Opinion: Living under the shadow of an unjust death sentence: The story of Marcellus Williams

Marcellus Williams is living a legal nightmare straight out of a Kafka story. And just last week, his strange and tragic case took another unexpected turn .

The overwhelming weight of the evidence points to the conclusion that Williams is the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, for which he has been sentenced to death. Even the prosecutor’s office, which secured that sentence, now acknowledges this fact.

Still, on Aug. 21, Williams entered a plea in return for the promise that he would serve life without parole instead of being executed.

He only did so because the prosecutors in his case mishandled critical evidence that could have shown that Williams is actually innocent. Their negligence deprived Williams of the chance to show how badly the state of Missouri has messed up his case.

To make matters worse, after the trial court accepted Williams’s plea, Andrew Bailey (R), Missouri’s zealous, pro-death-penalty attorney general , went to the state Supreme Court seeking to overturn that judgment .

The thought of an innocent person being caught up in Williams’s situation is shocking enough. But all that is compounded by the fact that a bloodthirsty attorney general seems determined to see Williams put to death, whether he’s innocent or not.

As long as America clings to the death penalty, law enforcement officials like Bailey will try to secure death sentences in cases like that of Marcellus Williams. And people like Williams will be induced to abandon innocence claims in return for a guarantee that they won’t be executed.

Both are reasons enough to end capital punishment. But that aside, let’s look more closely at the Williams case and what gave rise to this latest turn of events.

Williams was convicted and sentenced on March 31, 2000, for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. The crime was particularly gruesome: She was stabbed between 10 times and 43 times with a butcher’s knife taken from her kitchen.

Williams was convicted on the testimony of two police informants — both with criminal records. Their testimony was false , and none of the evidence from the crime scene implicated Williams. As journalist Madiba Dennie put it , “The bloody footprints (from the crime scene) did not match his shoes. The fibers didn’t match his clothes. The hairs didn’t match his body.”

At trial, the prosecutor struck six prospective Black jurors, so that the final jury selection included only one Black person out of 12 .

In January, Wesley Bell, the current St. Louis County prosecutor whose office first prosecuted Williams, finally acknowledged the miscarriage of justice in Williams’s case after an analysis of DNA found on the murder weapon determined that it could not have come from Marcel Williams. He asked the Circuit Court of St. Louis County to vacate Williams’s conviction.

That brings us to last week’s events. A Missouri trial court was scheduled to hold an evidentiary hearing that seemed likely to finally free an innocent man. But nothing seems simple in the Williams case.

Two days before the scheduled hearing, the prosecutor’s office revealed, without explanation, that it had conducted further DNA testing on the weapon used to kill Felicia Gale. But “The murder weapon was handled without proper procedures then in place.”

The result was that the DNA evidence was contaminated. The only DNA found on the murder weapon was consistent with that of a prosecutor and an investigator in the case. Tragically, as the New York Times explains , “Bell’s office concluded that the new findings had weakened the claim of innocence, though the prosecutors maintained that the case was still riddled with problems.”

Those problems were so glaring that, even without the DNA evidence, their office “still believed that Williams’s constitutional rights had been violated.” As a way out of the mess, they proposed a settlement.

Williams would enter a so-called Alford plea , in which “the defendant maintains his innocence but concedes that the state has enough evidence to obtain a conviction.” In return, the death penalty would be off the table.

Williams, who has always maintained his innocence, took the deal. He is not alone in doing this. All over the country, in all kinds of cases, innocent people enter guilty pleas. One study reports that, on the federal level, “between two and eight percent of convicted defendants plead guilty to crimes for which they are factually innocent.” Other research has shown that there are many reasons why they do so.

The most important involve draconian sentence differentials, like those in the Williams case, which await those who go to trial and are found guilty rather than take a plea.

Pleading guilty or entering an Alford plea also is quite common in death penalty cases. As law professor William Barry explains , “Given the choice between a death sentence and a plea deal, many defendants — innocent or not — choose to plead guilty, even if the cost is life in prison without the option of parole.”

Berry argues that in death cases, “bargained sentences almost certainly reflect the coercion of the prosecutor in an unequal bargaining dynamic rather than a voluntary acceptance of a proportional punishment for one’s crime.”

Whatever Marcellus Williams’s motivation, the judge in his case, Bruce F. Hilton, after reviewing “some 8,000 pages of records in the case” and speaking with the victim’s husband, determined that “the consent judgment is a proper remedy in this case.”

But that was not good enough for Attorney General Bailey, who instead insisted that Judge Hinton did not have the authority to accept the plea without first holding a full evidentiary hearing and permitting the attorney general to participate in that hearing. On Aug. 21, the Missouri Supreme Court agreed with Bailey .

So now Williams is back to square one, still living under the shadow of a death sentence for a crime he didn’t commit and with an attorney general determined to pull out all the stops until that sentence is carried out. He is trapped in a system whose failures put him behind bars in the first place and whose other failures now make it impossible for him to prove what he knows — namely, that he is an innocent man.

Williams’s story is so grotesque and cruel that it should lead people in Missouri and elsewhere to say that they have had enough of the death penalty. So long as we remain wedded to that punishment, we will do great damage, not just to people like Williams but to everyone who cares about the pursuit of justice.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Amherst College.

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