Missouri blocks Marcellus Williams deal; execution still on the table
A Missouri man facing execution next month will avoid the death penalty after agreeing to an Alford plea Wednesday afternoon.
UPDATE 8/22/2024: The Missouri state Supreme Court has blocked the agreement that would have spared Marcellus Williams’ life. The September 24 execution date appears set to move forward.
An evidentiary hearing has been set for August 28.
St. Louis Public Radio has more details on the Missouri Supreme Court granting Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s request and what happens next.
Read the original story below.
A Missouri man facing execution next month will avoid the death penalty after agreeing to an Alford plea Wednesday afternoon.
St. Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hilton's courtroom was set to hear new evidence Wednesday morning that proved Marcellus "Khaliifah" Williams’ innocence. After a morning of negotiations, a consent agreement between his attorneys and the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's Office was entered, despite the state attorney general office’s opposition.
Williams pleaded no contest and will be resentenced to life with no parole, according to St. Louis Public Radio justice reporter Rachel Lippmann, who said prosecutors admitted they had “over-reached.”
As a result of the agreement, Williams is no longer on death row. He is set to be resentenced Thursday morning.
“Marcellus Williams is an innocent man, and nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, attorney for Marcellus Williams, said in a statement. “By agreeing to an Alford plea, the parties will bring a measure of finality to Felicia Gayle’s family, while ensuring that Mr. Williams will remain alive as we continue to pursue new evidence to prove, once and for all, that he is innocent.”
According to Cornell University Law School's Legal Information Institute, an Alford plea is “a formal admission of guilt towards charges in criminal court while the defendant simultaneously expresses their innocence toward those same charges.”
“Today, our office agreed to and the court accepted a consent judgment under which Marcellus Williams' sentence of death would be vacated, conditional upon Williams immediately entering an Alford plea of guilty to the charge of murder in the first degree for the death of Felicia Gayle. Williams entered that Alford plea of guilty this afternoon,” the St. Louis County Prosecutor's office said in a statement.
“Under this agreement and in accordance with Missouri law, we anticipate Williams will be sentenced by the court to a term of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” it continued."
Williams, who was convicted of killing St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle during a home invasion in 1998, has long maintained that he did not commit the crime. Gayle was found stabbed to death, and the perpetrator left fingerprints, hair, a bloody shoeprint, a knife and more at the scene of the crime.
Williams, 55, was sentenced to death in 2001 by a jury comprised of 11 white people — and just one Black person.
Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, reviewed the evidence and found that testing of the knife uncovered another man’s DNA — not Williams. Bell filed a motion aiming to vacate Williams’ murder conviction, arguing that new DNA evidence has placed “inexorable doubt” upon the conviction. Williams spent 24 years of his life on Missouri’s death row.
“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” Bell’s motion in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County reads.
However, officials said Wednesday that the knife was mishandled and DNA evidence could have been added, corrupting his exoneration, KMOX News reporter Sean Malone reports. The attorney’s office said it “regrets” that the knife was mishandled, according to KSDK News.
Bell’s motion also claimed that Williams’ conviction had been “significantly compromised” as it relied heavily on the testimony of two witnesses who were “incentivized” to testify for financial and legal reasons.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been fighting to continue the process for Williams’ execution and even went so far as to try and prevent Wednesday’s hearing. He has a history of fighting these sorts of cases — most recently, the cases of Sandra Hemme and Christopher Dunn.
Bailey, a Republican, said he will appeal the decision to the Missouri Supreme Court, in order to have Williams executed.
Joe Amrine, who was exonerated from Missouri’s death row in 2003, spoke at a rally in Shaw Park in support of Williams.
“I’ve been out 20 years,” Amrine told the crowd. “We can't keep creating all these victims. We need to get rid of the death penalty.”
This is so distopian. Mr. Williams will not be executed for a crime he did not commit. No physical or forensic evidence has ever linked Mr. Williams to the crime. His conviction is based on the incentivized testimony of two unreliable witnesses. DNA testing excluded him as the source of male DNA on the murder weapon.