The Missouri Supreme Court is weighing whether to halt the execution of a man who was sentenced to death for a 1998 murder.
A St. Louis County circuit judge earlier this month rejected an attempt by prosecutors to throw out Marcellus Williams’ conviction. Current St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell appealed that decision. The judges heard arguments in the case on Monday.
Williams is set to be executed Tuesday for the killing of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. He has always denied any role in her death, and while police found some of her belongings in an old car of Williams’, there was no forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA to connect him to the scene.
Bell’s motion to vacate, filed in January, argued that DNA evidence from the murder weapon conclusively ruled out Williams as a suspect in Gayle’s stabbing. But testing later revealed the profiles were consistent with two employees of the office at the time, one of whom later admitted in court that he had touched the knife multiple times without gloves.
That led attorneys on Monday to shift away from arguing for Williams’ innocence and to focus instead on alleged violations of Williams’ constitutional rights at trial. The 2021 state law governing motions to vacate says prosecutors can try to prove that there is “clear and convincing evidence” either of actual innocence or constitutional error.
Williams’ defenders have argued for years that trial prosecutors deliberately left Black jurors off the case solely because of their race, in violation of a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Batson vs. Kentucky.
Keith Larner, a former prosecutor who retired from the office in 2014 after more than 30 years, said during a hearing in August that “part of the reason” he struck a juror was because both Williams and the juror were young Black men who wore glasses.
State and federal courts had previously rejected Williams’ Batson claims, but his attorneys say that new evidence means that the argument deserves a deeper look. They are asking the state high court to halt the execution and have the lower court address the questions about jury selection.
“Once the trial prosecutor was placed under oath and subjected to cross examination, he said the quiet part out loud,” said Jonathan Potts, an attorney representing Williams. “He admitted that there was actually a racial component here, and that is unconstitutional.”
Michael Spillane, an assistant attorney general, told the judges to read the entire transcript of Larner’s questioning. When Larner was asked directly if he eliminated the juror because of race he said no, Spillane said.
“There’s no clear and convincing evidence. There's no evidence at all,” he said.
Williams’ attorneys also argued that Larner’s admission that he touched the knife multiple times without gloves amounted to bad-faith destruction of evidence that could have proved who actually committed the crime. But Spillane told the judges that when the case went to trial in 2001, prosecutors did not know that simply touching an object could leave behind enough DNA to test.
Earlier 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 and to review 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.
Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty has launched a letter-writing campaign urging Parson to use his clemency power to halt the execution. Its executive director, Michelle Smith, watched arguments in front of the state Supreme Court on Monday.
“Right now I'm thinking about Mr. Williams, his family, his loved ones, and how from the inception of this case, he has had his rights violated and has not gotten the due process that he should have over these 20 plus years, and it continues today,” she said.
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