To read about it on social media is to be deluged with the belief that Missouri put to death an innocent man. The reason, they contend, is that finality matters more than innocence. As long as a defendant received the mechanics of due process, the fact of actual innocence made no difference. And while that is, indeed, the state of the law, it wasn’t quite the state of Williams’ case.
I’m not certain that he was innocent. There was no mic drop moment that proved he had nothing to do with the murder, and there was certainly some evidence to support the conviction. He pawned the victim’s laptop, the victim’s property was found in a car that his grandfather let him drive, and his girlfriend and a jailhouse informant told the police that he had confessed to the crime.
I agree with David French. Williams was convicted of the horrific murder of a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Felicia Anne Gayle. There is a significant distinction between proof that a person is innocent, what we mean by exoneration, and the failure of proof that a person was guilty.
Williams went to trial and was convicted. He appealed and his conviction was affirmed. He sought collateral review and lost. That’s what due process demands, and that’s what Williams got. And so he was executed.
At the same time, however, the physical evidence was profoundly lacking. His DNA wasn’t at the scene. His DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon. His DNA wasn’t under the victim’s fingernails (in spite of the fact that Williams’s girlfriend said he’d been scratched). The bloody footprints at the scene didn’t match his, nor did the fingerprints. There were problems with racial bias in jury selection.
The witnesses who testified against Williams include a jailhouse snitch and his girlfriend, a convicted felon, who wanted the $10,000 reward and was also implicated in the crime. And still, Williams was convicted of stabbing Gayle 43 times to death. While a defendant is presumed innocent before conviction, that presumption is lost once a verdict of guilty is rendered.
Nonetheless, Williams’ execution was stayed twice, but the governor and attorney general of Missouri refused to let it rest, and rejected a deal agreed upon by the local prosecutor, Wesley Bell, and the defense that would have taken him off death row. They wanted Williams executed.
The sum total of these evidentiary problems caused the prosecutor’s office in St. Louis to file a motion to overturn Williams’s conviction. The prosecution and defense even agreed to a plea deal that would have granted Williams relief from execution while keeping him in prison. But the Missouri Supreme Court rejected that deal, the governor of Missouri rejected Williams’s last-ditch request for clemency, and the United States Supreme Court rejected Williams’s request for a stay by a 6-to-3 vote.
There might have been DNA evidence the proved Williams’ DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon, but it turned out that it was spoiled by handling by a prosecutor. You might wonder why these issues weren’t effectively raised at trial by Williams’ lawyer. I know I do.
A hearing on Mr. Bell’s motion was scheduled for August. But just before that date, his office received a new analysis of the DNA on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife. Instead of pointing to an unknown suspect, which would have bolstered the case for Mr. Williams’s innocence, the analysis showed that the knife had been handled by a prosecutor and an investigator at the trial.
Spoliation of evidence doesn’t prove innocence, but it also precludes a defendant from using the evidence to prove innocence. The upshot was that Bell backed off his contention that Williams was innocent, but persisted in his argument that the evidence against Williams was insufficient to prove guilt, the prosecution was tainted by racism and at the very least, was inadequate to take a human being’s life.
Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project, said it was unjust to execute a man when the prosecutor’s office had admitted it was wrong and had fought to overturn the death sentence. “The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with finality over truth, justice and humanity,” she said.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” the local prosecutor, Wesley Bell, said in a statement. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty.”
Like David, I have no idea whether Marcellus Williams was innocent. Like Tricia, the doubts held by the prosecution should have been more than enough to save Williams from execution, even if they were not sufficient to exonerate him. It was a horrible crime. At the time of conviction, there was no doubt that Williams was the killer. And yet here we are, after the full panoply of normal due process was exhausted, years later, with a prosecutor who concedes error occurred and doubts aplenty.
Still Marcellus Williams was executed. There’s no going back now. When are we going to learn that our system is inadequately certain to take a human life no matter how much we hate a defendant and want to kill him?
According to an appeal document there was some question about whether one person or two left the blood shoe prints; I would like to read the testimony of the defense’s expert witness for myself, with a focus on the size of the shoe. The fingermarks were deemed unsuitable and were destroyed before the defense could examine them. The word “unsuitable” can mean different things in the fingermark world, and there is room for mischief. At least some of the hair came from the victim’s shirt, and DNA testing excluded Mr. Williams. A pro-prosecution commenter might claim innocent transfer, but this prompts the question of why it was even collected.
In its request to appoint a board of inquiry into the case, the Midwest Innocence Project wrote, “Despite repeated requests from trial counsel for a continuance for DNA testing, no DNA testing was conducted on the knife at the time of trial. All other forensic evidence collected at the time of the crime excluded Mr. Williams; forensic analysis confirmed that hairs and footprints collected from the scene did not come from Mr. Williams. Trial counsel also sought analysis of bloody fingerprints, which could have provided the identity of the perpetrator, only to learn that law enforcement had lost them…Shortly before trial, law enforcement lost bloody fingerprints on which the defense had requested testing. The trial court denied multiple defense requests for discovery as well as for DNA testing.” Not conducting DNA testing is surprising, but it also prompts one to ask if the forensics team checked for fingermarks. If the fingermarks were indeed bloody, they are highly probative.
ACLU Missouri’s Jeffrey Mittman was quoted as saying, “In the case of Mr. Williams, his public defenders were unprepared. They were already involved in another high-profile capital murder case at the time they were representing Mr. Williams. They appropriately asked for a continuance, but were denied.”
Worth noting, a “prosecutor” like Bell (cut from the same cloth as Boudin, Gascon, and Krasner) supporting a defendant isn’t exactly eyebrow raising.
Unfortunately, the Innocence Project isn’t really about innocence, but more sentence-mitigation where they think they can get away with it, regardless of guilt. And their integrity is very questionable.
We need a champion for the truly wrongly convicted & excessively sentenced. The system is as flawed as the average human. The Innocence Project ain’t it.
without sharing a travelogue from the various rabbit holes I have visited on this case (empty nest + mets rainout = time to waste), I’m comfortable claiming that there is enough evidence here to let a reasonable juror return a guilty verdict. That being said, I am not sure I agree with your ultimate conclusion, RCJP, even if you are on the money regarding the people mentioned. That is, maybe the name “Innocence Project” isn’t really alluding to defendant innocence, but rather about maintaining the innocence of the state: the Project is to make sure we don’t have blood on our hands. There is a good case to be made that anyone receiving the death penalty is “excessively sentenced”–not because of what he or she did or did not do, but because we as a society should no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.”
I’m not intimately knowledgeable about the people or the process but the length of time spent on death row, combined with the (likely rare) possibility that we get it wrong, puts me in favor of canning capital punishment entirely.
Specific to this case, the defendant only need show reasonable doubt and I think that’s exactly what we have.