Missouri death row inmate expected to be resentenced to life without parole under new agreement

(CNN) — Missouri death row inmate Marcellus Williams is expected to be resentenced to life without parole under a consent judgment reached Wednesday, the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office announced, just over a month before he was scheduled to be put to death for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a killing he denies committing.

The judgment dictates Williams enter an Alford plea, the office said in a news release, which allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while recognizing it is not in their interest to go to trial.

Williams is expected to enter the Alford plea of guilty to a charge of first-degree murder in Gayle’s death on Thursday, a spokesperson for the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said. The office had earlier issued a statement saying Williams entered the plea Wednesday.

The judgment also vacates Williams’ death sentence, which was expected to be carried out on September 24, the release said.

“Under this agreement and in accordance with Missouri law, we anticipate Williams will be sentenced by the court to a term of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” the release said, adding Williams’ sentencing is scheduled for Thursday morning.

In a separate statement, Williams’ attorney reiterated her client’s innocence, saying “nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact.”

“By agreeing to an Alford plea, the parties will bring a measure of finality to Felicia Gayle’s family,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell said, “while ensuring that Mr. Williams will remain alive as we continue to pursue new evidence to prove, once and for all, that he is innocent.”

A hearing had been scheduled to take place Wednesday, when lawyers from the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office were expected to present evidence in support of its motion to vacate Williams’ conviction – the results of DNA testing that three experts had determined excluded Williams as the person who wielded the knife used to kill Gayle.

The office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey had opposed that motion – and it similarly opposed Wednesday’s judgment, saying in a statement the prosecutor’s claim was wrong.

A “new round of DNA testing” proved an earlier assertion by the attorney general’s office, the release said, that the knife had “been handled by many actors” since its discovery – contesting prosecutors’ claim that the evidence proved Williams did not commit Gayle’s killing since the DNA would match the perpetrator.

“This was proven correct by the defense’s own DNA evidence, which proved an investigator handled the knife at trial without wearing gloves,” the office said, adding that the other evidence jurors relied on to convict Williams “remains intact.”

“Throughout all the legal games, the defense created a false narrative of innocence in order to get a convicted murderer off of death row and fulfill their political ends. Because of the defense’s failure to do their due diligence by testing the evidence that supposedly proved their point, the victims have been forced to relive their horrific loss for the last six years,” Bailey said. “The victims in this case deserve better. Missourians deserve better.”

Williams, 55, has always maintained his innocence in the fatal stabbing of Gayle, a one-time reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2017, the newspaper’s editorial board said she was a “kind and gentle woman who went out of her way to do nice things for people.” She had left the paper six years before her death to volunteer full-time, the board wrote.

CNN reached out to Daniel Picus, Gayle’s widower, for comment. The judgment says it was reached after a conference Wednesday in which a representative of Gayle’s family “expressed to the Court the family’s desire that the death penalty not be carried out in this case, as well as the family’s desire for finality.”

Williams’ attorneys and the motion by the office of St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell contended the inmate’s innocence claim was bolstered because he cannot be tied to other pieces of forensic evidence from the crime scene.

“Nothing puts Marcellus Williams at the crime scene,” Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, told CNN. “No one saw him there, none of the physical evidence puts him there … It was not him who wielded the knife. We already had this very unreliable evidence in the first place; now you tack on the DNA evidence and his innocence becomes even clearer.”

With his execution looming, Williams’ claim he was wrongfully convicted raised the specter that a potentially innocent person could be put to death, an inherent risk of capital punishment. Indeed, at least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have thereafter been exonerated, four of them in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Bell – who earlier this month defeated US Rep. Cori Bush in the Democratic primary for her seat – had filed a motion to vacate the inmate’s conviction and death sentence in January, the result of an independent review by the office’s Conviction and Incident Review Unit, Rojo Bushnell said. While the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office handled the 2001 trial against Williams, Bell did not take office until 2018.

The attorney general’s office fought the motion and last month sought to prevent the St. Louis County Circuit Court from holding Wednesday’s hearing and reviewing the evidence, arguing the state Supreme Court – which set Williams’ execution date in June – had already rejected the claims Bell’s office intended to make. That effort, however, was unsuccessful: The Missouri Supreme Court denied the request by Bailey, a Republican.

In its own filing seeking the dismissal of the prosecutor’s motion, Bailey’s office argued only the state Supreme Court has the authority to stay Williams’ execution.

But the prosecutor’s motion says the DNA evidence now in question “has never been considered by a court.”

“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”

Williams was convicted mainly on the testimony of two unreliable informants, the motion claims, calling them “known liars” who faced their own legal troubles and were “incentivized” by a $10,000 reward offered by Gayle’s family.

Williams had been scheduled for execution in 2017, but former Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, stayed the execution and appointed a five-person board to review the new evidence in the case, including the DNA. Greitens, however, resigned about a year later, and last year GOP Gov. Mike Parson issued an executive order dissolving the board and lifting the stay, saying in a statement the delay had deferred justice and left Gayle’s family “in limbo.” A day later, Attorney General Bailey filed a motion with the state Supreme Court to set Williams’ execution date.

In a 2017 op-ed for the Post-Dispatch, Picus’ wife, Laura Friedman, said he and Gayle’s family had been victimized not only by her murder, but “by a justice system so excruciatingly slow that an end is elusive nearly two decades after the crime and now, by a media frenzy.”

“In addition, if the convicted killer is innocent, as some claim, that means there is a murderer yet to be apprehended – a scenario too terrifying to contemplate - and almost surely too late to seek or find justice,” Friedman wrote. “This is the necessary, but unspoken, corollary and the first thought of family members when a convicted killer’s innocence is resolutely asserted.”

The murder of Felicia Gayle

Gayle, 42, was killed in her home in the St. Louis suburb of University City on August 11, 1998, having been stabbed 43 times with a kitchen knife, the prosecutor’s motion and other court records state.

At the scene, investigators found hair, footprints and fingerprints that belonged to neither Gayle nor her husband. Missing from the home was Picus’ laptop and Gayle’s purse with several personal items.

But the investigation struggled, the motion says. In hopes of encouraging someone to come forward with information, Gayle’s family offered a $10,000 reward, which the motion says was “emphasized” in the “significant television and newspaper coverage of the case.”

The first informant emerged in June 1999, the motion says: Henry Cole called police and told them he’d been in prison with Williams, who was behind bars for an armed robbery committed the year prior. Cole – who acknowledged he came forward for the reward and struggled with drug addiction and mental illness, the motion says – alleged Williams confessed to Gayle’s murder, providing details of the crime he claimed Williams shared.

But Cole’s statements were inconsistent and at times contradicted evidence, the prosecuting attorney’s office says in its motion. Still, as investigators sought to corroborate his account, they turned to Williams’ former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, whom Cole had told them Williams had seen the day of the killing.

The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.

Williams had blood on his shirt, scratches on his neck and a computer in his car, she said, according to the prosecutor’s motion. Williams later confessed to Gayle’s killing, she told investigators, according to the motion, which similarly notes inconsistencies between Asaro’s statements and Cole’s, as well as contradictions with known evidence in the case.

The next day, police seized Williams’ car and found inside a ruler from the Post-Dispatch, though the motion says it was never reported among Gayle’s missing belongings. Police did locate Picus’ missing laptop at the home of a man named Glenn Roberts, who said he’d received it from Williams.

DNA evidence has not previously been reviewed by a court

The prosecuting attorney’s motion contends Williams’ conviction “rested primarily” on Asaro’s and Cole’s testimony, because none of the evidence from the scene could be linked to Williams: The bloody footprints were not his, nor was the hair, the motion says. The fingerprints were never linked to Williams, either.

And though Picus’ laptop was recovered, the prosecuting attorney’s office says Roberts told investigators Williams said he’d gotten it from Asaro – a claim Roberts reiterated in an affidavit signed in 2020. Jurors at trial never heard this assertion, which the prosecutor’s motion says illustrates “the person with the most direct connection to the crime” was “Laura Asaro, and not Marcellus Williams.”

The DNA evidence now at the center of Williams’ innocence claim was not available at his trial. The state Supreme Court ordered the evidence tested in 2015, but two years later – after the testing had been done – it declined to halt the inmate’s execution without a hearing.

The prosecutor’s motion cites three DNA experts who determined the results exclude Williams as the source of male DNA found on the knife. “When you’re stabbing, DNA transfers because of restriction and force. If you’re stabbing anyone, you have a good chance of transferring your DNA because of that force,” one of those experts previously told CNN.

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