Did Missouri execute an innocent man? Marcellus Williams’s furious supporters decry ‘injustice system’
’How can you execute a man when there is reasonable doubt?’ Obie Alexander, who spent nearly two decades in prison on a wrongful murder conviction, toldThe Independent
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When the state of Missouri put Marcellus Williams to death on Tuesday night, it did so over the strenuous objections of the same prosecutor’s office that tried him for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, along with Williams’ legal team, had moved, unsuccessfully, to have the 55-year-old’s conviction vacated based on new information they said raised questions about his identification as Gayle’s killer. At 6:01 p.m. local time, Williams was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital while his son, an up-and-coming prizefighter named Marcellus Jr., watched from the witness gallery. Nine minutes later, Williams was pronounced dead.
“There was reasonable doubt,” Obie Anthony, a staunch Williams supporter who spent nearly two decades in prison on a wrongful murder conviction, told The Independent. “How can you execute a man when there is reasonable doubt?”
No one was there from Gayle’s family, who continued to believe in Williams’s guilt up until the very end but had been pushing for his sentence to be commuted to life without parole.
In a statement issued shortly before Williams was executed, his attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said, “We must all question any system that would allow this to occur. The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost. Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue.”
Afterward, Bell — who is presently running for Congress as a Democrat — took to social media with a statement of his own, writing, “Marcellus Williams should be alive today. There were multiple points in the timeline that decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty activist portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the 1995 film Dead Man Walking, said Williams’s execution called into question “the legitimacy of the entire legal process.” Rep. Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, called Williams’ execution a “depravity.” And the NAACP said Williams had been “lynched,” placing the blame directly at the feet of Missouri Gov. Michael Parson, a self-described “pro-life” Republican.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Gayle’s former husband, Daniel, a radiologist who has since remarried, declined to comment. Marcellus Williams Jr. was unable to be reached.
The top concern Americans have about the death penalty, studies have shown, is the possibility of executing an innocent person, according to attorney Justin Brooks, a professor at University of San Diego School of Law and the founder of The California Innocence Project.
“Every time an innocent person is freed from death row, that concern is amplified,” Brooks told The Independent. “Now that 200 innocent people have been freed from death row, we can longer pretend that innocent people are not sentenced to death, nor that it has only happened a few times.”
Williams was set to be executed in January 2015 but was granted a last-minute reprieve by then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, for more DNA testing to be performed. In August 2017, he was hours away from being put to death when Greitens ordered the execution stayed after new testing techniques unavailable at the time of Gayle’s killing determined that DNA on the handle of the murder weapon could not have come from Williams. His execution on Tuesday generated global outrage largely because Parson cravenly pushed for Williams to die in the face of serious concerns about his guilt, Brooks went on.
“And of course, it is devastating to those of us in the innocence community because this time, no one was able to save him,” he said.
Williams’ execution had one of his fiercest supporters, an exoneree who himself spent nearly two decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, wrestling on Wednesday with what he described as feelings of “profound, deep pain.”
At the age of 19, Obie Anthony was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit. In 2011, after 17 years behind bars — which followed some 18 months in the LA County lockup — Anthony was exonerated thanks to new evidence uncovered by a team of Innocence Project lawyers. He later founded Exonerated Nation, a nonprofit that helps other exonerees find their footing upon release.
Today, Anthony, a Missouri native, splits his time between California and the St. Louis area, where he emerged in recent years as a firm believer in Williams’ innocence.
By executing Williams, “first and foremost, our presumption of innocence has been removed from the court,” Anthony told The Independent.
“Even with evidence of [Williams’] innocence, that didn’t even matter,” he said, voice shifting from outrage to deep sorrow and back again. “... Justice has been cuffed and put behind the bench. Reasonable doubt no longer matters.”
Putting Williams to death, Anthony went on, constituted “a perversion,” and, “a tragedy in all forms.” The justice system, in Williams’ case, contorted itself into “an injustice system,” according to Anthony.
“We know this is not justice,” he said. “The family members said this is not justice. The prosecutor said this is not justice. Over a million people [who signed a petition against Williams’ execution] said this is not justice… How can people stand for this?”