Missouri Supreme Court refuses to halt execution Tuesday of death row inmate prosecutors say may be innocent

The Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Mike Parson declined to halt the execution Tuesday of a death row inmate who prosecutors say is potentially innocent, leaving his fate in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court less than 24 hours before he is scheduled to die by lethal injection.

“Mr. Williams has exhausted all due process and legal avenues, including more than 15 hearings, in an attempt to assert his innocence and overturn his conviction,” Parson said in a statement.

“No jury or court, not even at the trial level, the appellate court or the Supreme Court, has ever found any basis for Mr. Williams’ claims of innocence. Ultimately, his guilty verdict and death sentence were upheld. Nothing in the actual facts of this case led me to believe that Mr. Williams is innocent. Therefore, the sentence imposed on Mr. Williams will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of murdering Felicia Gayle, a former journalist found stabbed to death in her home in 1998. Williams has long maintained his innocence. And in an unusual move, the top St. Louis County prosecutor filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’ 2001 conviction and sentence.

But that request was denied. Armed with new information about possible evidence contamination, prosecutor Wesley Bell and Williams’ attorneys recently filed a joint brief asking the Missouri Supreme Court to send the case back to a lower court for a “further hearing” of the January request by Bell, a Democrat now running for Congress.

The Williams case raises the specter of executing a potentially innocent person — a risk inherent in capital punishment. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have been exonerated, including four in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Williams is expected to die by lethal injection around 6 p.m. Central Time Tuesday.

The NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have called on Governor Parson to halt Williams’ execution. The governor had already revoked a stay ordered by his predecessor, allowing Williams’ plan to be put to death to go ahead.

How the State Supreme Court Decided

The court considered several issues, the state judiciary said.

The first issue concerns whether the prosecutor in Williams’ 2001 trial excluded a potential juror from the jury “because of discriminatory intent.”

Williams’ lawyers also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, based on “newly discovered evidence during the trial prosecutor’s testimony” last month.

At a motion to dismiss hearing on Aug. 28, a prosecutor in Williams’ trial “admitted that he had removed (a potential juror from the jury pool) because, like Mr. Williams, (the potential juror) was black,” Williams’ attorneys wrote in an emergency request to the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

At Monday’s hearing in Missouri Supreme Court, Williams’ attorney, Jonathan Potts, claimed the trial prosecutor dismissed the potential juror “in part because he was a young black man wearing glasses.”

“There was a racial component to all of this,” Potts said.

But the Missouri attorney general’s office disputed that idea, saying the trial prosecutor’s intent to dismiss the potential juror was not based on race.

“What did he say when he was asked directly, ‘Did you hit someone in part because you were black?’ He said no, absolutely not,” Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said during Monday’s hearing. “And he explained that that would constitute a violation.”

Another issue the court considered was whether there was enough evidence presented to show that the prosecutor’s office “engaged in the destruction of potentially favorable evidence in bad faith,” the state judicial branch said.

This includes “whether the prosecutor destroyed DNA evidence on the murder weapon by handling it without gloves.”

Ultimately, the state Supreme Court unanimously decided not to stay the execution of Marcellus Williams because the prosecutor “failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence either Williams’ actual innocence or a constitutional error at the original criminal trial that undermines confidence in the original criminal trial judgment,” the opinion reads. The opinion also states that “because this Court dismisses this appeal on the merits, the motion for a stay of execution is dismissed as moot.”

In a statement after Monday’s ruling, Williams’ attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell said “the courts must step in to prevent this irreparable injustice.”

“Missouri is about to execute an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” she said.

In his own statement Monday, Bell said he and other advocates will continue the fight to save Williams’ life.

“Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option,” Bell said.

Why lawyers from both sides teamed up

In their joint brief, attorneys for Bell and Williams argue that the St. Louis County Circuit Court failed to consider newly disclosed evidence that contradicts prosecutors’ statements at Williams’ 2001 trial and on his prior appeals.

Prosecutors, who led the case against Williams, said in their January motion that DNA testing of the murder weapon could exclude Williams from Gayle’s list of killers. But that argument collapsed last month after new DNA testing revealed that the murder weapon had been misused, contaminating evidence meant to exonerate Williams and complicating their quest to prove his innocence.

Attorneys for both sides “received a report indicating that DNA on the murder weapon belonged to an assistant prosecutor and an investigator who handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to trial,” according to a summary of the case file.

However, “the circuit court concluded that there was insufficient new evidence to overturn the conviction or to establish Williams’ innocence.”

Williams’ attorneys said the prosecution’s contamination of DNA evidence before Williams’ trial violated his due process rights. They joined the county’s current chief prosecutor in asking the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn the circuit court’s decision and remand the case to give both sides time to present evidence and the court enough time to carefully consider the case.

Why a judge rejected the prosecutor’s request

Attorneys for Bell and Williams are seeking to have the convictions overturned because of “overwhelming evidence” that Williams’ trial was unfair, said one of his attorneys, Tricia Rojo Bushnell.

The prosecutor’s office raised other concerns about Williams’ conviction, including that he was convicted based on the testimony of two unreliable informants facing their own legal troubles and incentivized by a $10,000 reward.

But ultimately, a state judge ruled against Bell’s motion to vacate Williams’ conviction and sentence.

“There is no basis for any court to find Williams innocent,” Judge Bruce F. Hilton wrote in his ruling, “and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and has been sentenced to death.”

The case pits Bell, who took office in 2018, against Republican state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is seeking reelection. Bailey had challenged Bell’s motion in January, saying new DNA test results indicated the evidence would not exonerate Williams.

Last month, Bell’s office announced it had reached a deal with Williams. Under the consent decree approved by the court and Gayle’s family, the inmate would have pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and been resentenced to life in prison.

But the state attorney general’s office opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the deal.

A Republican governor stayed Williams’ execution, but the new governor reversed that decision

Former Republican Gov. Eric Greitens previously indefinitely stayed Williams’ execution and formed a committee to investigate his case and decide whether he should be granted clemency.

But after taking office, Parson disbanded the board investigating Williams’ case and revoked Williams’ 2023 stay of execution.

“This commission was created almost six years ago, and it’s time to move forward,” Parson said last summer. “We could drag this out and delay the process for another six years, delaying justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo and solving nothing. This administration will not do that.”

The decision effectively deprived Williams of his right to due process, his lawyers said.

“The Governor’s actions violated Williams’ constitutional rights and created an exceptionally urgent need for the Court’s attention,” the court documents state.

But Parson’s decision to disband the Williams investigation committee does not mean the governor has decided whether Williams should be executed, spokesman Johnathan Shiflett wrote in an email to CNN earlier Monday.

“It is up to the courts to decide.”

CNN’s Dakin Andone, Lauren Mascarenhas and Jennifer Hauser contributed to this report.

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