Update: The Missouri Supreme Court has halted the Marcellus Williams case and ordered a judge to hold a new hearing. Read more here.
ST. LOUIS COUNTY — A man facing his execution next month for the 1998 murder of a former Post-Dispatch reporter has agreed to a deal with prosecutors to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams was in court on Wednesday as part of a hearing to determine if he was innocent of the crime. Instead, lawyers made the surprise announcement that Williams had agreed to plead no contest to the first-degree murder charge.
Attorneys said the DNA evidence that some thought exonerated Williams could have been contaminated.
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The hearing came about five weeks before Williams’ scheduled execution date for the murder of Lisha Gayle, who was stabbed 43 times in her suburban home in August 1998. He was convicted of the killing in a 2001 trial.
On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Hilton accepted and vacated Williams’ original conviction. Williams then entered an Alford plea to the first-degree murder charge, which means he maintains his innocence but agrees to forgo a trial and accept a recommended sentence — in this case, life in prison without parole.
He is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday morning.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office filed with the state Supreme Court several hours after the announced deal asking the court to block it.
In January, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s office filed to vacate Williams’ conviction, arguing he was innocent.
His lawyers said on Wednesday that Williams still maintains his innocence.
“Marcellus Williams is an innocent man, and nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact,” said Williams’ attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell. “By agreeing to an Alford plea, the parties will bring a measure of finality to Felicia Gayle’s family, while ensuring that Mr. Williams will remain alive as we continue to pursue new evidence to prove, once and for all, that he is innocent.”
Williams appeared in court wearing eyeglasses, a white Taqiyah — a cap for Muslim men — and a light grey thobe, a long robe Muslim men often wear. He entered the plea after both sides made their arguments and Hilton made sure Williams understood what he was agreeing to.
Dozens of people packed Hilton’s courtroom and waited for hours as attorneys met privately to reach an agreement after reviewing the latest round of DNA testing, which Williams’ lawyers paid for.
The testing showed that one of the DNA samples on the murder weapon was consistent with that of chief investigator Edward Magee, who worked on the original trial. The other profile DNA did not belong to Williams, and forensics could not exclude the case’s original prosecutor Keith Larner from being a possible match.
There is no DNA evidence linking Williams to the crime.
“DNA evidence developed did not fully support our initial conclusion,” said Matthew Jacober, special counsel for the prosecutor’s office. “Additional investigating and testing demonstrated that the evidence was not handled properly at the time of his conviction. As a result, DNA was likely removed and added between 1998 and 2001.”
Wednesday’s consent agreement states that Williams’ rights were violated because the evidence was mishandled.
Hilton then vacated Williams’ original conviction, and Williams entered the Alford plea.
But lawyers for the attorney general’s office argued the circuit court does not have the authority to vacate a previous criminal conviction and its sentence.
“When a criminal court sentences someone like Mr. Williams, it exhausts its authority,” attorney Andrew Clarke argued in court on behalf of Bailey’s office. “This court does not have authority to first enter the consent judgment and then to use the consent judgment to unravel the criminal case.”
Clarke noted the filing by Bell’s office, which claimed Williams was innocent.
“The prosecuting attorney cannot raise a claim on behalf of Mr. Williams and then put his prosecutor hat on and concede,” Clarke argued.
Clarke declined to speak with the media after the hearing.
Just before 5 p.m. Wednesday, Bailey’s office filed a writ with the Missouri Supreme Court requesting an emergency stay of all proceedings.
Hilton, the writ said, “did not hear any evidence or find any basis to set aside Williams’ convictions other than the purported consent of the parties.”
And Bailey, who represented the state, did not agree to the deal, he said in the writ.
Hilton said he hoped the Missouri Supreme Court would expedite its decision. Williams, attorneys said, is still set to be executed on Sept. 24.
Jacober said Gayle’s family does not want Williams executed.
Her husband, Daniel Picus, is expected to address the court Thursday morning when Hilton sentences Williams to life in prison.
Outside the courthouse after the hearing, several anti-death penalty protesters with signs gathered as Nimrod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP, held a press conference.
He said the fact that Williams will not be executed is a win for both Williams and the state of Missouri.
“But it is a loss to the system — our judicial system and our democracy — because if we can’t believe in and depend on the integrity of the prosecutors in the case, the police in the case and our court system, then we have a problem with that entire branch of democracy,” he said.
He said the community had to continue to fight for justice, not just for Williams, but for “so many more.”
“The reason that we are here today … is that Andrew Bailey has refused to not only operate up under the court orders but to follow the precedent that’s been issued,” he said. “In Christopher Dunn’s case, he made the same tired arguments he made today.”
Dunn, 52, was found innocent by a judge last month in a 1990 St. Louis murder for which he was serving a life sentence. Dunn in late July was released from prison after nearly 34 years.
In a statement after Williams’ hearing, Bailey accused Williams’ legal defense of creating a false narrative of innocence.
“No innocent man is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison unless he knows he is guilty,” Bailey said in the statement.
“Because of the defense’s failure to do their due diligence by testing the evidence that supposedly proved their point, the victims have been forced to relive their horrific loss for the last six years,” he said.