A last-ditch effort to save the life of Marcellus Williams, who faces execution on Tuesday night in Missouri, got underway Monday morning in the Missouri Supreme Court.
A prosecutor from the office that obtained the original death sentence 21 years ago is expected to argue that Mr. Williams’s conviction was flawed by violations of his rights during trial.
Mr. Williams, 55, has come close to execution several times since his conviction for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home in 1998. But each time, doubts about his guilt led to a stay of execution.
Last month, Mr. Williams reached a deal with prosecutors that would have taken him off death row, but the deal was struck down by the court.
Now, his defense team is conducting an accelerated effort to save him, including today’s hearing and an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The N.A.A.C.P., the Council on American-Islamic Relations and United States Representative Cori Bush of St. Louis, have made pleas for mercy, saying that Mr. Williams was wrongfully convicted and that no physical evidence ties him to the crime.
“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,” Ms. Bush, a Democrat, wrote to Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican. “I am urging you to use it.”
Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Record Group and an opponent of the death penalty, took out a full page add in Monday’s editions of The Kansas City Star, calling on Missourians to telephone the governor and ask that the execution be stopped.
Mr. Williams’s effort to prove his innocence has faced hurdles, including the deaths of two key witnesses against him; the abrupt exit from office of a previous governor, Eric Greitens, who had appointed a board of inquiry on the case; and evidentiary issues with the murder weapon that dashed Mr. Williams’s hope that DNA found on the weapon would point to a different suspect.
Still, his execution has been stayed twice, in 2015 and 2017. He won the support of the local prosecutor, who argued to the courts that Mr. Williams was innocent.
The prosecutor, Wesley Bell of St. Louis County, filed a 63-page motion in January saying that Mr. Williams was probably innocent and that the original prosecutor on the case had improperly excluded prospective jurors who were Black. The motion said that the two main witnesses against Mr. Williams had not been credible, and in fact had incentives to testify against him. Mr. Williams, the motion said, was not the source of bloody shoe prints, fingerprints or hair found at the crime scene.
But before a hearing on that motion could take place, a new analysis showed that DNA found on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was consistent with that of an investigator and a prosecutor who participated in the original trial. Mr. Williams had hoped that it would point to an unknown suspect, but instead it only showed that the weapon had been contaminated.
That finding “unraveled” Mr. Williams’s innocence claim, the judge who heard the motion said.
With the execution date only a few weeks away, Mr. Bell then struck a deal with Mr. Williams that would have converted his sentence from death to life without parole. But the state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, objected. He said that the statute that allowed Mr. Bell to bring his motion did not allow him to strike such a deal, and the Missouri Supreme Court agreed.
Mr. Bailey and his recent predecessors have routinely objected to wrongful conviction claims. Mr. Bailey, a Republican, has argued that a jury’s original decision should be respected and that Mr. Williams is guilty. In two earlier cases, Mr. Bailey moved to block the release of prisoners who had been declared innocent by judges.
The state Supreme Court ordered the judge in Mr. Williams’s case, Bruce Hilton, to proceed with a hearing on Mr. Bell’s motion. After the hearing, on Aug. 28, the judge rejected the motion, but Mr. Bell appealed, and it is that appeal that the state Supreme Court is hearing on Monday. Mr. Bell’s office is asking the court to send the case back to Judge Hilton for a more comprehensive hearing, saying the office was given only two hours to present evidence the first time.
Since the new DNA analysis was conducted, Mr. Bell and Mr. Williams’s lawyers have stopped emphasizing claims that he is innocent, and have focused instead on arguments that the prosecutor at his original trial, Keith Larner, mishandled evidence and violated his rights.
Mr. Larner, who no longer works for the prosecutor’s office, was questioned at the August hearing. He said he had struck one of the jurors in question not because he was Black, but because he and Mr. Williams “looked like they were brothers.”
Unless another stay is granted, Mr. Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
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