Even for those of us who in theory support the death penalty for heinous crimes, Tuesday’s scheduled execution of Marcellus Williams is a travesty. Williams is almost certainly innocent, and the Supreme Court should block the execution.
I knew nothing about this case until columnist Peter Savodnik published a piece about it this morning. After following the internal links to the original court documents, however, one finds mind-boggling evidence not just casting doubt on Williams’s guilt but almost completely proving his innocence. The conscience reels at the thought that he could be executed at 6 p.m. Central time.
In a January court filing, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, a liberal but not radical Democrat who since then has won his party’s primary for a safely Democratic congressional seat, laid out the evidence for Williams’s actual innocence in the 1998 murder of Felisha Gayle, a reporter who was stabbed 43 times in an apparent home robbery. The evidence is compelling, bordering on overwhelming.
“The crime scene was rife with physical evidence,” Bell wrote. “The weapon — a kitchen knife — was left lodged in Ms. Gayle’s neck. Bloody shoeprints were present near a knife sheath in the kitchen, in the hallway leading to the front foyer, and on the rug near Ms. Gayle’s body. Bloody fingerprints were found along the wall. And hairs believed to belong to the perpetrator were collected from Ms. Gayle’s t-shirt, her hands, and the floor.”
Read that again: shoeprints, fingerprints, bloody knife, and hair (with DNA) all at the scene. None of them (repeat, none) matched Williams. Indeed, scientific testing completely ruled out Williams as a possible match for all of them. As Bell wrote, Williams was explicitly “excluded” as a source for all of them. In fact, three separate DNA experts excluded Williams as “the source of the male DNA on the handle of the murder weapon.”
If there is DNA on the bloody handle of a weapon that remains embedded in the victim’s body, and the DNA is absolutely not that of the man convicted of the murder, then it is almost physically impossible for the convict actually to have committed the crime. When this is combined with testing of “hairs believed to belong to the perpetrator [that] were collected from Ms. Gayle’s t-shirt, her hands, and the floor,” and none of those hairs came close to matching the convict’s, then nobody in his right mind would believe the convict actually is guilty.
The main testimony tying Williams to the murder came from an utterly unreliable source — a multiple-recidivist criminal offender for more than 30 years, all across the country, one whose story about Williams changed with almost every retelling. “Despite the inconsistencies of Cole’s story or his lengthy criminal history, use of drugs, and mental illness,” Bell wrote, “police apparently looked only for evidence to support what he told them.”
The other testimony came from Williams’s girlfriend at the time, who was a drug-using prostitute. Police “told her she was guilty of withholding evidence if she did not cooperate” with their attempts to nail Williams for the crime. The girlfriend’s story, by the way, did not match that of the recidivist criminal who said Williams had confessed the murder to him.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Again, read Bell’s entire court motion. It is utterly convincing: Williams did not commit the crime.
In sum, this isn’t a matter of stopping an execution because of mere procedural error. Marcellus Williams is innocent of that crime. The nation’s high court must not let a state kill an innocent man.