Big city case
By Amy Howe
on 24 September 2024
at 23:29
Judges allowed Marcellus Williams to be executed in Missouri on Tuesday evening, despite evidence of his innocence. (Thomas Hawk via Flickr)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the execution of Marcellus Williams. Williams was sentenced to death in 2001 for the 1998 stabbing murder of Felicia Gayle. None of the forensic evidence found in Gayle’s home could link Williams to the crime scene, and his lawyers argued there was reason to believe he was innocent. The lawyer prosecuting Williams also testified that he excluded at least one potential juror based on his race.
Williams was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday evening in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated they would stay his execution. Gayle’s family and the prosecutor had publicly objected to Williams’ execution.
The brief, unsigned orders came a day after the Missouri Supreme Court and the state’s governor, Mike Parson, rejected requests to stop the execution. Prosecutors in St. Louis, where Williams was convicted, had asked the courts to overturn his sentence, but the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opposed those efforts.
The only evidence linking Williams to the murder was a laptop stolen from Gayle’s husband. The St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office has acknowledged that there is evidence of Williams’ innocence: His DNA was not on the knife used to kill Gayle, and prosecutors had contaminated that evidence by handling it without gloves before and during the trial.
There was also evidence that the prosecution rejected at least one juror because of his race. The jury that convicted Williams, who was black, ultimately consisted of 11 white jurors and only one black juror.
Williams, who has maintained his innocence, agreed last month to Alford In it, he acknowledges that the state has enough evidence to charge him with murder. In return, he receives a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Both Williams and the St. Louis prosecutor came to the Supreme Court on Monday and asked the justices to stay the execution scheduled for Tuesday night and take up his case. “The conviction of Marcellus Williams is a grave miscarriage of justice and his execution would be an unthinkable, irreversible travesty,” Williams’ lawyers wrote in one of their briefs.
In October, the justices will hear oral arguments in the case of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man who was sentenced to death in 1997 for murdering the owner of the motel where he worked. In that case, the attorney general supported Glossip’s efforts to overturn his conviction and death sentence.
This article was originally published on Howe on the Court.
