ST. LOUIS, MO. — Twenty-three years after Marcellous Williams’s sentencing to death and ahead of his scheduled execution in September of this year, St. Louis prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell is doing his best to make sure the execution does not happen, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Bell filed “a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence ” based on DNA evidence that was never evaluated.
But, according to a news report by the DPIC, months after the filing of Missouri Attorney General Anthony Bailey on July 18 of 2024, Bailey asked the State Supreme Court to block Wiliam’s evidentiary hearings set for Aug. 21.
In the aftermath of the 1998 killing of local journalist Felicia Gayle, eyewitness testimony allegedly tied Marcellous Williams to the act, according to the DPIC, leading to his arrest and finally his sentencing in 2001, despite the fact that “no physical evidence tied Mr. Williams to the crime.”
Said the DPIC, the trial court judge also refused to allow DNA testing of some of the evidence. Williams, in 2015, was “given permission” to use the DNA test on the murder weapon, leading to the contraction of the original eyewitness testimony.
This, combined with what DA Bell has defined as what he believes at the time were “additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection,” as noted by the DPIC, is why DA Bell has proceeded with these filings despite the objections of the Missouri Attorney General.
The report also details how the actions of Bailey also fall in line with what many deem the Missouri Attorney General’s office’s long history of attempting to prevent the exoneration of wrongful convictions.
Most famously in 2003, when asked by Missouri State Supreme Court Justice Laura Denvir Stith about whether a proven innocent individual should still be sentenced to death, the AG at the time, Frank Jung, stated, “‘That is correct your honor.’”
Yet, according to the DPIC report, the Attorney General’s Office’s most recent attempts have failed at least twice, in the exoneration of Kevin Strickland in 2021 and of Lamar Johnson in 2023.
Defense attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project has called upon the Attorney General to join them in their “truth-seeking process” rather than continuing to prevent the circuit court from reviewing the evidence and exonerating Williams.
