This week’s developments in the case of Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, a Missouri death row inmate, have laid bare the brutality and arbitrariness of America’s state killing machine. Execution day is approaching for a man who, by all accounts, is innocent. He has always maintained his innocence, but all of his post-conviction appeals and pleas have been unsuccessful.
Williams, 55, was sentenced to death for the August 1998 murder of Felicia Anne Gayle, 42, a well-known St. Louis reporter. Gayle’s husband found her dead at the bottom of the stairs in their home, stabbed 43 times, the knife still lodged in her neck.
Williams has been on death row for murder for nearly two and a half decades. No forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts, or motive link him to the crime he is accused of. No court has examined DNA evidence that could have ruled him out as the perpetrator. Nevertheless, Missouri’s current governor, attorney general, and state Supreme Court have upheld the verdict and worked tirelessly to have Williams executed.
In 2021, the Missouri legislature passed a law allowing prosecutors to challenge convictions if they have “information that the convicted person may be innocent or may have been convicted in error.” The law was enacted in response to developments in forensic science and the growing recognition that failure to consider such new evidence can lead to wrongful convictions. The law requires that a hearing be held in such challenges; it also allows the attorney general to participate in the proceedings.
In accordance with that law, St. Louis County Attorney General Wesley Bell filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. Bell is running for the U.S. House of Representatives after defeating incumbent Rep. Cori Bush in the Democratic primary.
Bell said the two main witnesses against Williams, both of whom stand to gain financially from their testimony, are not credible. The prosecution excluded potential jurors because they are black. And the bloody fingerprints, shoe prints and hair found at the crime scene did not belong to Williams.
Crucially, analysis of the DNA found on the murder weapon ruled out Williams as the perpetrator. New findings surrounding this DNA evidence were at the heart of last week’s events. An evidentiary hearing was scheduled for August 21 at the St. Louis County Courthouse in Clayton, Missouri, to hear Bell’s arguments about Williams’ innocence.
But for those present in the courthouse, including Williams and his legal team, the incident came as a shock. Matthew Jacober, a special prosecutor representing District Attorney Bell, said the knife used to kill Gayle was contaminated by the prosecution because it had been mishandled and improperly stored. A new round of tests had shown that traces of an unknown man’s DNA on the murder weapon did not rule out the prosecution investigator as the perpetrator.
This meant that the DNA evidence could not be presented to support the prosecutor’s claim of Williams’ innocence. Despite the lack of evidence pointing to Williams’ guilt, Bell’s case was weakened. If the motion for acquittal was denied, Williams would be left with no options and faced imminent execution.
Instead, Bell proposed a deal, and Williams and his lawyer accepted it. Williams would enter what was known as an Alford plea, in which he would maintain his innocence but agree that the state had enough evidence to convict him and avoid the death penalty. The key to this deal was that Williams had the right to appeal his conviction if new exculpatory evidence came to light.
Presiding District Judge Bruce F. Hilton accepted the deal, but Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey objected, arguing that the judge had exceeded his authority and did not have his consent as the “exclusive authority” to review death penalty cases. He asked the state Supreme Court to intervene. In its ruling, the court blocked the deal, saying Judge Hilton must either proceed with the evidentiary hearing or argue why he must not do so. On August 22, the judge scheduled the hearing for August 28.
“It is in the interest of all Missourians that the rule of law is fought for and upheld – every time, without exception,” Bailey said in a statement following the Supreme Court ruling.. “I am glad that the Missouri Supreme Court has recognized this. We look forward to presenting evidence in a hearing as we had planned to do yesterday.”
“Rather than take the opportunity to prove his innocence at the originally scheduled hearing, Williams instead attempted to plead guilty to a crime he allegedly did not commit. No innocent person is willing to spend the rest of their life in prison not knowing they are guilty,” Bailey’s statement continued.
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an attorney for Williams and executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, told CNN that the presence of law enforcement DNA on the gun “proves that the state of Missouri violated important protocols in investigating this case, including improper handling of critical evidence.”
She added: “But regardless of who touched the gun between 1998 and today and left DNA on it, there is no doubt that Marcellus Williams did not do it,” she said, stressing that the deal would have kept Williams alive while the fight continued to prove his innocence.
Williams has already faced two execution dates. In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed his execution after DNA testing initially showed he was not the source of the DNA found on the murder weapon. In 2017, however, the special prosecutor appointed by the Supreme Court to review the evidence sent Williams’ case back to the court without a hearing, which again scheduled an execution date. On August 22, 2017, just hours before Williams’ scheduled execution, then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, stayed his execution and appointed a board of inquiry to investigate the case and issue an official report.
On June 29, 2023, the current governor, Republican Mike Parson, dissolved the investigative committee, which had not issued a report or recommendation. Attorney General Bailey requested a new execution date, which was set for September 24, 2024. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office has denied every claim of innocence for the past three decades.
Bailey, who is seeking re-election in November, is seeking the support of the most reactionary, pro-death penalty forces in the state and beyond. Despite the attorney general’s efforts to prevent their release, Missouri death row inmates Kevin Strickland and Lamar Johnson were rehabilitated in 2021 and 2023, respectively. There are currently 12 prisoners on death row. Christopher Leroy Collings is scheduled to be executed on December 12. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 99 people have been sent to their deaths in Missouri.
A petition calling for a halt to Williams’ execution has so far received more than 523,715 signatures.
