St. Louis Prosecutor Would Like To Free Marcellus Williams Instead Of Executing Him, Just Because He's Innocent

But what about the rule of law.

Jan 30, 2024

St. Louis prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell is about to throw a wrench in the state of Missouri’s plans to execute Marcellus Williams, a man almost definitely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted.

On August 27, 2001, despite a startling lack of evidence, Williams was sentenced to death for the stabbing murder of reporter Felicia “Lisha” Gayle in her gated community home in University City, a suburb of St Louis. Williams has maintained his innocence from the beginning, and the evidence that he is telling the truth about that is fairly close to overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, that the evening before his first execution date in 2015, Missouri’s then-Gov. Eric Greitens halted the execution and issued an executive order convening a board of inquiry to investigate the case.

Unfortunately, in 2023, current Gov. Mike Parson disbanded that board of inquiry before they could come to a conclusion about the case.

“This board was established nearly six years ago, and it is time to move forward,” he said at the time. “We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing. This administration won’t do that.”

Because hey! Does it really even matter that they may be killing an innocent person? Not to Mike Parson.

The state is now rushing to get Williams to the execution chamber before he can be exonerated.

However! Bell has filed a motion to vacate his conviction following the discovery that DNA on the knife used to kill Gayle belonged to someone other than Marcellus Williams.

“DNA evidence supporting a conclusion that Mr. Williams was not the individual who stabbed Ms. Gayle has never been considered by a court,” Bell said in the motion. “This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”

Bell is allowed to do this thanks to a relatively recent provision in Missouri law allowing prosecutors to intervene in what they have reason to believe are wrongful convictions — and the evidence that Marcellus Williams is innocent is about as overwhelming as it gets.

The prosecutors in the original trial based their case largely on the testimonies of jailhouse snitch Henry Cole and Williams’s ex-girlfriend, Laura Asaro, both of whom had a lot of motive to lie, as they were hoping for leniency in their own cases. It certainly also helped that Gayle’s husband, Dan Picus, was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his wife. In fact, when Cole seemed like he was reconsidering testifying in the case, prosecutors convinced Picus to give him $5,000.

The case was full of discrepancies, such as:

There were two grey pubic hairs found at the scene that did not match Williams or the Picuses.
Another woman had been stabbed to death in a similar incident, with the knife also left in her body, just weeks earlier.
There were possibly two sets of bloody footprints at the scene, neither of which were the same size as Williams’ feet.
Cole and the prosecution said Williams wore gloves, and yet investigators found bloody fingerprints at the scene — evidence of which was destroyed before the defense could have them analyzed, as the prosecution had deemed them “unusable.”
Cole and Asaro’s testimony changed multiple times and frequently clashed with the crime scene evidence — for instance Asaro claimed Williams had scratches on his face, but there was no DNA under Picus’s nails.
The state struck six out of seven Black potential jurors — one on account of the fact that they believed he physically resembled Williams and another because he worked for the postal service, and postal workers are notoriously liberal. Except for the postal worker whom the prosecution did not disqualify.

The lone piece of actual evidence against Williams was the fact that he pawned Dan Picus’s laptop to a man named Glenn Roberts. However, the prosecution refused “to let the defense elicit that Marcellus also told Roberts that he had received the laptop from Laura.” It also turned out that Laura had tried to sell such a laptop to Williams’s brother and was spotted getting off the bus with it by his cousin. The defense tried to argue that Asaro was testifying against Williams to cover up her own part in the crime.

As The Intercept notes, the Missouri Attorney General’s office has argued in favor of executing people convicted of capital crimes whether they are guilty or not. You may assume that I am being hyperbolic and the state just genuinely believed that people were guilty, but no. Sadly, I am not.

In 2003, the AG’s office literally argued that Joseph Amrine — who was exonerated and had his conviction overturned by the state supreme court — should be put to death even if he is innocent.

Via Valparaiso University Law Review:

The State asserted in its brief, and in oral argument, that Mr. Amrine had no right to additional review, whatever the nature of his current claims and whatever the strength of the evidence supporting them. I, therefore, asked the Assistant Attorney General arguing the case, "Are you suggesting, ... even if we find that Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?" The Assistant Attorney General answered: "That's correct, your honor."

Of course, this is simply dogma on the Right: No less an august personage than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that “actual innocence” was no bar to the death penalty: “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

In the case of Lamar Johnson, former state attorney general and current Senator Eric Schmitt argued that allowing district attorneys power to do anything to right a wrongful conviction would have “the potential to undermine public confidence” in the criminal justice system. So, just to be clear, he wanted to keep an innocent man in prison on the grounds that freeing him would make people think the state kept innocent people in prison. Logic!

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As factually wrong as they may be, people like to believe that our system works and that the system is fair. They like to believe that if they were wrongfully accused of a crime that they would be found innocent. They like to believe that if the unthinkable did happen and they were wrongly convicted, that someone would find that out and it would set them free. They shouldn’t believe this, but they do — and they’re more likely to continue trusting and believing if they can see that the state is willing to admit when it makes mistakes instead of doubling down on them.

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