In a Missouri prosecutor’s unusual quest to save the life of a man his office once tried to put to death, lawyers called several witnesses to testify in a hearing Wednesday to paint a picture of a murder conviction gone gravely wrong.
A lawyer who represented the man in the 2001 trial said he had not had enough time to mount the strongest defense. An expert on investigative interviewing cast doubt on the credibility of the two key witnesses who were pivotal in the guilty verdict. And the prosecutor from the original trial described how he had repeatedly handled the murder weapon without gloves, potentially contaminating critical DNA evidence that could have proven the man’s innocence.
It was the first time in over a decade that the man, Marcellus Williams, 55, who has long maintained his innocence, had received a hearing in open court. And it could be the last. He is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24.
Mr. Williams was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former reporter for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who was found stabbed to death with a kitchen knife lodged in her neck at her home outside St. Louis.
The case has pitted the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, a Democrat and an opponent of the death penalty, against the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican who has fought to keep exonerated prisoners behind bars and who is staunchly opposed to the effort to vacate Mr. Williams’s conviction. Both men are up for election in November in different races.
At the hearing in Clayton, Mo., which featured clashes on nearly every point and often turned testy, lawyers from Mr. Bailey’s office said that many of the arguments made by Mr. Bell’s team had been raised before and rejected. Both state and federal courts have upheld the conviction through several unsuccessful appeals.
The case is now with Judge Bruce F. Hilton, who has asked the lawyers — from Mr. Bell’s office, Mr. Williams’s legal team and the attorney general’s office — to file additional findings and conclusions within the next week and is expected to issue a ruling after that.
According to the original motion filed in January by Mr. Bell, there is no forensic evidence tying Mr. Williams to the crime. The motion states that Mr. Williams was not identified as the source of the bloody footprints, hairs or fingerprints at the crime scene.
Until last week, Mr. Bell’s office and Mr. Williams’s legal team had planned to argue that DNA testing performed on the murder weapon bolstered his claim of innocence, as it did not show any connection of Mr. Williams to the knife. They had hoped that additional analysis of the DNA would identify a different perpetrator, allowing them to make a stronger argument.
Although the report of that analysis, which came in two days before last week’s scheduled hearing, did not show any connection of Mr. Williams to the knife, it suggested that the investigator and the prosecutor in the original trial had mishandled the weapon and had possibly eliminated the perpetrator’s DNA, undermining any claims about the DNA evidence.
In response to the report, Mr. Bell’s team instead proposed an agreement that would have spared Mr. Williams from the death penalty but kept him in prison for life without parole. But the Missouri Supreme Court halted the deal just hours after it had been reached, following an objection from Mr. Bailey.
At Wednesday’s hearing, lawyers for Mr. Bell’s office shifted their approach and argued that the mishandling of evidence had been done in bad faith and had thus violated Mr. Williams’s right to due process in the original trial, grounds for overturning his conviction.
The lawyers for Mr. Bell’s office and Mr. Williams also sought to portray the original trial as one in which much had gone wrong in an effort to raise uncertainty about Mr. Williams’s guilt. In addition to casting doubt on the testimony of two witnesses, the lawyers asserted that the prosecution had improperly excluded qualified Black jurors.
“This wasn’t a fair trial,” said Jonathan Potts, a lawyer for Mr. Williams. “Never was. These DNA test results only represent the final blow.”
But lawyers for the attorney general’s office systematically contested each argument made by the local prosecutor’s office. On the DNA analysis, Michael Spillane, a lawyer for Mr. Bailey’s office, maintained that the prosecutor’s office had followed standard practices of the time in handling forensic evidence.
The prosecutor and the investigator in the original trial “did absolutely nothing wrong, and it’s not a nice thing to say that they did when there is no evidence to support it,” he said.
Mr. Williams’s execution date in September is the third time he has been scheduled to be put to death. His execution was first stayed in 2015 by the Missouri Supreme Court to allow DNA testing to be completed. In 2017, Gov. Eric Greitens put Mr. Williams’s execution on hold again just hours before he was scheduled to be killed and convened a board of inquiry to review his case. That board was later dissolved by Gov. Mike Parson, and the September date was set.
But in the intervening years, another avenue opened up for Mr. Williams. In 2021, a state law was passed that allows prosecutors to request hearings when they find evidence of wrongful convictions, enabling the legal challenge from Mr. Bell’s office. The law has been used five times aside from Mr. Williams’s case, overturning three convictions. But Mr. Bailey has said that the State Supreme Court has “exclusive authority” to review death penalty cases.
The political races in which Mr. Bell and Mr. Bailey are engaged have heightened attention on the case. In Mr. Bell’s campaign for St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, he ran as a reformer who opposed the death penalty. He recently defeated Representative Cori Bush in the Democratic primary for her House seat after pro-Israel groups poured millions into the race to unseat Ms. Bush, a vocal critic of Israel.
Mr. Bailey, seeking election as attorney general after being appointed to the role in 2022, won his primary against Will Scharf, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump who criticized Mr. Bailey as being soft on crime. Mr. Bailey has opposed at least three exoneration efforts, including Mr. Williams’s.
If Judge Hilton does not grant the motion, Mr. Bell’s office is expected to appeal. Another option could be requesting that Mr. Parson consider clemency. When asked about that possibility, the governor’s office said that it would review the case as is standard practice in all capital punishment cases.
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