A Pro-Life Murder – by Jonathan V. Last

Last week, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams for murder. In 2001, he was convicted of the August 11, 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle. Police and prosecutors alleged he broke into Gayle's home and stabbed her 43 times with a butcher knife.

There's just one problem. Williams almost certainly didn't.

The evidence presented against Williams at trial was based almost entirely on the testimony of two motivated witnesses. There was no evidence of his DNA on the murder weapon. And there were no fingerprints on the gun because the prosecution mishandled it.

This is David French the case:

The crime scene itself was horrific and contained abundant physical evidence. There were bloody footprints in the house, but they did not match Williams' shoes. There were bloody fingerprints, but they didn't match Williams either. Neither the DNA under Gayle's fingernails nor the hair samples were found at the crime scene.

As French says: To believe that Williams committed the murder, one must believe that he survived this terrible crime without leaving any physical evidence – and that another unidentified person showed up after the murder and left a lot of physical evidence before the police showed up.

You can't prove anything negative, but how sure are people that Williams was innocent?

In January of this year, the current St. Louis district attorney filed a motion to vacate Williams' conviction because he no longer believed in the case through his own office.

It's not every day that a prosecutor tries to overturn the conviction of one of his predecessors.

And yet the state of Missouri executed Williams anyway.

A case like this can shake your trust in the criminal justice system.

But what shocks me even more is the extent to which the Williams case illuminates the flaws in our political system.

Courts will get things wrong. Always. There is no such thing as perfect justice.

The hope is that by establishing overlapping review systems, initial errors can be found and corrected. But even appeals and reviews are not enough. Mistakes come through. Security in the system is supposed to be politics: in cases where an obvious error lasts throughout the legal process, there are political actors who have the power to intervene and prevent executions.

That's what Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens did in 2017 when he stayed Williams' execution. After stopping the execution to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Greitens appointed a commission of inquiry to re-examine the Williams case.

So far, so good.

However, it is not clear what this board actually is did. No report was issued. And in June 2023, the new governor Mike Parson quickly dissolved the investigative committee. The very next day, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date.