A St. Louis man has been sentenced to death for a 1998 murder that lawyers say he did not commit.
Marcellus Williams was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. Tuesday, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected several last-minute requests to stop the execution. The state Supreme Court allowed the execution on Monday, the same day that Governor Mike Parson refused to grant Mildness.
In a closing statement, Williams, who became a devout Muslim during his prison sentence, said, “All praise is due to Allah in every situation.”
Imam Jalahii Kacem, who had spent time with Williams earlier in the day, was in the same room as Williams during the execution. Media witnesses to the execution said Williams appeared calm.
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said in a statement: “Tonight, we are all witnesses to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of power. Do not let it be in vain. This must never happen, and we must not allow it to continue.”
Parson said he hoped the execution would “bring closure to a case that has been simmering for decades.” He said the legal proceedings had “revictimized” the family of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was stabbed to death in her University City home in August 1998.
Gayle’s family, although they believed Williams was guilty of her murder, opposed his execution. They made no statement and no one from her family was present at the execution at Bonne Terre prison.
Williams had always claimed he had nothing to do with Gayle’s murder. Police found some of Gayle’s belongings in a car that belonged to Williams, and he pawned a laptop that belonged to her husband. But no forensic evidence such as DNA, hair or fingerprints ever linked him to the crime scene. He was convicted largely based on the testimony of his ex-girlfriend Laura Asaro and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.
In 2017, Asaro called a Kansas City activist, According to reports to retract her statements against Williams. But Asaro’s mother allegedly did not let her finish the conversation. Asaro and Cole have since both died.
St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell believed Williams was innocent of the crime, and filed an application for eviction the conviction in January.
In a statement on Tuesday, he said the execution did not serve the interest of justice.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said. “If there is even the slightest doubt about his innocence, the death penalty should never be an option.”
Initially, he relied on three experts who said the unknown DNA found on the handle of the knife used in the murder could not have come from Williams. But further tests showed that the DNA most likely came from two former prosecutors. One of them later admitted in court that he had touched the knife several times before the trial without gloves. While these findings meant that the evidence was contaminated, they also no longer pointed to an unknown killer.
Sophie Proe
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St. Louis Public Radio
To save Williams’ life, his lawyers and Bell’s office reached an agreement in which Williams would plead “no contest” to the murder charge in exchange for a life sentence. When state Attorney General Andrew Bailey objected, St. Louis County District Judge Bruce Hilton stayed the sentence. the deal and continued with a hearing about the application for eviction.
With their evidence of an unknown killer thrown out, Bell’s office and Williams’ lawyers now argued that the handling of the knife constituted a “fraudulent failure to preserve evidence.” They also claimed that prosecutors had prevented a juror from serving solely because he was black, violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky. But both Hilton and the state Supreme Court agreed that the “clear and convincing evidence” required under state law for motions to overturn a conviction was lacking.
“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or proof of constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original verdict,” Justice Zel Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion Monday.
