The wheels of justice turn slowly, especially for death row inmates who are the victims of miscarriages of justice. Marcellus Williams, who has been on Missouri’s death row since 2001 and is scheduled to be executed on September 24, knows that all too well.
Next week he will finally get a chance to prove his innocence.
Williams was convicted and sentenced for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. The 42-year-old Gayle was killed during a burglary at her home in an upscale suburb of St. Louis. The crime was particularly gruesome: she was stabbed between 10 times and 43 times with a butcher’s knife taken from her kitchen.
In May 1999, Gayle’s family announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. In response, two police informants, both with criminal records, came forward and said that Marcellus Williams was the killer.
One of them testified that Williams had made a jailhouse confession to him. The other one, who had been previously charged with soliciting, also said that Williams confessed to her.
None of this was true. But it is a familiar pattern for anyone who has studied miscarriages of justice in death cases.
It is a reminder that American criminal justice has a crippling false conviction problem and that is particularly acute in death cases where informants are used. It is long past time to begin to address that epidemic and adopt nationwide standards to govern the use of informant testimony where someone’s life hangs in the balance.
We know that informant testimony plays an outsize role in the epidemic of false convictions. As the Innocence Project notes, it is “one of the leading contributing factors of wrongful convictions nationally, playing a role in nearly one in five of the 367 DNA-based exoneration cases.”
In 2019, Pro Publica reported that “More than 140 people have been exonerated in murder cases involving jailhouse informant testimony since the U.S. Supreme Court signed off on its constitutionality in 1966.”
In that case, Hoffa v. United States, the Court ruled that the use of informant testimony is constitutional so long as any statements allegedly made by the defendant are made voluntarily. Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented.
Warren warned that using informants creates“ a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truth-finding process” in courts everywhere. He pointed out that the incentives and background of many informants should always raise suspicions.
“No conviction,” Warren wrote, “should be allowed to stand” when based solely on informant testimony. He warned that their use would lead to “pollution…[of] the waters of justice.”
Warren was right. The Williams case provides just the latest example of his wisdom.
The only two witnesses against him were promised leniency in their cases and reward money in return for their testimony. The Innocent Project reports that the investigation of the Gayle murder “had gone cold when a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him, while they were both locked up in jail, that he committed the murder. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.”
“Both of these individuals,” the Innocent Project notes, “were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.”
And, as the journalist Madiba Dennie says, “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.” None of the evidence from that crime scene implicated Williams.
As Dennie says, “The bloody footprints did not match his shoes. The fibers didn’t match his clothes. The hairs didn’t match his body.”
On top of this, 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.”
Fourteen years after Williams was convicted, the Supreme Court of Missouri ordered DNA testing on crime scene evidence, including the knife left in Ms. Gayle’s neck, her fingernail clippings, and hairs recovered from her hand. Subsequently, three experts concluded that the DNA evidence showed that Williams could not have been the source of all of the physical evidence at the crime scene.
In January of this year, Wesley Bell, the current St. Louis County prosecutor whose office prosecuted Williams, finally stepped up and acknowledged the miscarriage of justice in Williams’s case. He asked the Circuit Court of St. Louis County to vacate Williams’s conviction.
As Bell told the court:
Based on a review of the evidence and additional investigation, the Prosecuting Attorney has concluded that: (1) new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is actually innocent; (2) Mr. Williams’s trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate and present evidence to impeach Henry Cole and Laura Asaro; 3) Mr. Williams’s trial counsel was ineffective for failing to present mitigation evidence during the sentencing phase; and (4) The prosecution improperly removed qualified jurors for racial reasons during jury selection in violation of Batson v. Kentucky. . . .
Due to the evidence as it exists today as well as the ongoing investigation, the Prosecuting Attorney believes is incumbent upon this Office to begin the process of asking this Court to correct this manifest injustice by seeking a hearing on the newfound evidence and the integrity of Mr. Williams’s conviction. This request is made all the more urgent because the Attorney General’s office has requested an execution date for Mr. Williams.
One would have thought that such an unusual admission of error by a prosecutor whose office secured the initial conviction would be enough to lead to Williams’s release. But not in Missouri.
There, the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, who has a long and bizarre record of opposing the release of people from his state’s prisons even after they have been proven innocent, did the same in the Williams case. It took six months for the Missouri Supreme Court to deny Bailey’s request to block an evidentiary hearing now scheduled for August 21, where the circuit court will hear the overwhelming evidence of Williams’s innocence.
One can only hope that Marcellus Williams’s nightmare will be ended then. But whatever happens next week, it is time to undertake reforms to stop the epidemic of false convictions brought about by the reliance on informant testimony.
The Innocence Project proposes a set of long overdue changes that should be the basis of that reform effort. They include “Pretrial ‘reliability’ hearings to weigh the credibility of jailhouse informants. Robust tracking systems detailing benefits conferred upon informants. Full disclosure to defendants regarding informant incentives and background. Clear jury instructions explaining the inherent unreliability of jailhouse witnesses. Expert testimony on typical informant practices and jail culture.”
We owe it to Williams and all defendants who, in the future, are prosecuted for capital crimes based on informant testimony to push for the adoption of those proposals in every death penalty state. Only that way can we begin to escape what Warren called “the quicksand” upon which those prosecutions rest.