is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at around 6 p.m. CT on Tuesday.
The NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Parson to stop Williams’ execution. The governor had previously revoked a stay of execution in the case ordered by his predecessor, allowing Williams’ execution to go ahead.
The court examined several questions, the state judiciary said.
The first concerns whether the prosecutor in the 2001 trial against Williams excluded a potential juror from the jury “due to discriminatory intent.”
Williams’ lawyers have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution based on “newly discovered evidence from the prosecutor’s testimony” last month.
During a hearing on a motion to quash the case on August 28, a prosecutor in Williams’ case “admitted that he had rejected (a potential juror from the jury pool) because (the potential juror) was black, as was Mr. Williams,” Williams’ lawyers wrote in an emergency motion asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
During Monday’s hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court, Williams’ attorney, Jonathan Potts, claimed that the prosecutor rejected the potential juror “in part because he was a young black man with glasses.”
“There was also a racist component to it,” Potts said.
However, the Missouri Attorney General’s office disputed this view, arguing that the prosecutor’s intent to reject the potential juror was not based on race.
“What did he say when we asked him directly, ‘Have you hit anyone because you’re black?’ He said no, absolutely not,” Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said during Monday’s hearing. “And he explained that would be a violation.”
Another issue the court addressed was whether there was sufficient evidence that prosecutors “maliciously destroyed potentially helpful evidence,” the state Attorney General’s Office said.
This includes the question of “whether the prosecutor destroyed DNA evidence on the murder weapon by handling it without gloves.”
Ultimately, the state Supreme Court unanimously decided not to stay Marcellus Williams’ execution because the prosecutor “failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence Williams’ actual innocence or a constitutional error in the original criminal trial that undermines confidence in the verdict of the original criminal trial,” the opinion said. The opinion also said, “Because this Court denies this appeal on the merits, the motion for a stay of execution is denied as moot.”
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an attorney for Williams, said in a statement after the decision on Monday that the “courts must intervene to prevent this irreparable injustice.”
“Missouri is on the verge of executing 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 attorneys would continue the fight to save Williams’ life.
“Even for those who oppose the death penalty, irreversible execution should not be an option when there is even the slightest doubt about the defendant’s guilt,” Bell said.
In their joint brief, attorneys for Bell and Williams argue that the St. Louis County District Court failed to accept newly introduced evidence that contradicted prosecutors’ statements in Williams’ 2001 trial and in his earlier appeals.
The prosecution prosecuting Williams argued in its January motion that DNA analysis of the murder weapon could rule out Williams as Gayle’s killer. But that argument fell apart last month when new DNA analysis showed the murder weapon had been improperly handled, tainting the evidence intended to exonerate Williams and complicating his attempt to prove his innocence.
Attorneys for both sides “received a report indicating that DNA on the murder weapon belonged to an assistant district attorney and an investigator who had handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to trial,” according to a summary of the case files.
However, “the court concluded that there was no new evidence sufficient to overturn the conviction or prove Williams’ innocence.”
Williams’ lawyers said that the prosecution’s tampering with DNA evidence before Williams’ trial violated his fair trial rights. They joined the county’s current top prosecutor in asking the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn the district court’s decision and remand the case to give both sides time to present evidence and the court enough time to carefully review the case.
Bell and Williams’ lawyers are trying to overturn the verdict because there is “overwhelming evidence” that Williams’ trial was unfair, said one of his lawyers, Tricia Rojo Bushnell.
Prosecutors have raised other concerns about Williams’ conviction, including that he was convicted based on the testimony of two unreliable informants who were facing legal troubles of their own and who also received a $10,000 bounty.
But ultimately, a state judge denied Bell’s request to overturn Williams’ conviction and sentence.
“There is no basis for a court to find Williams innocent,” Judge Bruce F. Hilton wrote in his ruling, “and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death.”
In the case, Bell, who took office in 2018, faces Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is running for re-election. Bailey had fought Bell’s January motion, arguing that new DNA test results suggested the evidence did not exonerate Williams.
Last month, Bell’s office announced it had reached a settlement with Williams. Under the settlement, approved by the court and Gayle’s family, the inmate would have entered an Alford guilty plea to first-degree murder and received a life sentence.
But the state’s attorney general opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the agreement.
Former Republican Governor Eric Greitens had previously stayed Williams’ execution indefinitely and set up a commission to investigate his case and decide whether he should be granted clemency.
But after Parson took office, he disbanded the committee investigating Williams’ case and revoked Williams’ stay of execution in 2023.
“This board was created almost six years ago and it’s time to move forward,” Parson said last summer. “We could spend another six years stalling and delaying, postponing justice, leaving a victim’s family in the dark and not solving anything. This administration will not do that.”
The move effectively denied Williams his right to due process, Williams’ lawyers said.
“The Governor’s actions violated Williams’ constitutional rights and required the Court’s attention with extraordinary urgency,” the court documents say.
However, Parsons’ decision to disband the Williams investigation committee does not mean that the governor has decided whether or not Williams should be executed, spokesman Johnathan Shiflett wrote in an email to CNN on Monday.
“The courts have to decide that.”
CNN’s Dakin Andone, Lauren Mascarenhas and Jennifer Hauser contributed to this report.
