Experts: Marcellus Williams execution shows "how much politics factors into capital punishment"

The Tuesday execution of Marcellus "Khaliifah" Williams, a Missouri man held on death row for 23 years for a 1998 murder he maintained he did not commit, followed months of pleas to have his life spared.

Attorneys, criminal rights activists and politicians spoke out to condemn the execution, carried out after requests for it to be stayed were denied by both the Missouri and United States Supreme Courts and after Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson declined Williams' final appeal for clemency.

In the weeks — and, especially, days — leading up to Williams' execution, Americans nationwide pleaded for Parson to commute Williams' sentence to life without parole through a targeted campaign of calls, letters, faxes and a clemency petition signed by the victim's family. The petition cited concerns over the DNA evidence, claims of racial bias in jury selection at Williams' original trial and the victim’s family’s own call for Williams to be removed from death row.

Williams' death by lethal injection on Tuesday at 6:10 p.m. CT has since led many Americans to question the integrity of a justice system and state actors that push to execute in the face of doubt of a defendant's guilt and potentially exonerating evidence, especially when the original prosecuting office and the victim's family no longer support such punishment. 

Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, a Brooklyn Law School professor whose research focuses on capital punishment, called the state's support of and ultimate decision to execute Williams despite protests from the prosecutor, the defense and the victim's family "disturbing" and "head-scratching."

"The larger question becomes," she added, "in whose name is the state of Missouri now executing Mr. Williams and how can the state purport that this is about justice or bringing closure to the victim when these parties are no longer defending the capital sentence?"

Williams was convicted in 2001 of first-degree murder in the violent stabbing death of social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle during a robbery of her suburban home in August 1998. Throughout his nearly 25 years on death row in a Missouri corrections facility, Williams maintained his innocence. 

After reexamining the case, the potential for new possibly exonerating evidence to arise with the advent of advanced DNA testing and suspicions of racial bias in the selection of the jurors — which according to the The New York Times included 11 white jurors and one Black juror after the original prosecutor struck six of the seven prospective Black jurors — led current St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell to seek to overturn Williams' conviction.

Last winter, Bell filed a motion to vacate Williams' murder conviction, empowered by a Missouri law that took effect in 2021 allowing prosecuting attorneys to do so if they believed a convicted defendant to be innocent or erroneously convicted. In the motion, Bell said he believed Williams was not involved in Gayle's slaying, citing new DNA evidence and arguing the original prosecutors had improperly excluded prospective jurors who were Black. 

Bell's motion also argued that the witness testimony used to convict Williams was not credible and that Williams did not leave the bloody shoe prints, fingerprints or hair that investigators found at the crime scene. 

The original prosecuting office's "concession of error" in this way makes Williams' case both "unusual" and "quite extraordinary," argued Austin Sarat, a Salon contributor and professor of law and political science at Amherst College whose research focus includes capital punishment. 

"That's not a usual thing that happens," he said in an interview, adding: "But in many other ways, the case was not unusual. The death penalty system in the United States often makes mistakes. Miscarriages of justice, the kind that happened to Marcellus Williams, happen all too frequently in the United States."

A 2014 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that, if all defendants sentenced to death remained under the sentence indefinitely, at least 4.1% of them would eventually be exonerated. Since 1972, some 200 people sentenced to capital punishment have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center's database. Of those cases 70.5% included official police misconduct, while 65% included false accusations or perjury, the DPIC found.  

Williams' case largely hinged on testimony from witnesses, namely his girlfriend at the time of Gayle's slaying and a jailhouse informant. Defense attorneys, both at the time of trial and now, questioned the credibility of their testimony, arguing that the girlfriend and informant, who testified against Williams in 2003, both had felony convictions and were motivated by the reward money offered for information about the case.

Hoag-Fordjour said that, while prosecutors may not always have physical and forensic evidence tying someone to a crime, it's "rarer in a capital case for that to be the only evidence against someone because the stakes are so high." Regardless of the evidence present in the case, she added, the potential for racial discrimination in jury selection violates the Missouri and U.S. Constitutions and should have "been an issue worthy of overturning the conviction in this case."

An analysis of the DNA evidence on the kitchen knife used to kill Gayle just before a late August hearing showed that it had been contaminated with DNA from a prosecutor and investigator on the case, leaving Williams and his defense team without the new evidence they had hoped would exonerate him.

In light of the test, Bell and Williams' attorneys agreed he would take an "Alford plea," a deal that would have allowed him to admit that prosecutors had enough evidence to acquire a guilty verdict but reduce his sentence to life without parole, which Williams' attorneys at the time said would offer them more time to pursue his exoneration.

The circuit judge overseeing the hearing, with approval from the victim's widower, said he would sign off on the new sentence, according to The Times. But Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who supported the conviction and Williams' execution, argued that the circuit court did not have the authority to overturn the conviction or resentence — an assertion the state Supreme Court upheld. 

The state Supreme Court ordered the judge to proceed with the Aug. 28 hearing, in which lawyers for the attorney general argued that the struck juror was removed for reasons other than his race and that the knife was handled at a time when prosecutors did not understand that the contact could leave trace amounts of DNA behind.

The judge rejected Bell's claims in his ruling against Williams earlier this month. Bell's appeal of that ruling to the Missouri Supreme Court is what the court denied Monday. 

In its opinion denying the stay, the Missouri Supreme Court noted that the prosecutor had recently pulled back from his claims that Williams was innocent, according to the Times.

“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,” the opinion said.

Gov. Parson, a former county sheriff who has declined to grant clemency for death penalty sentences throughout his tenure as governor, also disagreed with the pleas to spare Williams' life, arguing Williams had received plenty of consideration from the state justice system.  

“Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims," Parson said in a statement following his decision Monday. "At the end of the day, his guilty verdict and sentence of capital punishment were upheld. Nothing from the real facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence, as such, Mr. Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

Gayle was found stabbed to death inside her home with her purse and husband's laptop stolen. Investigators and prosecutors at the time claimed Williams broke into the home, heard a shower running, found a large butcher knife and stabbed Gayle 43 times when she came downstairs, leaving the knife in her throat, according to local outlet Fox 2 Now. 

Williams' girlfriend at the time had said that he confessed to killing Gayle after she found her purse in his car, prosecutors said. Williams' girlfriend had also said that he threatened to kill her and her loved ones if she told anyone. The jailhouse informant testified that Williams had boasted about killing Gayle. 

In response to questions of the girlfriend and informant's credibility, Parson's statement said that the girlfriend never asked for the reward, and the informant provided specifics about the crime that were "not publicly available yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams' involvement." Parson's statement also recounted Williams' criminal history. 

Yet, the governor's predecessor, former Republican Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, had twice paused Williams' execution in 2015 and 2017 — the latter time just hours before he was set to be put to death — stating that the testing, which was unavailable at the time of Gayle's killing, showed that Williams' DNA was not on the murder weapon, Fox 2 Now reported. Greitens also formed a board of inquiry to further examine the case, but Parson dismantled it last June before it reached any conclusion pertaining to Williams' guilt or innocence.

"The fact that you have one governor creating this board and then the next governor shutting it down just shows how much politics factors into capital punishment," Hoag-Fordjour said. "It no longer has to do with somebody's criminal culpability and what is the appropriate punishment for certain culpability, but rather politics. It just seems so arbitrary — and that's exactly the death penalty is not supposed to involve, arbitrariness."

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Sarat noted the difference between a defendant's legal guilt and factual guilt. The former must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, a standard both Sarat and Hoag-Fordjour said does not have to be met in subsequent appeals of a verdict. 

"Legal guilt is what can be proven, and simply because something is proven in a court of law, it does not mean that it is true," Sarat said, adding: "It seems to be very clear that in the Marcellus Williams case, there was a miscarriage of justice, that the legal determination of guilt in his trial was inaccurate, wrong, the result of racial bias, the result of prosecutorial misconduct."

With the introduction of doubt from the contamination of the evidence, the concerns over the credibility of the witness testimony and the jury selection process, Sarat said the "moral standard" should follow the baseball tenet of "the tie goes to the runner," while emphasizing that the legal standard is not so. 

"What I think ought to occur in death cases is, if there is a doubt about whether or not this person is actually innocent, if there is a doubt about whether or not the trial was conducted in a way that respected the rules, then that doubt ought to be resolved in favor of not executing the person. That is not the legal standard," he said.

Both Williams' defense attorney, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project Tricia Rojo Bushnell, and Bell's office agreed with that argument. 

“That is not justice. And we must all question any system that would allow this to occur. The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost,” Bushnell said in a statement to Fox 2 Now. "Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue," she added.

Bell's office said in a statement following the Monday rejections of the appeal and clemency petition that it still had questions "about the integrity of [Williams'] conviction," according to Fox 2 Now. 

“Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option,” Bell said. “As the St. Louis County prosecutor, our office has questions about Mr. Williams' guilt but also about the integrity of his conviction.”

Sarat argued that cases like Williams' push the country closer toward one day ending the death penalty, despite some states "tenaciously clinging" to it. He asserted that Americans are in "a period of national reconsideration of capital punishment" evidenced by overall declines in the number of annual executions nationwide, decreases in death sentences and the drop in public support for capital punishment. 

The percentage of Americans who support the death penalty for defendants convicted of murder has slowly declined over the years, Gallup polling shows. In October of 2023, 53% of Americans supported capital punishment compared to 44% who did not. The support is down from 60% in 2013 and 80% in 1994, when Americans' support for the death penalty peaked. 

"In that sense, Marcellus Williams was a kind of martyr for the cause of ending the death penalty in the United States," Sarat said, arguing that much of the objections to the death penalty stem from the justice system's inability to do it well. 

"At the guilt phase, we convict the innocent. At the sentencing phase, we sentence people because of their race or the race of the victim," he asserted. "When we go to execute people, we often botch the executions." 

Williams' execution, Hoag-Fordjour added, also underscores how factors that should be "arbitrary" in a capital case, like race, poverty, mental health and the race of the victim, often dictate whether someone is convicted in a capital case and ultimately sentenced to death, disproportionately affecting "the most marginalized people in society — Black people, people of color, people with mental illness and poor people."

Williams' death "crystallizes for us that this country — the legal system in this country — is much more concerned with finality than with justice," she argued. "The just thing to do in Mr. Williams' case was to stay the execution and for the governor to grant clemency. And yet those with the authority chose, instead, to focus on finality, and that entailed executing a man that could have been and may have been innocent. That's a terrifying way to run a justice system."