Marcellus Williams, 55 years old, is set to be executed by lethal injection in less than a week for a crime that he did not commit. Activists and supporters are fighting tooth and nail against the Missouri court system to save the life of a man who has been proven innocent by DNA evidence.
In January of 2024, prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County Wesley Bell asked to vacate Marcellus Williams’ murder conviction based on “clear and convincing evidence” of Williams’ innocence. But despite this evidence, St. Louis County Judge Bruce Hilton denied Bell’s request to vacate and the state of Missouri is set to move forward with Williams’ execution on September 24.
Williams has maintained his innocence since 1998. In 2001, he was convicted in the case of the brutal murder of newspaper reporter Felicia Gayle in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. His conviction was not based on concrete evidence but instead on the testimony of two witnesses. According to Bell’s motion, these two witnesses, “were known liars” and were “being incentivized by the reward money” offered by the family of the victim for finding leads regarding Gayle’s murderer.
As stated in Bell’s motion to vacate, “DNA evidence supporting a conclusion that Mr. Williams was not the individual who stabbed Ms. Gayle has never been considered by a court.” No physical evidence has tied Williams to Gayle’s murder. Instead, “three DNA experts have reviewed the DNA testing performed on the knife and each has independently concluded that Mr. Williams is excluded as the source of the male DNA on the handle of the murder weapon.”
The death penalty, innocence, and race
Williams’ case has ignited conversations around the use of capital punishment in the US, particularly in regard to innocence. “The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person,” states the website of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Since 1973, at least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US have been exonerated.”
The Innocence Project, which has been spearheading the fight for Williams’ freedom, specializes in restoring freedom to those proven innocent of crimes after being wrongfully convicted. On its website, the organization highlights the critical role that race plays in death penalty cases. “The vast majority of people exonerated from death row are Black or Latinx, and more than half of death row exonerees are Black,” the organization states. “Studies consistently demonstrate that the race of the accused and/or race of the victim plays an arbitrary yet determinative role in the administration of the death penalty. This is significant in the context of wrongful conviction because official misconduct has been documented in three-fourths of the cases of Black exonerees and two-thirds of the cases of Latinx exonerees, while official misconduct is present in less than 60% of the cases of white exonerees.”
Williams is Black, and was convicted of killing a white woman. In the US, cases with this type of racial dynamic have a higher likelihood of resulting in a death penalty. This comes as no surprise given the racist history of the US, especially considering that Black men have historically been brutalized following accusation of harm to white women; from the case of Emmett Till who was falsely accused of whistling at white Carolyn Bryant and paid with his life in 1955, to the Scottsboro boys who were sentenced to death after false accusations of raping two white women in 1931, to the Central Park 5, a group of five Black and Latino teenagers who were convicted and later exonerated of the rape and assault of a white woman in 1989.
At the time, future president Donald Trump himself used his vast fortune to take out two full-page ads in major New York City newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty for these five teens, who were later proven innocent.
Thwarted by the legal machine
At several junctures, Williams’ appeals for freedom have been thwarted by the conservative legal machine of the state of Missouri. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a motion to block a new evidence hearing for Williams following the discovery of DNA evidence that concluded that Williams’ DNA was not on the murder weapon. Bailey’s office claimed that a lower court cannot “usurp” the determination of a higher court, but Bailey is notorious for denying the overturning of convictions in cases of proven innocence.
Bailey opposed and attempted to circumvent the release of Sandra Hemme, who spent 43 years behind bars for the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke, only to be finally released this year, making her the longest-held wrongfully convicted woman in the US. In Hemme’s case, it was found that the police department of St. Joseph, Missouri had withheld evidence implicating a police officer in Jeschke’s murder. Missouri Judge Ryan Horsman had to threaten Bailey with contempt if Hemme was not immediately released, after Bailey’s office called the prison warden and told prison officials not to release Hemme.
Williams’ attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, has stated that, “The decision of a prosecutor to move to vacate a murder conviction and death sentence is not done lightly. Prosecuting Attorney Bell filed a motion because there is overwhelming evidence that Marcellus Williams’ trial was constitutionally unfair, including revelations that the State contaminated the most critical evidence in the case—the murder weapon.”
Bushnell pledges to “continue pursuing every possible option to prevent Mr. Williams’ wrongful execution. There is still time for the courts or [Missouri] Governor Parson to ensure that Missouri does not commit the irreparable injustice of executing an innocent person.”