Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) on Tuesday stayed the scheduled execution of Marcellus Williams, just hours before the death-row inmate was set to be put to death for the 1998 killing of a former newspaper reporter.
Greitens said he would appoint a board to look into the new DNA evidence and other factors before issuing a report about whether or not Williams should be granted clemency.
“A sentence of death is the ultimate, permanent punishment,” Greitens said in a statement. “To carry out the death penalty, the people of Missouri must have confidence in the judgment of guilt.”
Williams, 48, was convicted in 2001 of brutally killing Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, who had been a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Gayle was in her home when she was stabbed 43 times with a butcher knife, according to court records.
Williams was scheduled to be executed in 2015 for the high-profile killing, but the state Supreme Court stayed his lethal injection, allowing him time to obtain the new DNA testing.
Attorneys for Williams have argued he is innocent, pointing to DNA tests they say produced “conclusive scientific evidence that another man committed this crime.” They say this evidence shows that DNA belonging to someone else was found on the murder weapon, exonerating Williams.
“They’re never going to ever confront an actual innocence cause more persuading than this involving exonerating DNA evidence,” said Kent Gipson, one of Williams’s attorneys. “I’ve seen a lot of miscarriages of justice, but this one would take the cake.”
State officials, though, said they still believed Williams is guilty because of other “compelling non-DNA evidence.”
In court filings, the office of Joshua D. Hawley, Missouri’s attorney general, listed some of these other factors, describing two people — a man who served time with Williams and Williams’s girlfriend — who both told police that he confessed to the killing. Williams had also sold a laptop stolen from Gayle’s home, Hawley’s office wrote in the filings, and items belonging to Gayle were found in a car Williams drove the day she was killed.
“We remain confident in the judgment of the jury and the many courts that have carefully reviewed Mr. Williams’ case over sixteen years,” she wrote Tuesday afternoon. “We applaud the work of the numerous law enforcement officers who have dedicated their time and effort to pursuing justice in this case.”
A little more than four hours before Williams was set to be executed, Greitens signed an executive order halting the lethal injection. Greitens also appointed a board of inquiry to further consider Williams’s clemency request and issue a report about whether he should be executed or have his sentence commuted.
In his statement, Greitens said he was appointing the board “in light of new information.” According to Greitens’s executive order, the board will consider “newly discovered DNA evidence” as well as “any other relevant evidence not available to the jury.”
In 2015, when Missouri last intended to execute Williams, the state’s Supreme Court stayed the lethal injection. A laboratory tested evidence from the scene of Gayle’s killing and a DNA expert determined that Williams “could not have contributed” to the DNA found on the knife that killed the former reporter, Williams’s attorneys said. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a request to stay Williams’s execution without explanation.
Missouri officials had argued in court that in order to exonerate Williams, “DNA evidence would have to explain how Williams ended up with the victim’s property, and why two witnesses independently said he confessed to them, or at least provide a viable alternate suspect.” They also said that just showing “unknown DNA” on the knife handle does not alone prove Williams’s innocence.
“The item was a kitchen knife with both male and female DNA on the handle,” Hawley’s office wrote in a filing to the Supreme Court. “It is reasonable to assume people not involved in the murder handled the knife in the kitchen. And there is no reason to believe Williams would not have worn gloves during a burglary and murder, as he wore a jacket to conceal his bloody shirt after he left the murder scene.”
Gipson argued that the case against Williams was always weak, consisting primarily of the statements of two jailhouse informants who claimed Williams had confessed to the crime. Gipson also said that bloody footprints at the scene did not match Williams’s shoe size and added that bloody fingerprints were never tested or compared to Williams’s fingerprints because they were lost by police.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/22/missouri-plans-to-execute-marcellus-williams-as-his-attorneys-say-dna-evidence-exonerates-him/?utm_term=.21c240295841
