Board Appointed By Resigned Missouri Governor to Review Death-Row Prisoner’s Case

A Board of Inquiry appoint­ed by for­mer Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens will con­vene on August 22, 2018 to con­sid­er the fate of Marcellus Williams (pic­tured), one year to the day after Williams received a last-minute reprieve from exe­cu­tion based on evi­dence of his innocence. 

Citing ​“new infor­ma­tion” from DNA test­ing made pos­si­ble by a pri­or stay of exe­cu­tion, Greitens issued an exec­u­tive order on August 22, 2017 just hours before Williams was to be put to death, stay­ing his exe­cu­tion and cre­at­ing a Board of Inquiry that would review the DNA evi­dence and ​“any oth­er rel­e­vant evi­dence not avail­able to the jury” and make rec­om­men­da­tions on Williams’s appli­ca­tion for exec­u­tive clemen­cy. However, the Board’s first meet­ing, which had been sched­uled for June 4, was abrupt­ly can­celed after Greitens resigned in dis­grace on June 1 as a result of a lurid sex scan­dal and alle­ga­tions that he had mis­used a charity’s donors list to raise campaign funds. 

Former fed­er­al dis­trict court judge Carol Jackson, who was chair­ing the board of inquiry said the board had can­celed the meet­ing because ​“Governor Greitens’ res­ig­na­tion … called into ques­tion whether our author­i­ty would con­tin­ue after he left office.” She said the board ​“need­ed to just put this on pause for a minute” until it could deter­mine whether new­ly sworn in Gov. Mike Parson would want to con­tin­ue the inquiry.

Parson had equiv­o­cat­ed ear­li­er in the month when asked by CBS News how the case would pro­ceed. ​“I would assume they would [meet],” Parson said. ​“I heard they’re not going to. So I think once they make that rec­om­men­da­tion, if they do meet, then we’ll dis­cuss that at the time.” Judge Jones had said the Board of Inquiry sus­pend­ed its work ​“pend­ing guid­ance from Governor Parson.” 

Williams’s lawyer, Kent Gipson, con­firmed in a June 25 phone call with the Death Penalty Information Center that he has received noti­fi­ca­tion from the Board that it will con­vene in August for its first meet­ing. Details about the Board’s deci­sion-mak­ing process remain unavailable. 

Williams was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death by a near­ly all-white St. Louis County jury in the high­ly pub­li­cized stab­bing death of for­mer St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle, based on the tes­ti­mo­ny of a jail­house infor­mant and a pros­ti­tute who was an admit­ted crack addict. No phys­i­cal evi­dence links Williams to the mur­der, and nei­ther foot­prints from the mur­der scene nor DNA from the victim’s cloth­ing and under her fin­ger­nails match Williams. He obtained a stay of exe­cu­tion in 2015 to per­mit DNA test­ing of the killer’s knife. 

According to reports sub­mit­ted by two DNA experts, the DNA on the knife did not match Williams or Gayle, but came from an unknown third per­son. Nonetheless, Missouri pros­e­cu­tors sought a new exe­cu­tion date and the Missouri Supreme Court sum­mar­i­ly denied Williams a new stay, with­out any court hear­ing on the DNA claim. 

In halt­ing the exe­cu­tion and cre­at­ing the board of inquiry, Greitens said, ​“To car­ry out the death penal­ty, the peo­ple of Missouri must have con­fi­dence in the judg­ment of guilt.” 

In ear­li­er fed­er­al habeas cor­pus pro­ceed­ings, the dis­trict court had over­turned Williams’s death sen­tence, find­ing that his tri­al lawyer had failed to inves­ti­gate and present sig­nif­i­cant mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence relat­ing to Williams’s his­to­ry of men­tal defi­cien­cies and chron­ic abuse through­out his child­hood. That deci­sion, how­ev­er, was reversed by the Eighth Circuit in a split 2 – 1 deci­sion. Williams had alleged that St. Louis County pros­e­cu­tors had a pat­tern and prac­tice of strik­ing black prospec­tive jurors, includ­ing 6 of the 7 African Americans it had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to empan­el in his case. 

“This process is so bro­ken and steeped in pat­terns of sys­temic racism and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct that an inno­cent man came with­in just hours of exe­cu­tion by lethal injec­tion,” NAACP Missouri con­fer­ence President Nimrod Chapel said. Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck said “[t]here’s enough doubt in this case that [Williams’s] sen­tence should at least be com­mut­ed. The skin cells on the han­dle of the knife that was used in this mur­der are not from him.”