After a string Despite the courts failing to intervene and the state’s governor not seeking clemency, Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams was executed by Missouri prison officials on Tuesday night for a 1998 murder he said he did not commit.
The family of the victim, former newspaper reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, who was stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home, did not support the state-ordered killing. In August, Picus’ husband, Dan, told court officials and representatives from Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office that while he believed Williams was guilty, he did not want her to be executed.
It was Bailey’s actions that cleared the way for Williams’ execution. In mid-August, a St. Louis County District Court judge approved a deal between Williams and county prosecutor Wesley Bell that would have sentenced Williams to life in prison. Bailey scoffed at the deal and intervened to stop it.
On Monday night, Governor Mike Parson declined to offer Williams a pardon, and despite dissent from the court’s three more liberal justices, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene on Tuesday afternoon..
Williams’ execution in Missouri brings the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: Four executions are scheduled to take place in four states by the end of this week, putting the country on pace to reach the 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. As public support for the death penalty continues to wane and juries increasingly rarely vote for the death penalty, officials in states like Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma continue to plan executions — even in cases like Williams’, where there are doubts about the underlying conviction and its fairness. Democrats dropped their longstanding goal of abolishing the death penalty from their platform this year. To date, 200 people sentenced to death have been acquitted: one acquittal for every 8 executions carried out.
In the days before Williams’ execution, more than a million people contacted Parsons’ office asking him to spare Williams’ life, and billionaire abolitionist Richard Branson took out a full-page ad in the Kansas City Star He urged readers to do the same. Parson declined to offer clemency and criticized the media as biased, saying that none of the “true facts” of the case led him to believe that Williams was innocent.
Anger over the execution boiled over online on Tuesday night, and Williams’ final statement and parts of his poems went viral after his murder. “All praise is due to Allah in every situation!!!” Williams wrote.
Missouri kills Williams despite lingering doubts about the fairness of his 2001 trial. In January, Bell filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction, arguing that the scant evidence against Williams cast “unavoidable doubt” on the case.
Among the issues raised by Bell was that the prosecutor handled the murder weapon without protective gloves, which tainted the evidence and made it impossible to extract any possible DNA from the killer. None of the evidence at the crime scene linked Williams to the murder. The prosecutor’s tampering with the evidence unconstitutionally deprived Williams of a fair trial, Bell argued.
During an evidentiary hearing in August, now-retired prosecutor Keith Larner admitted to handling the gun with his bare hands at least five times before the trial, which he said was his normal practice. Larner said he thought this was acceptable because he had concluded based on an investigator’s claim that Picus’ killer was wearing gloves during the attack. There is no evidence in the case to support that suspicion.
Bell also pointed out that Larner excluded potential jurors at least in part because they were black. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said it is unconstitutional to reject jurors based on their race. According to court records, Larner excluded six of the seven black potential jurors from serving. Explaining his decision to exclude one of them, Larner testified last month that he did so because the man and Williams “looked like brothers, like family brothers, not like black people.”
Bailey intervened at every step of the process, arguing that the verdict was justified, that Larner had done nothing wrong, and that Williams should be executed. Williams’ ordeal is just the latest in a series of cases in which Bailey has used the power of his office to fend off allegations of wrongful convictions and even ensure that people acquitted by the court remain in prison.
Although Bell acknowledged that Williams’ conviction was implausible due to a constitutional error, and although Dan Picus wished the state would not go ahead with its plans, Bailey insisted that his actions represented justice and that Williams and his lawyers were on a crusade to deceive the public and get a murderer off the hook. “The public has been deceived at every turn,” the attorney general said in an August press release. “That is why the truth in this matter must come out.”
On September 12, District Court Judge Bruce Hilton ruled that there was no legal basis to overturn Williams’ conviction.
In a flurry of subsequent litigation, attorneys from the Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, and lawyers for Bell appealed to a number of other courts, including the Federal District Court, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Missouri Supreme Court, but all to no avail.
Although the federal appeals court rejected Williams’ attempts to appeal a lower court decision based on procedural rules, Judge Jane Kelly wrote a concurring opinion expressing concern that the issues underlying the case “challenge the fundamental fairness of Williams’ proceedings.”
“What is most difficult to explain and what we cannot understand is why the routine application of a process to preserve finality is more important than the search for truth and the achievement of fairness.”
In a statement after Williams’ execution, attorney Larry Komp of the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Kansas City, who also represented Williams, stressed that the system had failed to take into account the serious problems in his case.
“It’s hard to explain how admitted racial discrimination is ignored and never seriously addressed. It’s hard to explain how a prosecutor can admit to tampering with evidence throughout his entire legal career … and yet do nothing,” Komp said. “What’s hardest to explain, and what we can’t understand, is how the routine application of a procedure to preserve finality is more important than seeking truth and ensuring fairness.”
