Despite St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s opposition, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, 55, Tuesday for a 1998 killing that he consistently maintained he did not commit.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Mr. Bell said in a statement shortly after the execution. “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
Prosecutor Works to Correct “Manifest Injustice”
In January, the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office filed a 63-page motion to vacate Mr. Williams’s 2001 conviction in the killing of a journalist in her home in the St. Louis suburbs.
The prosecuting attorney wrote that new DNA evidence, increasing doubts about the credibility of the State’s key witnesses, and constitutional defects including ineffective counsel and racially discriminatory jury selection at trial compelled him to ask the circuit court “to correct this manifest injustice.”
A lot of physical evidence was collected at the crime scene—including the murder weapon (a kitchen knife), bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, and hairs on the victim’s t-shirt, her hands, and the floor that did not match her or her husband—and none of it can be tied to Mr. Williams, the prosecutor wrote.
Mr. Williams was excluded as the source of the footprints and hairs, the fingerprints, and male DNA that was recently recovered from the knife handle.
With no direct evidence linking Mr. Williams to the crime, the State’s case depended on two unreliable witnesses—a jailhouse informant who claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him, and Mr. Williams’s girlfriend, who claimed she saw Mr. Williams with the victim’s laptop. Both implicated Mr. Williams because they wanted reward money and shorter sentences in their own cases, Mr. Williams’s counsel told The Washington Post.
New evidence further undermined the witnesses’ credibility, prosecutors wrote. Sworn statements from his own family state the jailhouse informant made up the story about Mr. Williams to get the reward money, and evidence emerged that Mr. Williams had gotten the laptop from his girlfriend, who had her own financial and personal motives to implicate him.
“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection,” the prosecuting attorney’s office wrote, “casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”
Despite Widespread Opposition, Execution Proceeds
In June, while the motion to vacate was pending, the Missouri Supreme Court set September 24 as Mr. Williams’s third execution date.
In 2015 and 2017, the state supreme court and then-Gov. Eric Greitens, respectively, issued last-minute reprieves. The governor appointed a board of inquiry to investigate innocence claims based on DNA testing of the weapon, but before it submitted findings, it was disbanded by current Gov. Mike Parson.
Just before a hearing on the prosecutor’s motion, DNA test results revealed that the DNA on the knife that excluded Mr. Williams matched the trial prosecutor and his investigator, who had repeatedly handled the weapon without gloves.
The contamination undermined Mr. Williams’s ability to prove an actual innocence claim based on new evidence, so he entered an agreement with the prosecutor to enter a “no contest” plea in exchange for a life-without-parole sentence. The circuit judge and the victim’s family approved it, but the Missouri Supreme Court intervened and overturned the agreement.
In August, the circuit court held an evidentiary hearing where the trial prosecutor admitted he repeatedly handled the murder weapon without gloves and, according to Mr. William’s court filings, admitted that “part of the reason” he struck a potential juror was because he was Black.
Mr. Bell conceded constitutional error in the mishandling of evidence, but the state courts nonetheless denied the prosecutor’s motion and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay without explanation. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson noted they would have granted a stay.
Despite statewide protests, Gov. Mike Parson denied clemency and, reportedly for the first time, Missouri carried out an execution over opposition from both the prosecutor’s office and the victim’s family.
Mr. Williams was the 100th person executed in Missouri since 1989, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.