(Sept. 24) Note: This column was to no avail. The state executed Marcellus Williams anyway after the Supreme Court refused to intervene. Since then, I did find out that the knife prints belonged to lab techs who mishandled the knife, not to whoever committed the murder. The rest of what I wrote still stands.
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…. [The full column is here. My outrage on this will be everlasting.]
