Former reporter and community-volunteer Felicia Gayle was the victim of a brutal murder in 1998, stabbed dozens of times in her home in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. This produced, to put it delicately, an abundance of physical evidence. But none of it can be traced to Marcellus Williams—the innocent man scheduled to be executed next month for Felicia Gayle’s death.
The bloody footprints did not match his shoes. The fibers didn’t match his clothes. The hairs didn’t match his body. And DNA evidence never-before-considered by a court now confirms that his DNA did not match that which was left on the murder weapon.
The only link to Marcellus was the word of two people who were known to lie for personal gain, and to whom detectives had offered reward money and leniency in their own criminal cases if they helped obtain a conviction in Gayle’s murder case. Their testimony was inconsistent with the crime scene evidence, like claiming Marcellus wore gloves so he wouldn’t need to worry about fingerprints, when there were in fact someone else’s bloody fingerprints in the home. Odds nevertheless stacked up against Marcellus. At trial, the prosecutor purposefully excluded Black people from the jury, using peremptory strikes against six of seven Black prospective jurors. The fate of a Black man accused of killing a white woman was thus left up to a jury composed of 11 white people and one Black person.
Despite the glaring weaknesses of the case against him, Marcellus was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001. He has spent decades behind bars maintaining his innocence while awaiting execution for a crime he did not commit.
Wesley Bell, a Democrat five years into his term as St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney (who, separately, defeated Rep. Cori Bush (MO-1) in a Democratic primary last night), is finally trying to end this injustice before it’s too late. His office filed a motion in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County earlier this year to vacate Marcellus’s conviction and death sentence, writing “new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is actually innocent.”
That motion was opposed by none other than Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri. You may recognize his name because he ran to the Supreme Court last month and asked the justices for permission to file a complaint against New York, aiming to block the state from sentencing Donald Trump for his 34 felony convictions until after the election. Bailey had no semblance of standing, but a great deal of audacity.
The great sense of grievance and concern about unfairness that Bailey extended to Trump was nowhere to be found in the case of Marcellus Williams. Bailey filed his own motion in the St. Louis County Circuit Court asking it to dismiss the prosecutor’s motion to vacate Marcellus’s conviction. Bailey argued that we’ve been through this before, characterizing Bell’s concerns as a “mere attempt to repackage claims already denied.” He also told the Associated Press last week that the legal system “should respect and defer to the finality of the jury’s determination.”
Apparently, for Bailey, this manifestly unjust determination warrants more deference than the verdict against Trump. And even more perversely, U.S. Supreme Court precedent supports the idea that the last word is more important than an innocent man’s life: in Herrera v. Collins (1992), the Court held 6-3 that an actual innocence claim did not entitle someone on death row to federal habeas relief. Mercifully, the state supreme court denied Bailey’s request; Marcellus will be able to present evidence of his innocence at a hearing in two weeks.
This is at least the third time in roughly as many weeks that Bailey has put himself on the opposing side of people seeking relief in actual innocence cases. Sandra Hemme was incarcerated in Missouri for decades, and a judge ruled in June that there was “clear and convincing evidence” of her “actual innocence.” Yet Andrew Bailey fought her release anyway, with his office even calling the prison warden and telling prison officials not to release her. Sandra Hemme was finally released from prison on July 19—after the judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt—having served 43 years for a murder she did not commit.
Christopher Dunn was ordered to be released on July 22 after spending 34 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. But Andrew Bailey filed an emergency stay on the judge’s order, which the state supreme court granted right as Dunn was preparing to walk out of the prison doors. At an emergency hearing, a judge threatened to hold the warden in contempt if Dunn wasn’t released. Last week, Dunn was finally freed.
Image of an empty prison cell. Not pictured: Andrew Bailey wondering why there aren’t innocent people in it.
Bailey has claimed that he is trying to “honor the victims” and ensure that the criminal legal system has “a component of finality.” Meanwhile, all he is doing is creating more victims. (Bailey is also currently facing a primary challenge from the right, and has an extra incentive to present himself as “tough on crime.”) “Finality” has no inherent value to the legal system or the people that system is supposed to serve; it’s valuable insofar as it produces confidence and trust in the legal system and its results. And there is no reason to trust a system that permits people like Bailey to zealously incarcerate innocent people.
