Missouri Supreme Court hears arguments in attempt to block execution of death row inmate Marcellus Williams

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On Monday, one day before his execution, the Missouri Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case of Marcellus Williams, who has long maintained his innocence.

On Saturday, Williams' attorneys and St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell filed a joint brief asking the state Supreme Court to remand the case to a lower court for a “more comprehensive hearing” on Bell's January motion to overturn Williams' 2001 conviction and sentence.

Williams, 55, was convicted of killing Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was found stabbed to death in her home in 1998.

The attorneys asked the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn the district court's decision and remand the case for a new hearing, which would give both sides sufficient time to present evidence and the court enough time to carefully review the case.

The brief explains that the St. Louis County District Court failed to admit newly discovered evidence in the case that contradicted the prosecutor's and the State's representations at trial and in Williams' previous appeals. The brief also argues that the court erred in holding that the prosecutor's tampering with DNA evidence did not violate Williams' fair trial rights and expresses concern that the Attorney General's efforts to prevent a retrial of Williams' conviction have prejudiced the District Court proceedings.

The hearing is scheduled for Monday at 9 a.m. CT. Williams' execution is scheduled for Tuesday at 6 p.m. CT, unless the court or Governor Michael Parson intervenes.

Earlier this week, Williams' lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution.

In that motion, Williams' lawyers argued that he was denied his right to due process during the years-long legal battle to save his life.

They also pointed out that former Governor Eric Greitens had previously stayed Williams' execution indefinitely and set up a commission to investigate his case and decide whether he should be granted clemency.

“The panel investigated Williams' case for the next six years – until Governor Michael Parson abruptly ended the proceedings,” the lawyers wrote.

When Parson took office, he dissolved the board and revoked Williams' stay of execution, the petition says. Parson's decision denied Williams his right to due process, Williams' lawyers argued.

“The Governor's actions violated Williams' constitutional rights and required the Court's attention with extraordinary urgency,” the court documents say.

The St. Louis district attorney's office, which handled Williams' original trial, argued in a January motion that DNA testing of the murder weapon could rule out Williams as Gayle's killer. But that argument fell apart last month in the face of new DNA testing that showed the murder weapon had been improperly handled, tainting the evidence intended to exonerate Williams and complicating his attempt to prove his innocence.

“There is no basis for a court to find Williams innocent,” Judge Bruce F. Hilton wrote in his ruling, “and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death.”

Prosecutors have sought to overturn Williams' conviction because “overwhelming evidence” showed that Williams' trial was unfair, said one of his lawyers, Tricia Rojo Bushnell.

The case pits Bell, who took office in 2018 and is now running for Congress as a Democrat, against Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is seeking re-election. Bailey had fought Bell's January motion, arguing that new DNA test results suggested the evidence did not exonerate Williams.

In its motion, Bell's office also raised other objections to Williams' conviction, claiming that he was convicted based on the testimony of two unreliable informants who were facing legal troubles of their own and who also received a $10,000 bounty.

After Hilton denied the motion to overturn Williams' conviction, Bell said he was “incredibly disappointed” with the judge's decision because there were “detailed and well-documented concerns about the integrity” of Williams' conviction.

Last month, Bell's office announced it had reached a settlement with Williams. Under the settlement, which was approved by the court and Gayle's family, the inmate would have entered an Alford guilty plea to first-degree murder and received a life sentence.

But the attorney general's office opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the agreement. Bailey's office praised the court's intervention at the time, while prosecutors said they still had “concerns about the integrity” of Williams' conviction.

The case also raised the threat that a potentially innocent person could be executed, a risk associated with the death penalty. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have later been acquitted, four of them in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are calling on Parson to prevent Williams' execution.

“The killing of Mr. Williams, a black man wrongfully convicted of killing a white woman, would be a horrific miscarriage of justice and a repeat of Missouri's worst past,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Nimrod Chapel Jr., president of the Missouri State Conference, wrote in an open letter to Parson.

“We call on Governor Parson to immediately stop the execution of Imam Marcellus Khalifah Williams, an innocent man who served God for decades behind bars while wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he did not commit,” CAIR Deputy National Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement. “The DNA evidence proves his innocence, and carrying out this execution would be a grave miscarriage of justice.”

CNN's Dakin Andone and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.