Missouri Supreme Court to consider death row case a day before scheduled execution

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

The Missouri Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday as attorneys working on behalf of Marcellus Williams seek to save him, just a day before his scheduled execution.

Oral arguments were scheduled for Monday morning in the hearing before the state Supreme Court. Williams, 55, is set to die by injection Tuesday evening for the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle in University City, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.

Williams has long maintained his innocence. DNA evidence raised enough questions that a previous governor halted an execution in 2017, and St. Louis County's current prosecutor challenged Williams' guilt in a court hearing last month.

Attorneys for Williams also have an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, a clemency request before Gov. Mike Parson focuses largely on how Gayle's own relatives want the sentence commuted to life in prison without parole. The national NAACP also is urging Parson, a Republican, to stop the execution of Williams, who is Black.

The execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 15th nationwide.

Williams was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay after reviewing DNA evidence that found no trace of Williams’ DNA on the knife used in the killing. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to examine the case, but that panel never reached any conclusion.

That same DNA evidence prompted Democratic St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new testing showed that the DNA evidence was spoiled because members of the prosecutor’s office touched the knife without gloves before the original trial.

With the DNA evidence unavailable, Midwest Innocence Project attorneys reached a compromise with the prosecutor’s office: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed off on the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s urging, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place Aug. 28.

Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand.

“Every claim of error Williams has asserted on direct appeal, post-conviction review, and habeas review has been rejected by Missouri’s courts,” Hilton wrote. “There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding.”

The clemency petition from the Midwest Innocence Project focuses heavily on how Gayle’s relatives want the sentence commuted to life without parole. “The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” the petition states.

Parson, a former county sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions, and has never granted clemency.

Issues of racial bias in Williams’ conviction also have been raised.

The prosecutor in the 2001 first-degree murder case, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that the trial jury was fair, even though it included just one Black member on the panel.

Larner said he struck just three potential Black jurors, including one man because he looked too much like Williams. He didn’t say why he felt that mattered.

Executing Williams would perpetuate a history of racial injustice in the use of the death penalty in Missouri and elsewhere, NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote to Parson last week. The NAACP is opposed to the death penalty.

“Taking the life of Marcellus Williams would be an unequivocal statement that when a white woman is killed, a Black man must die. And any Black man will do,” Johnson wrote.

Prosecutors at Williams’ original trial said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower, and found a large butcher knife. When Gayle came downstairs, she was stabbed 43 times. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the laptop in the car and that Williams sold it a day or two later.

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors Williams confessed to the killing and offered details about it.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted of felonies and wanted a $10,000 reward.

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Salter reported from O'Fallon, Missouri.