Marcellus Williams’ execution set to proceed Tuesday, Missouri Supreme Court rules

The execution of Marcellus Williams is set to proceed as scheduled Tuesday after the Missouri Supreme Court and the state’s governor both rejected pleas to halt the procedure.

An attorney for Williams argued Monday that the state Supreme Court should halt the lethal injection because a trial attorney prevented a Black man who he thought looked similar to the defendant from serving on the jury, but the court rejected that argument. 

“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,” the court said in its decision.

Williams is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. CT on Tuesday for the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle in the St. Louis suburb of University City.

Williams, 55, has asserted his innocence. But his attorney did not pursue that claim Monday before the state’s highest court, instead focusing on alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged mishandling of the murder weapon.

The state Supreme Court should “correct an injustice” either by declaring that a prosecutor wrongly excluded a potential juror for racial reasons or by sending the case back to a lower court to determine that issue, attorney Jonathan Potts argued on behalf of Williams.

Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office has argued for the execution to proceed. The trial prosecutor has denied that he had racial motivations in removing potential jurors and did nothing improper — based on procedures at the time — by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it had already been tested by a crime lab, Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said in arguments to the state Supreme Court.

Williams had requested clemency from Republican Gov. Mike Parson, an ask that focused largely on how Gayle’s relatives want the sentence commuted to life in prison without parole. But Parson on Monday said the execution would proceed following the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Capital punishment cases are some of the hardest issues we have to address in the Governor’s Office, but when it comes down to it, I follow the law and trust the integrity of our judicial system,” Parson said in a statement Monday. “Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims. At the end of the day, his guilty verdict and sentence of capital punishment were upheld. Nothing from the real facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence, as such, Mr. Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”  

Parson, a former sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions and has never granted clemency. The NAACP had also urged Parson to stop the execution.

“Missouri is poised to execute an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” said Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and an attorney representing Williams. “Given everything we know about Marcellus Williams’ case—including the new revelations that the trial prosecutor removed at least one Black juror because of his race, and opposition to this execution from the victim’s family and the sitting Prosecuting Attorney—the courts must step in to prevent this irreparable injustice.”

Attorneys for Williams already had an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. But in a new filing Monday night, lawyers representing Williams asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay his execution until a similar case is ruled on.

“This case closely resembles that of Richard Glossip, who remains on death row in Oklahoma because the state court similarly refused to accept the State’s confession of error,” the Innocence Project said in a statement Monday night. “Mr. Williams asks the Supreme Court to stay his execution pending resolution of the Glossip case, which is set for oral argument on October 9.”

The execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.

Williams was less than a week away from execution in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court called it off, allowing time for his attorneys to pursue additional DNA testing.

He was just hours away from being executed in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay after reviewing DNA evidence that found no trace of Williams’ DNA on the knife used in the killing. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to examine the case, but the governor stepped down over an unrelated scandal and that panel never reached a conclusion.

Questions about DNA evidence also led Democratic St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new testing showed that the DNA evidence was spoiled because members of the prosecutor’s office touched the knife without gloves before the original trial.

The state Supreme Court on Monday wrote in its ruling that DNA testing had actually “undermined Prosecutor’s claim of actual innocence and fully supports the circuit court’s finding that this evidence neither shows the existence of an alternate perpetrator nor excludes Williams as the murderer.”

With the DNA evidence unavailable, Midwest Innocence Project attorneys reached a compromise with the prosecutor’s office: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed off on the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at Bailey’s urging, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place Aug. 28.

Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that his arguments all had been previously rejected.

“There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding,” Hilton wrote.

On Tuesday, Williams’ attorney argued that circumstances are different, because the trial prosecutor had not previously been questioned in court by Williams’ attorney about the reason he removed a specific juror.

The prosecutor in the 2001 first-degree murder case, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that the trial jury was fair, even though it included just one Black member on the panel. Larner said he struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams. He didn’t explain why he felt that mattered.

In a statement e-mailed to CBS affiliate KOMO-TV last week, Larner said his “juror strikes of any Black jurors at trial have been affirmed as race-neutral and lawful, unanimously, by the Missouri Supreme Court on a vote of 7-0 in 2003. Bell’s/Innocence Project claims of improper jury selection are bogus.”

Bushnell told KOMO prior to Monday’s ruling that the August hearing was “the very first time that the prosecutor had to testify under oath about his practices.”   

“He admitted, that at least partly, that race was a reason for striking jurors,” Bushnell said. “No court has ever heard that, and the federal court that previously considered the racial discrimination claim should have that information when it’s making that decision. The justification given for denying that claim previously is now absolutely rebutted by these admissions made by the prosecutor himself.”  

The state Supreme Court said Monday however that when Larner was “specifically asked if part of the reason he struck juror number 64 was because he was Black, the trial prosecutor replied: ‘No. Absolutely not,'” and said Williams’ attorney’s argument “cherry-picks the record, ignores the circuit court’s factual findings, and offers no persuasive justifications for reversing this Court’s previous merits determination of this claim.”

Bell on Monday said in a statement, “Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option. As the St. Louis County prosecutor, our office has questions about Mr. Williams’ guilt, but also about the integrity of his conviction. For those reasons we will continue to do everything in our power to save his life.”

Prosecutors at Williams’ original trial said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower, and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times when she came downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop computer were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later. Police have said they found items belonging to Gayle in Williams’ car. 

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors Williams confessed to the killing and offered details about it.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted of felonies and wanted a $10,000 reward. Parson on Monday said in a statement the girlfriend “never requested the reward for information.”