Missouri Supreme Court to consider death row case a day before scheduled execution
JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri — The Missouri Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday as attorneys on behalf of Marcellus Williams trying to save him, just a day before his scheduled execution.
Oral arguments were scheduled for Monday morning in the state Supreme Court hearing. Williams, 55, is scheduled to die by injection Tuesday night for the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle in University City, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
Williams has long maintained his innocence. DNA evidence raised enough questions that a previous governor halted an execution in 2017, and the current St. Louis County district attorney contested Williams’ guilt in a court hearing last month.
Williams’ attorneys also have an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, a petition for clemency to Gov. Mike Parson focuses largely on how Gayle’s own family members want the sentence commuted to life without parole. national NAACP also urges Parson, a Republican, to stop the execution of Williams, who is black.
It would be the third execution in Missouri this year and the 15th nationwide.
Williams was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, postponement granted after examining DNA evidence that found no trace of Williams’ DNA on the knife used in the murder. Greitens a panel appointed of retired judges to investigate the case, but that panel never came to a conclusion.
That same DNA evidence led the Democratic district attorney of St. Louis County to Wesley Bel to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But just days before the hearing on August 21, new tests showed that the DNA evidence had been rendered useless because members of the prosecution had handled the knife without gloves before the original trial.
Because DNA evidence was not available, attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the prosecution: Williams would again plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at the urging of Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with a evidence hearingwhich took place on August 28.
Hilton ruled on September 12 that the conviction for premeditated murder and the death penalty would be upheld.
“Every claim of error Williams has asserted on direct appeal, post-conviction review, and habeas review has been rejected by the Missouri courts,” Hilton wrote. “There is no basis for any court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding.”
The Midwest Innocence Project’s clemency petition focuses on how Gayle’s family members want the sentence commuted to life without parole. “The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” the petition states.
Parson, a former sheriff, has carried out 11 executions and has never granted a pardon.
Issues have also been raised suggesting that Williams was racially biased in his sentencing.
The prosecutor in the 2001 first-degree murder case, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that the jury was fair, even though it included only one black panelist.
Larner said he rejected only three potential black jurors, including one man because he looked too much like Williams. He did not say why he thought that was important.
Williams’ execution would perpetuate a history of racial injustice in the use of the death penalty in Missouri and elsewhere, NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote to Parson last week. The NAACP opposes the death penalty.
“Taking the life of Marcellus Williams would be an unequivocal statement that when a white woman is murdered, a black man must die. And every black man will do so,” Johnson wrote.
Prosecutors at Williams’ original trial said that on Aug. 11, 1998, he broke into Gayle’s home, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. When Gayle came downstairs, she was stabbed 43 times. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
Authorities say Williams stole a jacket to cover up the blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would be wearing a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the laptop in the car and that Williams sold it a day or two later.
Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was incarcerated on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about the killing.
Williams’ attorneys responded that both the girlfriend and Cole had been convicted of crimes and that they wanted a $10,000 reward.
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Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.