A hearing on Monday in the state’s Supreme Court could determine whether Marcellus Williams is executed on Tuesday for a 1998 murder conviction.
By Shaila Dewan
A last-ditch effort to save the life of Marcellus Williams, who faces execution on Tuesday night in Missouri, got underway Monday morning in the Missouri Supreme Court.
A lawyer from the office that obtained the original death sentence 21 years ago argued that Mr. Williams’s conviction was flawed by violations of his rights during trial.
He focused on what he said was an admission by the original prosecutor at a hearing last month that he had struck a prospective juror at least partly because he was Black, saying that the juror and Mr. Williams “looked like they were brothers.”
“When he said that, the courtroom audibly gasped,” the lawyer, Jonathan B. Potts, told the justices.
But Michael J. Spillane, a lawyer from the attorney general’s office, said that the prosecutor had said he “absolutely” did not make any jury strikes based on race.
The two sides also sparred over whether contamination of the murder weapon amounted to prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Williams, 55, has come close to execution several times since his conviction for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home in 1998. But each time, doubts about his conviction led to a stay of execution.
Last month, Mr. Williams reached a deal with prosecutors that would have taken him off death row, but the deal was struck down by the court.
Now, his defense team is conducting an accelerated effort to save him, including today’s hearing and an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The N.A.A.C.P., the Council on American-Islamic Relations and United States Representative Cori Bush of St. Louis, have made pleas for mercy, saying that Mr. Williams was wrongfully convicted and that no physical evidence ties him to the crime.
“You have it in your power to save a life today by granting clemency to a man who has already unjustly served 24 years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Ms. Bush, a Democrat, wrote to Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican. “I am urging you to use it.”
Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Record Group and an opponent of the death penalty, took out a full page advertisement in Monday’s editions of The Kansas City Star, calling on Missourians to telephone the governor and ask that the execution be stopped.
Mr. Williams’s effort to prove his innocence has faced hurdles including the deaths of two key witnesses against him; the abrupt exit from office of a previous governor, Eric Greitens, who had appointed a board of inquiry on the case; and contamination of the murder weapon, which dashed Mr. Williams’s hope that DNA found on the weapon would point to a different suspect.
Still, his execution has been stayed twice, in 2015 and 2017. He won the support of the local prosecutor, who argued to the courts that Mr. Williams was innocent.
The prosecutor, Wesley Bell of St. Louis County, filed a 63-page motion in January saying that Mr. Williams was probably innocent and that the original prosecutor on the case had improperly excluded prospective jurors who were Black. The motion said that the two main witnesses against Mr. Williams had not been credible, and in fact had incentives to testify against him. Mr. Williams, the motion said, was not the source of bloody shoe prints, fingerprints or hair found at the crime scene.
But before a hearing on that motion could take place, a new analysis showed that DNA found on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was consistent with that of an investigator and a prosecutor who participated in the original trial and not an unknown perpetrator.
That finding “unraveled” Mr. Williams’s innocence claim, the judge who heard the motion said.
With the execution date only a few weeks away, Mr. Bell then struck a deal with Mr. Williams that would have converted his sentence from death to life without parole. But the state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, objected. He said that the statute that allowed Mr. Bell to bring his motion did not allow him to strike such a deal, and the Missouri Supreme Court agreed.
Mr. Bailey and his recent predecessors have routinely objected to wrongful conviction claims. Mr. Bailey, a Republican, has argued that a jury’s original decision should be respected and that Mr. Williams is guilty. In two earlier cases, Mr. Bailey moved to block the release of prisoners who had been declared innocent by judges.
The state Supreme Court ordered the judge in Mr. Williams’s case, Bruce Hilton, to proceed with a hearing on Mr. Bell’s motion. After the hearing, on Aug. 28, the judge rejected the motion, but Mr. Bell appealed, and it is that appeal that the state Supreme Court heard on Monday. Mr. Bell’s office asked the court to send the case back to Judge Hilton for a more comprehensive hearing, saying the office was given only two hours to present evidence the first time.
Unless another stay is granted, Mr. Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the lawyer from the prosecutor’s office who spoke in favor of Mr. Williams at the hearing on Monday. He was Jonathan B. Potts, not Matthew A. Jacober.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY NYT 2024