Missouri death row inmate agrees to new plea in deal that calls for a life sentence without parole

CLAYTON, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri death row inmate on Wednesday dropped his innocence claim and entered a new no-contest plea in an agreement that calls for a revised sentence of life in prison without parole.

But the Missouri Attorney General’s Office opposes the new consent judgment and will appeal in an effort to move ahead with the scheduled Sept. 24 execution of Marcellus Williams.

The complicated turn of events happened on the day that St. Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hinton was supposed to oversee a hearing requested by Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell aimed at vacating Williams’ first-degree murder conviction in the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle. Bell had cited DNA testing unavailable at the time of the crime that found someone else’s DNA — but not that of Williams — on the murder weapon.

After a lengthy delay with lawyers meeting behind closed doors, Matthew Jacober, a special prosecutor for the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, announced that even newer DNA testing released on Monday found contamination due to handling of the weapon by a former assistant prosecutor and investigator. The contaminated evidence made it impossible to show that someone else may have been the killer.

“The murder weapon was handled without proper procedures in place,” Jacober said. The improper handling occurred several years before Bell took office.

Williams agreed to an Alford plea, which is not an admission of guilt but acknowledges that evidence is sufficient to convict him. Under an agreement reached with St. Louis County prosecutors, Williams entered that plea on Wednesday. He’ll be sentenced Thursday — the agreement calls for life in prison without parole. Williams also agreed not to appeal.

“Marcellus Williams is an innocent man, and nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact,” Williams’ attorney, Tricia Bushnell, said in a statement. She noted that Gayle’s family supports setting aside the death penalty, and the plea “brings a measure of finality” to the family.

But the plea doesn’t guarantee Williams won’t be executed. Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey is appealing to the Missouri Supreme Court as he seeks to move ahead with the execution, arguing that a circuit court doesn’t have authority to overrule the state Supreme Court that set the execution date.

“Throughout all the legal games, the defense created a false narrative of innocence in order to get a convicted murderer off of death row and fulfill their political ends,” Bailey said in a 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.”

Williams, 55, was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay after DNA testing unavailable at the time of the killing showed that DNA on the knife matched someone else, not Williams.

That evidence prompted Bell to reexamine the case.

“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” Bell’s motion stated.

Williams, who is Black, was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury consisting of 11 white people and one Black person.

A 2021 Missouri law allows prosecuting attorneys to file a motion seeking to vacate a conviction they believe was unjust. The law has resulted in exonerations of three men who spent decades in prison, including Christopher Dunn last month.

The Missouri Supreme Court set the September execution date on June 4, hours after it ruled that Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, was within his rights when he dissolved a board of inquiry convened by Greitens after he stopped the 2017 execution.

The inquiry board, consisting of five retired judges, never issued a ruling or reached a conclusion on whether the new DNA evidence exonerated Williams. Parson dissolved the board in June 2023, saying it was time to “move forward.”

In addition to Dunn, who spent 34 years behind bars for the death of a 15-year-old St. Louis boy, the Missouri law allowing prosecutors to challenge convictions led to freedom for two other men — Kevin Strickland and Lamar Johnson. Bailey was not attorney general when Strickland’s case went to a hearing, but his office opposed vacating the convictions of Dunn and Johnson.

Bailey also opposed efforts to overturn the conviction of Sandra Hemme, who spent 43 years in prison for murder, though that case was adjudicated through appeals, not a prosecutor’s motion. A judge ruled in June that Hemme should be freed. Bailey filed multiple appeals to try and keep her behind bars, but Hemme was released in July.

Strickland was freed in 2021 after serving more than 40 years for three killings in Kansas City after a judge ruled he had been wrongfully convicted in 1979. In 2023, a St. Louis judge overturned Johnson’s conviction. He served nearly 28 years for a killing he always said he didn’t commit.

Williams was the first death row inmate whose innocence claim went before a judge since passage of the 2021 law. Several other people who have been exonerated of crimes were in the courtroom to support him, including another former death row inmate. Joseph Amrine spent 17 years on death row before he was freed in 2003 after the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that no credible evidence linked him to the killing of another inmate.

Prosecutors at Williams’ trial said he broke into Gayle’s suburban St. Louis home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower, and found a large butcher knife. When Gayle came downstairs, she was stabbed 43 times. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen. Gayle, who was white, was a social worker who previously worked as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the laptop in the car and that Williams sold it a day or two later.

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a St. Louis cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors Williams confessed to the killing and offered details about it.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted felons out for a $10,000 reward.