The governor of Missouri on Monday turned down a bid for clemency for a man scheduled to be executed this week for murder, and a short time later the state’s highest court rejected the man’s latest legal challenge, all but clearing the way for his execution on Tuesday night.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the man, Marcellus Williams, is expected to be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Central time at a state prison in Bonne Terre.
Mr. Williams, found guilty of murder 21 years ago, has been fighting his conviction for decades, and this year he won the support of the prosecutor’s office that brought the original case. But the state attorney general maintained that Mr. Williams, now 55, was guilty, and the legal battle between the state and the county has been playing out for months in Missouri’s courts.
In a statement accompanying his decision on clemency, Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, said, “Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims.”
The clemency decision and the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court came hours after a hearing before the court in which Mr. Williams’s lawyers argued that his rights were violated during his trial in 2003.
In its opinion, the court noted that the prosecutor who had moved to have Mr. Wiliams exonerated had more recently backed away from its claims that Mr. Williams was innocent. “Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,” the opinion said.
Mr. Williams was convicted of murdering Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home in 1998. For years he hoped that advanced DNA testing would prove his innocence by showing that an unknown suspect had handled the murder weapon, a kitchen knife.
But last month, a new analysis showed that the knife had been contaminated by DNA from a prosecutor and investigator working on the case.
Since then, his supporters have focused on arguments that Mr. Williams’s rights were violated at trial. They say that the original prosecutor improperly rejected a Black prospective juror and that mishandling of the knife had deprived Mr. Williams of his rights.
At the hearing, lawyers for the state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, who backs the conviction and the planned execution, argued that the juror was struck for reasons other than his race and that the knife was handled at a time when it was not understood that such contact could leave trace amounts of DNA behind.
The N.A.A.C.P., the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri had implored Governor Parson to show mercy, saying that Mr. Williams was wrongfully convicted and that no physical evidence ties him to the crime.
Besides the contamination of the murder weapon, Mr. Williams’s effort to prove his innocence has faced other hurdles. They include the deaths of two key witnesses against him and the abrupt exit from office of a previous governor, Eric Greitens, who had granted him a stay of execution and appointed a board of inquiry to review the case.
After the passage in 2021 of a law allowing prosecutors to seek redress if they believed a wrongful conviction had occurred in their jurisdiction, Mr. Williams won the support of the local prosecutor, Wesley Bell of St. Louis County.
Mr. Bell, a Democrat, 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 jury was made up of 11 white jurors and one Black juror, after six out of seven prospective Black jurors were struck by the prosecutor.
The prosecutor’s 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.
A judge later ruled that those facts did not constitute new evidence and that the lack of new DNA analysis pointing to another suspect had “unraveled” Mr. Williams’s innocence claim.
Governor Parson said that Mr. Williams had a previous criminal record that included robbery, burglary and unlawful use of a weapon, and that he had told both witnesses that he had committed the crime.
After the judge ruled against Mr. Williams, Mr. Bell struck a deal with Mr. Williams that would have converted the sentence from death to life without parole. Ms. Gayle’s widower gave the arrangement his approval, but Mr. Bailey, the state attorney general, objected. He said that the statute that had 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 was that appeal that the state Supreme Court rejected on Monday.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bell said, “Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option.”
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