Last-ditch efforts are not uncommon in a death penalty case. But few legal sagas can match the twists and turns of the last few weeks in the case of Marcellus Williams, who faces execution on Tuesday night in Missouri.
On Monday morning, a prosecutor from the office that obtained the original death sentence 21 years ago will argue before the state Supreme Court that Mr. Williams’s conviction was flawed by violations of his rights during trial.
The hearing is one front in the accelerated effort by the defense team to spare the life of Mr. Williams, 55, who was convicted in 2003. His lawyers have filed an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and the N.A.A.C.P., the Council on American-Islamic Relations and U.S. 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.”
Since Mr. Williams’s conviction for killing Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home in 1998, he has repeatedly come close to being spared, most recently last month.
His 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. He agreed to a deal that would have taken him off death row, but it was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Last January, the prosecutor, Wesley Bell of St. Louis County, filed a 63-page motion saying that Mr. Williams was likely innocent and that the original prosecutor 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 the motion could take place, a new analysis showed that DNA found on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was not that of an unknown suspect, but was consistent with that of an investigator and a prosecutor who participated in the original trial. That finding “unraveled” Mr. Williams’s innocence claim, the judge who heard the motion said.
With the execution date only 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 ruled to reject the motion. Mr. Bell has appealed that decision, and his office will ask the state Supreme Court on Monday at 9 a.m. 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, Mr. Bell and Mr. Williams’s lawyers have stopped emphasizing claims that he is innocent and focused instead on arguments that the prosecutor at his original trial, Keith Larner, mishandled evidence and violated his rights by improperly striking Black prospective jurors and by mishandling the knife.
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.”
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