Is Missouri About to Execute an Innocent Man?

On June 4, the Missouri Supreme Court set a September execution date for a man named Marcellus Williams. There’s a profound problem with this ruling, however. Williams is most likely innocent of the charges against him.

The story — like every story about capital punishment — begins with tragedy and evil. On Aug. 11, 1998, a 42-year-old former Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Felicia Anne Gayle was found stabbed to death in her home. The murder was brutal. She’d been stabbed 43 times; her husband found her with the knife still in her neck.

The crime generated a significant amount of local news coverage. Gayle’s husband was a radiologist, and the murder happened in a quiet gated community. Despite the media coverage and the intense interest in the case, the murder went unsolved for 15 months, until the police charged Williams with the crime.

At first glance, the charges seemed to make sense. Williams is not a sympathetic defendant. He has previous convictions for burglary and armed robbery, and his girlfriend, Laura Asaro, accused him of the crime, along with a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.

Their story was compelling — and dreadful. Cole claimed that he had been locked up with Williams in the City Workhouse, where Williams was detained for an unrelated crime. Cole said Williams told him that he went to the house with the intention of burglarizing it. When he arrived, he knocked (perhaps to discern whether anyone was home), and when no one answered, broke a windowpane on the door to enter the house. When he got inside he heard water running, realized someone was there, grabbed a knife from the kitchen and waited for the person to emerge.

When Gayle came downstairs, he stabbed her to death and then took her purse, another bag containing a laptop computer and a number of other items. Later, he picked up his girlfriend in his grandfather’s car, which Williams was allowed to drive. Asaro testified that he was wearing a jacket, even though it was a hot summer day, and that she saw scratches on his neck. He first said that he’d been in a fight, but Asaro testified that the next day he confessed to the murder.

To corroborate her story, the state also introduced evidence that it found a ruler and a calculator belonging to Gayle in the grandfather’s car, and it introduced evidence that Williams sold the computer after the murder to a man named Glenn Roberts. During the penalty phase of the trial, the state also introduced evidence of Williams’s extensive criminal history, which included 16 different convictions, including armed robbery and threatening to kill a corrections officer.

That evidence certainly seems damning, and when it’s recounted in a court opinion — like the Eighth Circuit opinion rejecting Williams’s request for post-conviction relief — it can seem airtight.

But there’s a problem. None of the physical evidence from the crime scene supports this story.

The crime scene itself was horrific, and it included a large amount of physical evidence. There were bloody footprints in the house, but they did not match Williams’s shoes. There were bloody fingerprints, but they weren’t a match for Williams, either. Neither was the DNA found under Gayle’s fingernails, and neither were the hair samples found at the scene.

And what of the testimony that Williams sold a laptop belonging to the victim’s family? The trial court excluded testimony that Williams told Roberts that his girlfriend had given him the laptop to sell. Indeed, as the prosecutor’s office later asserted, this evidence made “the person with the most direct connection to the crime Laura Asaro and not Marcellus Williams.”

In addition, Cole and Asaro were deeply problematic witnesses. As the prosecutor’s office observes, Cole has a “lengthy criminal history,” and he has “long struggled with drug addiction — he regularly used crack cocaine, marijuana and heroin — and with mental illness; he had received psychiatric treatment and had been prescribed ‘psych medicine,’ which caused hallucinations and memory loss.” Asaro also had a considerable criminal history, and she agreed to testify only after the police told her she could be charged with withholding evidence if she didn’t cooperate.

Their stories also evolved over the course of the case and were inconsistent with the physical evidence. For example, Asaro said Williams went through the back door, but the broken window aligned with the deadbolt on the front door. Asaro said Williams rinsed the knife, but it was in fact left in Gayle’s body. Cole in particular was keenly interested in a $10,000 reward Gayle’s family posted for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.

There were also concerns with the jury. Gayle is white, and Williams is Black; the prosecutor used six of his nine peremptory challenges (which permit prosecutors to strike prospective jurors without providing a justification) to exclude six of the seven Black prospective jurors. As a result, Williams faced a jury composed of one Black and 11 white members, a potential violation of binding Supreme Court precedent prohibiting prosecutors from engaging in racial discrimination in jury selection.

In spite of the lack of physical evidence and the unreliability of the prosecution’s witnesses, the jury convicted Williams and sentenced him to death.

Both state and federal courts upheld his conviction in the face of multiple appeals, ultimately rejecting all his arguments on appeal, including his challenge to the composition of the jury. In 2015, however, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered additional DNA testing, and the results were startling — according to three experts who reviewed the results, Williams’s DNA is not on the murder weapon. Instead, there was a mixture of DNA from two other men.

In my opening paragraph, I described Williams as “most likely” innocent. It is still possible that he is guilty of the crime, but at this point his conviction strains credulity. There’s no physical evidence placing him at the scene of the crime. As his attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project, told me, “There is no eyewitness testimony saying they saw him” at the crime scene, and “there is nothing that puts him there” other than the “incentivized” testimony of Cole and Asaro, neither of whom claims to have been with Williams at the Gayles’ house.

I suppose it is conceivable that Williams broke in and killed Gayle without leaving any trace evidence of his presence even as an unknown other person walked around the scene, leaving fingerprints and DNA on the knife. It is conceivable, but it is hardly likely. It is far more likely that Williams is the victim of two unreliable witnesses with other motives.

In spite of the new DNA evidence, on Jan. 31, 2017, the Missouri Supreme Court denied Williams’s habeas petition without briefing and without hearing oral arguments. Williams also petitioned the Republican governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, for relief, and on Aug. 22, 2017, Greitens stayed Williams’s execution and convened a board of inquiry to take a closer look at the case.

But here’s where matters go from complicated to downright strange. The board moved at a glacial pace and never seemed to issue a final report. Bushnell told me that the board did send inquiries to the attorneys in the case, but its proceedings were under seal. On June 29, 2023, the current Republican governor of Missouri, Mike Parson, dissolved the panel. In his statement, the governor said, “We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo and solving nothing.”

“Withdrawing the order,” he noted, “allows the process to proceed within the judicial system, and once the due process of law has been exhausted, everyone will receive certainty.”

The next day, the Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, asked the Missouri Supreme Court to set an execution date. On June 4, that’s exactly what the Missouri Supreme Court did; it scheduled Williams’s execution for Sept. 24.

All is not lost, however. In January, Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, filed a motion in Saint Louis County Circuit Court asking the court to vacate the judgment against Williams. (Bell, incidentally, is running in the Democratic primary for Congress against Representative Cori Bush.) Missouri law authorizes a prosecutor to move to set aside a conviction “at any time if he or she has information that the convicted person may be innocent or may have been erroneously convicted.”

I’d urge you to read the entire document. It’s a comprehensive argument against the conviction made by the prosecutor’s office. This isn’t the defense asking for relief; it’s the prosecution, and its reasoning is powerful.

“To date,” Bell argues, “no court has considered the compelling testimony by three separate DNA experts excluding Mr. Williams as the individual who wielded the knife found in Ms. Gayle’s body.” In addition, “No court has considered this evidence in the context of the lack of evidence placing Mr. Williams at Ms. Gayle’s home and the increasing lack of credibility of Cole and Asaro’s testimony, which, beyond Mr. Williams having possessed stolen property, the laptop, is the only evidence underlying Mr. Williams’s conviction.” This motion is still pending, and there is a status conference — in which the courts often establish the schedule for the case — set for July 12.

My own feelings about the death penalty are complicated. In 2021, I joined my colleague Jane Coaston and The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig for a podcast about the morality and justice of the death penalty. Elizabeth is a powerful and eloquent opponent of state-sanctioned executions, but I don’t see the death penalty as inherently unjust. There are circumstances in which it is an appropriate punishment for a particularly heinous crime.

My problem, however, is with the way in which we impose the death penalty here in the United States. There are a number of racial disparities, for example. Black defendants are on death row at a rate that far outpaces their share of the population. But arguably the most revealing evidence of racial problems with the death penalty relates to the identity of victims. Study after study indicates that murders involving white victims are more likely to lead to the death penalty than murders of minorities.

The Williams case is also a textbook example of how the legal system itself is often so complex and obtuse that even after years of appeals, we’re still waiting on a court to fully consider all the evidence in the case, including the crucial finding that Williams’s DNA was not on the murder weapon.

Regardless of your underlying feelings about the death penalty, however, there should be unanimity on this point: We should not and must not kill anyone when there is compelling evidence of actual innocence. The fact that Williams is guilty of a number of other serious crimes does not mean that he should face death for a crime he did not commit. And when new evidence is discovered, the understandable drive for finality should not lead us to short-circuit a careful process.

We must know he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, based on all available evidence, and the available evidence is substantially different from the evidence the jury considered at trial.

Governor Parson should either pardon Williams or commute his sentence, and Missouri courts should vacate his conviction. But “should” is a far cry from “will.” It would be tempting to read the facts of the case and become complacent, to believe that the courts will certainly intervene when both the defense and prosecution believe the conviction should not stand. But remember, the Missouri Supreme Court set an execution date without even bothering to hold a hearing exploring the results of the DNA tests that it ordered. Complacency is not an option when a man’s life is on the line.

Some other things I did

I took last week off for two very good reasons. First, my wife has been battling breast cancer since November, and last week she had surgery after six months of intensive chemotherapy. The surgery was remarkably successful, and the doctors have told her that she is now cancer-free. As part of her treatment protocol, she still has to endure radiation treatments, but we’re overjoyed that the cancer responded so well to chemo, and her prognosis is good.

Second, my son graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yes, he’s a Banana Slug for life now.

But before I took time off, I wrote a Sunday column about being canceled by my former church. The piece begins like this:

This week, the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in America are gathering in Richmond, Va., for their annual General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family’s church home for more than 15 years.

It just canceled me.

I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to this piece. I received hundreds of personal messages, many from people telling their own stories of pain and hurt in church, including stories of being bullied out of their congregations over political differences. I’m grateful for those messages, and even though I couldn’t reply to all of them, I can assure you that I read them all, and so very many of them touched my heart.

There is a faction of Republican Christians who do not want Democrats in church. They don’t want conservatives who, like me, oppose Trump there, either. They view their role as purging the church of alleged heretics, and in pursuit of that misguided mission, they’re destroying friendships, dividing congregations and poisoning discourse.

As I wrote in the piece, “When I left the Republican Party, I thought a shared faith would preserve my denominational home. But I was wrong. Race and politics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer welcome in the church I loved.”