Missouri Court Denies Condemned Prisoner Stay of Execution, Review of Case Despite Exonerating DNA Evidence

After having previously granted Marcellus Williams (pictured) a stay of execution in 2015 to permit DNA testing in his case, the Missouri Supreme Court on August 15 summarily denied him a new execution stay, despite recently obtained results of that testing that support his innocence claim.

Williams—who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 by a nearly all-white St. Louis County jury in the highly publicized stabbing death of a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter—presented scientific evidence that excluded him as a contributor to DNA on the knife used to kill Felicia Gayle. Williams had filed a motion in the state court to stay his scheduled August 22 execution, along with a petition seeking the appointment of a Special Master to hold hearings on his innocence claim.

Williams’s petition was supported by reports from two DNA experts who had determined that DNA evidence on the knife did not match Williams or Gayle, but came from an unknown third person. One expert concluded that Williams “could not have contributed to the detected [DNA] profile” and the other found “a clear exclusion of Marcellus Williams from the knife handle.”

The petition alleged that the “physical evidence collected from the crime scene”—which included fingernail scrapings from the victim, who had been stabbed more than 40 times—“did not match and could not be linked to” Williams.

Williams was convicted and sentenced to death based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant and a prostitute who was an admitted crack addict. He has never been provided an evidentiary hearing on the DNA results. The Missouri Supreme Court denied his petition without any written opinion within one day of its filing, and before Williams had an opportunity to respond to the State’s opposition.

Kent Gipson, one of Williams’s lawyers, said the defense plans to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court. “It certainly would give most reasonable people pause to say, ‘Should you be executing somebody when you’ve got reasonable evidence suggesting another man did it?,’” Gibson said. Williams also has a case pending in federal court arguing that he should be permitted to re-open his habeas proceedings because he can show he is innocent; he was denied relief in the federal district court and is currently appealing that denial to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. 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 also previously raised a claim alleging 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.

A Missouri Supreme Court justice noted in another St. Louis County capital case “a fairly repetitive pattern” in which St. Louis County “has a substantial African-American community” yet there are “still all white juries and that’s not mathematically probable.” This issue was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in Herbert Smulls’s death-penalty case in 2014, but the Court declined to review the issue and Smulls was executed.