The case of Marcellus Williams has attracted nationwide attention as yet another reminder that the death penalty is often unjustly applied. On Sept. 23, lawyers made the legal version of a Hail Mary pass on Williams’ behalf.
According to The New York Times, a lawyer from the prosecution team that originally got Williams sentenced to death in 2003 is expected to bring an argument before Missouri’s Supreme Court that Williams’ conviction was tainted due to his rights being violated during his original trial.
In October, Williams came to an agreement with prosecutors for the State of Missouri that would have removed him from the state’s death row, but the Missouri Supreme Court later rescinded the deal. Williams’ defense lawyers, the NAACP, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and St. Louis’s Rep. Cori Bush all made pleas regarding the innocence of Williams, arguing that there is no physical evidence that links Williams to the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle.
Rep. Bush sent Missouri Gov. Michael Parsons a letter earlier in September pleading that he use his power of clemency on behalf of Williams.
“We must dedicate ourselves to actually achieving the fundamental principles of liberty and justice that animate our laws and our governance. Within the last four decades, four individuals who were on death row have been exonerated in Missouri. We must not allow innocent individuals to be murdered at the hands of the state. 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. I am urging you to use it.” Bush wrote.
According to MissouriNet, Missouri NAACP Chapter President Nimrod Chapel Jr. also sees the Williams case as an injustice and calls attention to the potential destruction of evidence by the police.
“The reason that he cannot produce any more evidence to exonerate himself is because the prosecutor and the police officers destroyed it,” Chapel told the outlet. “They touched it in such a way that you cannot even get DNA off of it to be able to determine who was or was not on the murder weapon.”
The 55-year-old Williams has faced several obstacles in his quest to have his conviction exonerated, including the deaths of two key witnesses against him, the abrupt departure from office of Eric Greitens, a former governor who appointed a board inquiry into the case, and as Chapel alluded to, the mishandling of evidence by the police which destroyed any hope that DNA recovered from the murder weapon would point at someone besides Williams for the murder of Gayle.
Wesley Bell, the prosecutor for St. Louis County, argued that Williams was most likely innocent and that the prosecutor who originally worked during the trial of Williams had Black jurors excluded from the jury. Bell’s January 2024 motion argued that the two-star witnesses against Bell were not credible and had a motive to testify against Williams. Bell also argued that Williams was not the person who left bloody shoe prints, fingerprints, or hair collected at the scene of the crime.
According to St. Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton, who heard Bell’s argument, the discovery that the murder weapon, a knife, had been contaminated by an investigator and a prosecutor who originally prosecuted Williams essentially curtailed any hope of Williams’ claim to innocence being heard.
According to Rolling Stone, the board that Greitens established was dissolved by Missouri’s Republican Gov. Parsons in 2023, implying in a statement that he has no plans to pardon Williams or further examine his innocence.
“This board was established nearly six years ago, and it is time to move forward,” Parsons said. “We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing. This administration won’t do that. Withdrawing the order allows the process to proceed within the judicial system, and once the due process of law has been exhausted, everyone will receive certainty.”
Judge Hilton, who presided over the hearing challenging Williams’ guilt in the case, initially approved the agreement, but Parsons and the AG he appointed did not.
On Sept. 12., the judge upheld Williams’ death penalty conviction, writing in a ruling: “Every claim of error Williams has asserted on direct appeal, post-conviction review, and habeas review has been rejected by Missouri’s courts. There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and has been sentenced to death.”
Several jurors from the original trial, including the foreperson and an alternate juror, also regretted their decision to find Williams guilty in light of new evidence.
“After considering this new DNA evidence, it is something I would have considered at the guilt phase, and it may have made a difference with the jury,” the foreperson told Rolling Stone.
An alternate juror said that they were disturbed that that information was withheld at the trial, “Having reviewed this information, I am disturbed that none of this was presented at trial and that the jury never had the opportunity to consider it…I strongly believe that had this information been provided to the jury, it would have made a difference in the verdict and sentence.”
As it stands, unless Williams receives a stay of his execution, the State of Missouri plans to put him to death at 6 PM on Sept. 24 despite numerous parties who dispute his initial conviction. Tricia Rojo Bushnell, one of Williams’ lawyers who works for the Innocence Project, told Rolling Stone that the prospect was troubling.
“The prosecutor’s office, the very office, right, that secured the conviction, that secured the death sentence, now says that there was error in the case,” Bushnell said. “They’ve conceded error, both in [terms of] racial discrimination, jury selection, and the contamination of evidence. But the state is still seeking to execute him. That’s a really troubling phenomenon for all of us. What’s the point?”
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