The Missouri Supreme Court will not stop the execution of Marcellus Williams.
In a decision handed down this afternoon, judges said they saw no reason to send the case back to a judge to hear claims from Williams’ attorneys that prosecutors in the original trial had improperly struck jurors solely because of their race.
Without intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, Williams will be put to death by lethal injection sometime after 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Gov. Mike Parson has said he will not grant clemency to Williams.
Williams has always denied that he played any role in the 1998 stabbing death of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. Earlier this year, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell wrote that he no longer had confidence in the conviction and asked for it to be vacated. A circuit court judge denied that motion, which Bell appealed to the state Supreme Court.
No forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA had ever tied Williams to the crime, although detectives believed the killer may have worn gloves. Police did find some of Gayle’s belongings in Williams’ car, and he also pawned a laptop belonging to her husband. He was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.
Bell initially focused on three experts who said unknown DNA found on the handle of the knife used as the murder weapon could not be from Williams. But further testing proved that those samples were consistent with the profile of Ed Magee, an investigator in the prosecutor’s office at the time. The review also found that Keith Larner, a veteran prosecutor who handled the Williams case in 2001, could not be excluded as a contributor.
Larner admitted in an August hearing that he touched the knife multiple times without gloves, saying that it was standard practice for the office back in 2001.
While those findings meant the evidence had been contaminated, they also no longer pointed to an unknown killer. That contamination of the possible evidence became a key focus of arguments from prosecutors and attorneys for Williams.
At that same August hearing, Larner admitted that “part of the reason” he struck a juror was because both Williams and the juror were young Black men who wore glasses, in violation of a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibits blocking jurors based on their race. Multiple appeals courts at the state and federal levels had already rejected those claims, but attorneys for Williams said the new evidence warranted a second look from a lower court.
On Monday, a federal appeals court rejected efforts by Williams’ attorneys to again raise the issue of jury selection at the federal level. His attorneys are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, both to review the jury issue and the decision by Gov. Mike Parson to terminate a board of inquiry studying Williams’ conviction before the board had made any recommendations. The state’s high court had found that a board of inquiry is within the clemency power of the governor, which cannot be limited. But the Midwest Innocence Project said the decision violated Williams’ right to due process.
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