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#Post#: 661--------------------------------------------------
~ Marcellus Williams, 24Sep24, (MO) ~
By: BuzzC Date: September 8, 2024, 1:43 am
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Marcellus Williams' fate in hands of Missouri judge, with less
than a month before execution--
August 29th, 2024
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Without the ability to definitively link DNA found on the murder
weapon to an alternate suspect, attorneys for Marcellus Williams
relied on raising questions about the original conviction.
Williams is scheduled to be executed on September 24.
The fate of Marcellus Williams — who is set to be executed in
less than a month — now rests with a St. Louis County circuit
judge.
Judge Bruce Hilton took six hours of testimony on Wednesday in a
hearing on a motion to throw out Williams’ conviction. He is
under a court order to rule on the motion by Sept. 13.
“This is a difficult procedure for everyone,” Hilton said. “It
is going to be a decision that I will weigh heavily.”
Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of former
St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle and is scheduled
to be executed Sept. 24. He has always maintained his innocence.
Earlier this year, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell wrote
that he no longer had confidence in the conviction and asked for
it to be vacated.
No forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA had ever
tied Williams to the crime, though detectives believed the
killer may have worn gloves. Police did find some of Gayle’s
belongings in Williams’ car. He also pawned a laptop belonging
to her husband.
Bell initially focused on three experts who said unknown DNA
found on the handle of the knife used as the murder weapon could
not be from Williams. But further testing proved that those
samples were consistent with the profile of Ed Magee, an
investigator in the prosecutor’s office at the time. The review
also found that Keith Larner, a veteran prosecutor who handled
the Williams case in 2001, could not be excluded as a
contributor.
While those findings meant the evidence had been contaminated,
it also no longer pointed to an unknown killer. That
contamination of the possible evidence became a key focus of
arguments from prosecutors and attorneys for Williams.
Larner, the prosecutor, admitted in court that he handled the
knife at least five times without gloves as he was showing it to
witnesses before the original trial. He said it was standard for
prosecutors at the time to handle murder weapons without gloves
at trial.
“It was worthless in my view at that time,” Larner said of the
knife. “I knew that I wanted no more testing. I assumed the lab
did the most thorough job, I didn’t even know of any other
[testing] that could be done.”
In an update to its motion, Bell’s office called the mishandling
of the knife a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence.” Michael
Spillane, with the attorney general’s office, disagreed sharply
with that characterization.
Back at the time of the trial in 2001, Spillane said, no one
knew that simply touching an item could leave enough DNA to be
tested.
“I don’t like him being accused of sloppy evidence protocols
because he didn’t do anything wrong,” Spillane said of Larner,
who retired in 2014 after more than 30 years with the county
prosecutor’s office.
Bell’s office and attorneys for Williams also used the hearing
to raise their ongoing concerns about the two main witnesses in
the case. Williams was convicted largely based on the testimony
of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant
named Henry Cole. Both Cole and Asaro had criminal backgrounds,
and Cole had documented mental health issues. Family members
swore in affidavits that he often made things up, and he asked
about reward money before providing information to police.
State law governing the motion to vacate process says a judge
must grant the motion when there is “clear and convincing
evidence” of a person’s innocence, or an error at the original
trial that undermines confidence in a judgment.
Jonathan Potts, an attorney for Williams, said that standard was
clearly met on Wednesday.
“Marcellus Williams didn’t receive the defense he deserved,” he
said. “Prosecutors deliberately tainted the evidence.
Prosecutors deliberately ensured that he was not judged by a
jury of his peers.”
Williams, Potts said, “will not wake up on Sept. 25 unless this
court acts.”
As he has throughout this case, Spillane told the judge the
issue came down to the rule of law.
“I don’t think dragging this out year after year on claims that
are legally meritless does anything,” he said.
Gayle’s family has said it does not support Williams’ execution
and is seeking finality in the case. In a letter submitted to
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Aug. 14, Laura Friedman, the wife
of Gayle’s then-husband Daniel Picus, wrote that the family was
“exasperated and exhausted” by the ongoing court fight, saying
it was “forcing the family to relive the worst days of their
lives and denying them the closure they deserve.”
Prosecutors and attorneys for Williams previously reached a deal
that would have seen him plead no contest to Gayle’s murder in
exchange for a sentence of life in prison. Hilton accepted the
offer at first but withdrew it after the Missouri Supreme Court
halted it temporarily and scheduled Wednesday’s hearing.
Friedman and Picus were in court on Wednesday to observe the
proceedings. They declined to comment to the media.
8)
#Post#: 665--------------------------------------------------
Re: ~ Marcellus Williams, 24Sep24, (MO) ~
By: BuzzC Date: September 24, 2024, 10:16 pm
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Marcellus Williams Executed After U.S. Supreme Court Declines to
Intervene--
Tuesday, September 24th, 2024
Marcellus Williams died by lethal injection on Sept. 24 at 6
p.m. CT. for the 1998 stabbing death of newspaper reporter
Felicia Gayle.
Felicia, a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found
brutally murdered inside her gated community home in University
City, Mo., on Aug. 11, 1998. Investigators later determined that
Gayle had been stabbed at least 43 times, dying from 16 wounds
to her head, neck, chest and abdomen.
A jury of 11 White people and 1 Black person convicted Williams
in 2001 of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, armed
criminal action, and robbery.
Williams was the third Missouri inmate executed this year.
8)
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