Missouri Court Halts Deal to Spare Prisoner From Execution

In a suburban St. Louis courtroom on Wednesday, it appeared that Marcellus Williams would be spared execution after the local prosecutor’s office raised questions about his guilt and agreed to a prison sentence of life without parole.

Hours later, the Missouri Supreme Court halted the deal over concerns that a judge had overstepped his authority in approving the new plea and sentence.

The late-night order was the latest twist in Mr. Williams’s long-running effort to prove that he is innocent and avoid being executed. And it was the latest skirmish in a power struggle between the state attorney general and local prosecutors over who speaks for the state in wrongful conviction cases.

Mr. Williams, who is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24, was convicted of killing Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home in 1998. Mr. Williams, 55, has always maintained his innocence, but his appeals and post-conviction pleadings were unsuccessful.

In 2021, the Missouri legislature passed a law allowing a prosecutor to challenge old convictions “if he or she has information that the convicted person may be innocent or may have been erroneously convicted.” The law, a response to advances in forensic science and a growing awareness of the factors that can contribute to wrongful convictions, says that a hearing must be held on such a motion, and it permits the attorney general to participate.

The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, filed a 63-page motion to overturn Mr. Williams’s conviction, saying that the two main witnesses against him had not been credible and that the prosecutor had improperly excluded prospective jurors who were Black. Mr. Williams, the motion said, was not the source of bloody shoe prints, fingerprints and hair found at the crime scene, and a DNA analysis showed that DNA found on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, was not his.