Marcellus Williams, photographed in prison (photo submitted). It is not every day that a prosecutor takes the extraordinary step of asking a court to vacate a criminal conviction, let alone one carrying a death sentence.
In the case of Marcellus Williams, St Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell did so after he reviewed the case and found “clear and convincing evidence” that Williams is innocent. Despite the prosecutor’s pending motion, the Missouri Supreme Court set an execution date for Williams, and Attorney General Andrew Bailey now seeks to prevent the St. Louis County Circuit Court from assessing the new DNA evidence at all.
On July 2, the Circuit Court will decide whether it will hold a hearing on the prosecutor’s motion. It is hard to imagine justice in a system that would not require it.
In 2017, Williams came within hours of being executed. His life was only spared after then-Gov. Eric Greitens stayed the execution and appointed an independent Board of Inquiry to review new evidence of Williams’s innocence which included new forensic test results that excluded him as the source of male DNA on the murder weapon — a knife left on the victim’s body.
Six years later, Gov. Mike Parson dissolved the Board of Inquiry on the basis that it was “time to move forward” and “allow the process to proceed within the judicial system.” That process requires a court to consider the DNA evidence before exacting a punishment from which there is no turning back.
To date, no court has reviewed the DNA evidence. Although the Missouri Supreme Court appointed a judge to oversee DNA testing in 2016, the court did not hold a hearing on the results. Now, the very office that secured Williams’s guilty verdict and death sentence has reviewed those test results as well as the evidence presented at trial and asked a court to overturn that conviction on the basis that he is innocent.
In his motion, the prosecutor notes the “paucity” of evidence supporting guilt. Although the perpetrator left behind a great deal of forensic evidence, none of it matched Williams.
It was not his bloody footprint on the floor, it was not his hair in the victim’s hand. No one saw him in the vicinity of the victim’s home.
There was no reason for him to have been in the area and no motive for him to have committed the crime. No one and nothing connected Marcellus Williams to this crime until months later, when a jailhouse informant looking to collect reward money and cut a deal on his own pending charges claimed Williams had confessed to him. That informant led police to a second, equally incentivized witness, who only came forward after she was arrested on her own charges and who told police that Williams had sold the victim’s stolen laptop.
What the jury never learned, however, was that the person who purchased the laptop had also told police that Williams got it from that same incentivized witness.
In the intervening decades, DNA exonerations have shed light on the problems with such testimony—incentivized informants are a contributing factor in some 15% of wrongful convictions overturned through DNA evidence.
As Parson noted when he dissolved the Board of Inquiry, it is only “once the due process of law has been exhausted [that] everyone will receive certainty.” That process requires a court to hold a hearing and carefully review the never-before-considered DNA evidence in the context of the case as a whole.
And it must do so before it is too late. While Williams’s Sept. 24 execution is frighteningly imminent, there is still time to ensure Missouri does not execute a man both the prosecution and defense agree is innocent.
The bottom line is simple: the circuit court should hold a hearing on the prosecutor’s motion and consider the DNA evidence that proves Marcellus Williams did not kill Felicia Gayle. It would be unconscionable for Missouri to allow his execution otherwise.
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