Marcellus Williams was convicted 16 years ago for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a former reporter in St. Louis, Missouri. She had been stabbed dozens of times and left to die with the murder weapon, a knife, still embedded in her.
A jury of 12 people looked at the evidence, listened to witnesses and decided beyond a reasonable doubt that Williams was guilty. The problem is that the system may have failed in several significant ways.
I don’t know yet if he’s guilty or innocent. There’s simply not sufficient time to review it all and come to an opinion, but it’s time to take time. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who just hours before Williams’ scheduled execution on Tuesday granted a stay and empaneled a “board of inquiry” to look into the case, should be congratulated on taking a common sense, “let’s be certain” approach to a difficult issue.
We also know two facts that should lead to an immediate stay of execution and a complete review of the case. Gayle was savagely stabbed to death with a knife that was left in her chest and Williams’ DNA was simply not on that knife.
The prosecutors of the state of Missouri, in opposing a stay of Williams’ execution, made a mistake. We should simply pause to make sure we do it right, particularly when there is compelling evidence that Williams may be factually innocent. We’ve known for decades that DNA evidence is very precise and, although not completely infallible, can by its existence damn a person or exonerate one.
That second fact, one of “non-evidence” is as compelling as if his fingerprint was on the knife. A brief lesson in DNA evidence: We leave it everywhere. We certainly leave it during the violent act of stabbing somebody. Its nonexistence should be very troubling for a prosecutor, and for any of us who take the time to think what it may mean.
At Williams’ trial, while St. Louis is almost 50% black, only one black juror was seated, when six other potential jurors of color were all struck by the prosecution. Williams is black, while the woman he stood accused of killing was white. Such strikes of jurors by the prosecution are supposed to be subject to strict scrutiny, to guard against the existing, undeniable and systemwide prejudice of striking blacks from trials of blacks.
In Rose v. Mitchell in 1979, the Supreme Court acknowledged the presence of racial and other forms of discrimination in the criminal justice system, and in 1989, in Batson v. Kentucky, the court held that “the Equal Protection Clause forbids the prosecutor to challenge potential jurors solely on account of their race or on the assumption that black jurors as a group will be unable impartially to consider the state’s case against a black defendant.”
Unfortunately, horrific prejudice still exists in the death penalty system, with blacks making up 42% of death row while only 13% of the population, and blacks being three times more likely to be executed than whites. We have a long way to go before we can consider this system fixed enough that we don’t even need to take time to review DNA evidence.
In these times of heightened social and racial frustrations, where we have recently shone a light on the underbelly of the prejudices and biases that unquestionably still exist within us, it is impossible for us to rely on a criminal justice system that refuses to even take a breath and review evidence that may exonerate an innocent man unjustly convicted and unjustly incarcerated.
Innocence projects around the country have saved hundreds of inmates, some of them serving on death row, by presenting new evidence that has definitively proven them not guilty. Think of how many innocent people we have executed, when the number should be zero. We should all be shocked and appalled by this. Since we know innocent people sometimes get convicted based upon bad identifications, faulty witnesses, improper police activities, or incompetent counsel, can’t we at least agree to avoid killing somebody when we know we have an imperfect system?
I’ve learned that for the families of homicide victims, after an execution, rather than feeling the long sought sense of relief they expected, very often they are left, instead, with unresolved emptiness. In this case, an editorial in her former newspaper memorialized Gayle and suggested that she would not have favored executing Williams.
If Williams is deemed guilty after all the evidence is fully examined, there will be plenty of time to carry out the death penalty. But if he’s innocent, we should not want the epilogue of this story to be that he was unjustly executed.