Marcellus Williams, photographed in prison (photo submitted).
Missouri plans to execute Marcellus Williams on Sept. 24.
If that occurs, he’d be the 100th person executed in our state since 1989, a shameful milestone, and another instance of executing a possibly innocent person.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 at least 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have been found to have been wrongly convicted. No one knows how many innocent people were among the 1,595 people executed since then, but it is highly likely some of them were innocent.
Williams has always professed his innocence in the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle Picus.
The prosecution’s case against him was based solely on notoriously unreliable, incentivized informant testimony and circumstantial evidence. No physical evidence nor eyewitnesses implicated him. The current St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney, Wesley Bell, tried to have the conviction overturned, but did not convince Judge Bruce Hinton following a hearing that there was sufficient evidence to overturn the conviction.
However, there is plenty of evidence that the original prosecution was flawed and unfair.
Death row exonerees urge Missouri AG to consider Marcellus Williams’ innocence
In a statement following Judge Hilton’s ruling, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, emphasized Bell’s office sought to vacate the conviction because “there is overwhelming evidence (his) trial was unconstitutionally unfair.”
Retired St. Louis County Assistant Prosecutor Keith Larner, who oversaw the initial 2001 prosecution of Williams, testified at the Aug. 28 hearing that on at least five occasions he handled without gloves the knife used to murder Gayle Picus. Testing conducted in mid-August found the DNA of both Larner and Ed MaGee, an investigator with the prosecution on the knife handle.
Attorneys for Williams and Bell argued this mishandling contaminated the weapon, potentially obscuring DNA evidence of the assailant and shutting a key evidentiary door which could have helped exonerate Williams.
Besides mishandling evidence, William’s attorneys contended Larner’s testimony helped prove he struck six of seven African-Americans from the original jury pool due to their race (leaving one Black member on an otherwise all-white jury), thus denying Williams a chance to be tried before a jury of his peers.
Race has always had a sordid history in the implementation of the death penalty in this country. Black people are disproportionally executed (38 of 99 in Missouri, over three times the statewide population), and while African-Americans have been about 60% of murder victims in our state over the past five decades, 78 of the 99 (78%) people executed were convicted of murdering white victims.
All murder is reprehensible, and Gayle Picus’s death was particularly gruesome as the assailant stabbed her more than 40 times. Police investigators found an abundance of physical evidence at the crime scene: fingerprints, bloodied shoe prints and hairs. But none of it implicated Williams. Ultimately, prosecutors also unethically destroyed evidence, including lifted fingerprints, before his trial attorneys had the chance to have them tested independently.
St. Louis County police had no leads for 10 months following the murder until Dr. Daniel Picus offered a $10,000 reward for evidence leading to the conviction of his wife’s murderer. That’s when Henry Cole called the police, claiming Williams confessed to the killing while the two were in jail together.
A few months later, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, Laura Asaro was arrested for sex work. She told officers she had information about Gayle Picus’s murder. But when detectives tried questioning her, she refused, admitting she was “’just trying to get out of the arrest.’” Upon learning of the reward though, Asaro then implicated Williams.
Williams’ attorneys contend the two witnesses’ stories changed throughout the investigation, often contradicting their earlier statement and the facts of the crime. Both died several years ago. Their relatives have provided statements under oath reporting the two, both with extensive prior convictions and a history of drug use, were known for providing police false information to benefit themselves.
Wrongful convictions can harm not just people inaccurately imprisoned but the general public too, as the actual perpetrator of such crimes may remain free to harm others. Almost a month before Gayle Picus’s murder, Debra McClain was stabbed over 20 times in her home in Pagedale, another St. Louis County suburb about three miles away from the Gayle Picus residence.
Dr. Mary Case, then the St. Louis County Medical Examiner, believed the murders were connected. Williams, who had a prior extensive criminal record of burglaries and robberies, was in jail when McClain was murdered, the same jail where he allegedly later confessed to Cole. No one has been charged in McClain’s killing.
Regardless of whether Judge Hinton could be convinced that there was enough evidence to conclusively prove Williams innocent, there is so much evidence pointing away from him and towards prosecutorial misconduct that Missouri executing him runs a huge risk of executing an innocent man.
Moreover, Dr. Daniel Picus, the husband of the victim, has opposed the execution.
If courts fail to intervene, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson must halt the execution a man quite likely wrongly convicted.