Missouri Supreme Court Considers Prosecutors’ Request to Stay Death Row Inmate Michael Williams’ Execution

Williams, 55, was convicted of murdering St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, then 42, who was stabbed to death 42 times with a butcher knife in her kitchen during an attempted burglary in her gated University City community.

However, the St. Louis County prosecutor filed a motion to have his conviction overturned in January, citing a lack of forensic evidence linking him to the crime and “overwhelming evidence” of an unfair trial.

The January motion to dismiss was initially approved by a county trial judge but was overturned on September 12 after Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey challenged it.

The case was brought before the Missouri Supreme Court after attorney Wesley Bell and lawyers representing Williams filed a joint brief asking the court to send the case back to a lower court for a “fuller hearing.”

Nearly 30 years ago, no forensic evidence could link Williams to the alleged crime.

Yet despite this, Williams, a black man, was convicted by an almost all-white jury of “his peers” in 2001 of Gayle’s 1991 murder, according to Amnesty International, which was among the organizations that called for Williams to be granted clemency by Governor Mike Parson.

In the January motion, the district attorney’s office, which handled Williams’ 2001 trial, said DNA testing of the murder weapon could potentially rule out Williams as a suspect in Gayle’s murder, but it was later revealed that the gun had been mishandled, throwing a wrench in the case.

The effort to reverse Williams’ situation pitted the local prosecutor against Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, who is running for re-election.

Last month, Bailey rejected a deal with prosecutors and Gayle’s family to overturn Williams’ first-degree murder conviction and re-sentence him to life in prison, instead appealing to the conservative Missouri Supreme Court, which is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats.

Other organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, joined Amnesty in calling on Parson to stop Williams’ execution scheduled for Tuesday.

The NAACP said Williams’ execution “would violate international law.”

“Furthermore, a US district court ordered in 2010 that Marcellus Williams be granted a new sentencing hearing after finding that his attorney had presented no mitigating evidence regarding Marcellus Williams’ violent and abusive childhood,” Amnesty wrote in a letter to Parson.

Gayle was in the shower on the morning of Aug. 11, 1998, when Williams allegedly broke into the gated residence. According to court documents, Gayle left her second-floor bathroom and was walking downstairs when she encountered her alleged killer on the landing. Her husband, Daniel Picus, found her body and called 911.

Evidence included bloody shoe prints and fingerprints, a knife sheath and hair from the alleged killer, collected from Gayle’s shirt, hands and the floor.

Four Missouri death row inmates have been exonerated in 40 years, and since 1973 at least 200 U.S. citizens have been kept off death row, a Missouri congresswoman said, citing the Death Penalty Information Center.

On Friday, Rep. Cori Bush, a Mississippi Democrat, called on the governor to exonerate Williams “for a crime he did not commit,” she said.

Calling the death penalty “racist, flawed and inhumane,” Bush, who co-authored the federal law banning the death penalty, said Parson and the courts allowed the execution “despite credible evidence of Williams’ innocence and a thorough review of the fairness of his trial.”

Executions in the United States in 2023 were largely concentrated in the South. Texas and Florida accounted for more than half of last year’s executions in the United States.

The Death Penalty Information Center has called 2022 “the year of botched executions,” a year in which questions surrounding the humane use of the death penalty have become a renewed national focus.

The documents say Williams had a troubled youth that involved death, sexual and physical abuse, drugs and prison stints and was described by a lawyer as “a caring and loving father” during the penalty phase of his murder trial.

His last stay of execution was ordered by then-Governor Eric Greiten, who appointed a commission of inquiry to review the case until that decision was overturned last year by Parson.

In doing so, Parson’s actions “violated Williams’ constitutional rights and created an exceptionally urgent need for the Court’s attention,” Williams’ lawyer argued.

“St. Louis and I stand today to say that state-sponsored violence has no place in a humane society,” Bush said. “I urge Governor Parson not to let another innocent person be murdered by the state. He must heed our call.”

He had originally been sentenced to death in January 2015 and again in August 2017. Both lethal injections were halted to allow for additional DNA testing.

Williams had just begun serving a 20-year prison sentence for robbing a downtown St. Louis doughnut shop when he was convicted of murder.

Police did not immediately identify a suspect in the murder, and in May 1999, Gayle’s family announced they would offer $10,000 for information leading to an arrest. Williams became the prime suspect after a girlfriend, Lara Asaro, and an inmate named Henry Cole testified that Williams was the culprit.