The new DNA lab report came in two days before Marcellus Williams was supposed to have his day in a suburban St. Louis courtroom, and it was a problem.
Not because the report showed that Mr. Williams, who claimed that he was wrongfully convicted of murder and faced a looming execution date, had touched the murder weapon. It did not.
But the report indicated that the weapon, a kitchen knife, had been mishandled during his trial, dashing his hopes that it could be used to help exonerate him.
Instead of sitting through a daylong hearing that was supposed to be an opportunity to poke holes in his conviction, Mr. Williams found himself agreeing to a compromise that would spare him the death penalty but keep him in prison for life without parole.
It was a stunning turn in a case that has drawn considerable attention in Missouri, where the state’s attorney general has fought at least three exoneration efforts, including the bid by Mr. Williams.
He was just weeks from a scheduled execution date, and in agreeing to an unusual guilty plea — in which he did not admit to committing the crime — Mr. Williams, 55, lived to contest his conviction if new evidence were to emerge supporting his contention that he is innocent.
A statement by his legal team, led by the Midwest Innocence Project, stopped well short of exultant. “This resolution ensures that Mr. Williams will not be executed for a crime he did not commit.”
The statement went on to note that no physical or forensic evidence has ever linked Mr. Williams to the crime, and asserted that the key witness testimony came from two people with reason to implicate Mr. Williams.
The local prosecutor, Wesley Bell, a Democrat who rose to prominencefollowing the police killing of Michael Brown, a Black man, in Ferguson, Mo., 10 years ago, supported Mr. Williams’s innocence claim, filing a 63-page motion to overturn the conviction.
The state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican, has routinely opposed wrongful conviction claims, going so far as to try to keep people in prison after they have been exonerated.
A judge was supposed to begin hearing evidence on Wednesday and weigh whether to grant the motion by Mr. Bell. Shortly before 8:30 a.m., representatives from the attorney general’s office wheeled in 11 large plastic bins of evidence.
Those bins were opened, and the hearing that was planned never happened.
Instead, as journalists and spectators filled the benches, all the lawyers left the room, engaging in hours of negotiations behind the scenes. A planned lunchtime rally in support of Mr. Williams at a nearby park went forward as planned. Still, the court did not come to order until around 2 p.m.
Matthew Jacober, representing Mr. Bell’s office, revealed that the new DNA evidence, which was expected to be instrumental in the innocence claim, “did not fully support our initial conclusions.”
Initial testing of the knife detected male DNA that excluded Mr. Williams, raising his legal team’s hopes that a different perpetrator could be identified. But a new analysis found that the DNA was consistent with that of an investigator and a prosecutor involved in the original trial in 2001.
That finding suggested that the investigator and the prosecutor had mishandled what might have been the most important piece of evidence, leaving their own DNA and perhaps eliminating DNA that had been left by the perpetrator.
“The murder weapon was handled without proper procedures then in place,” Mr. Jacober said. “As a result, DNA was likely removed and added during the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Williams”
Mr. Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, who was stabbed to death during a burglary of her home in University City, a suburb of St. Louis.
In court, Mr. Jacober said that the office “deeply regrets its failure” to preserve the evidence properly and that the office still believed that Mr. Williams’s constitutional rights had been violated.
A new Missouri law allows prosecutors to challenge past convictions if they believe the person is innocent or was convicted in error. In his written motion, Mr. Bell argued that Mr. Williams was excluded as the source of shoe prints, fingerprints and hairs found at the scene, and that the prosecutor had improperly excluded prospective jurors who were Black.
Besides Mr. Williams’s case, the law has been used five times. Three led to convictions being overturned, while one challenge was rejected, and another was dismissed for procedural reasons.
Mr. Bailey has filed motions to block the innocence hearings from taking place and tried to appeal the judge’s rulings in the cases, saying that the State Supreme Court has “exclusive authority to review death sentences.” His opponents maintain that the law allows him to participate in the hearings but not to appeal the results.
After the new DNA analysis came back in the Williams case, Mr. Bell’s office concluded that the new findings had weakened the claim of innocence, though the prosecutors maintained that the case was still riddled with problems. They included the reliance on two witnesses who had been motivated by reward money and other help from law enforcement, and who had told inconsistent stories that contradicted the crime scene evidence.
Mr. Bell’s office proposed a consent judgment, or settlement. Mr. Williams would take what is known as an Alford plea, in which the defendant maintains his innocence but concedes that the state has enough evidence to obtain a conviction. Mr. Bell would drop the death penalty, and Mr. Williams would waive his right to appeal except if new evidence is discovered or a new law passed that applies to his case.
The judge, Bruce F. Hilton, said that he had reviewed some 8,000 pages of records in the case and had spoken by telephone with the victim’s husband, Daniel Picus, who said he was opposed to executing Mr. Williams. “The court finds the consent judgment is a proper remedy in this case,” the judge said.
The attorney general’s office objected, saying that the judge had no authority to resentence Mr. Williams to life without parole and promising to petition the State Supreme Court to block the agreement.
Judge Hilton said the sentencing would proceed on Thursday morning after Mr. Picus was given a chance to address the court.
Mr. Bell was not present at the hearing; he was attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He recently defeated Representative Cori Bush in the Democratic primary for her House seat in a heavily Democratic district, so he will very likely be heading to Congress in January.
Mr. Bailey, who fended off a primary challenge this month and is also likely to win the general election in this deeply red state, was likewise absent but issued a statement. “Throughout all the legal games, the defense created a false narrative of innocence in order to get a convicted murderer off of death row and fulfill their political ends,” it said.
As the proposal was explained in court, Mr. Williams, who has taken the name Khalifah while in prison, listened wearing a white skull cap and silver-gray robe.
When questioned by the judge, he agreed that the arrangement was in his best interest. Asked how he pleaded to the charge of murdering Ms. Gayle, he answered, “No contest.”
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