Only a guilty man would have taken deal, says Missouri AG. Or one who wanted to live | Opinion
First, state prosecutors offered Missouri death row inmate Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, whose execution date is set for Sept. 24, a way to stay alive after new testing showed that DNA evidence on the murder weapon had been messed up — corrupted, in law enforcement parlance — by long ago mishandling by their own office.
But to get the deal on the table, which would have re-sentenced Williams to life in prison, he had to plead “no contest” in the 1998 murder of former St. Louis journalist Felicia Gayle.
He agreed; of course he did. But then, only hours after entering that plea, another arm of the state, the attorney general’s office, opposed the deal. And so, on Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court agreed to make it disappear.
Now AG Andrew Bailey has the gall to announce that only a guilty man would have agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison in the first place. We’d offer a slight correction to that assertion: Only a guilty man, or else one who wanted to keep on breathing.
“No innocent man is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison unless he knows he is guilty,” Bailey said in a statement. When the alternative is imminent death, on the contrary, just about everyone would take that trade. Live and hope to prove your innocence someday? Of course that’s a yes.
Since 2017, we have been writing that the facts do not support Williams’ conviction, much less his execution.
St. Louis County prosecutors say they still see problems with the way the case was originally tried by their office, and defense attorneys promise to keep fighting to prove Williams’ innocence at an Aug. 28 evidentiary hearing. But time is absurdly short.
The new testing shows that the knife used to stab 42-year-old Gayle to death in her own kitchen was handled by who knows how many people, including a prosecutor who wasn’t wearing gloves, so that DNA was added, and some may have been taken away.
But that does not change the fact that the DNA actually on the weapon is not a match for Williams, now 55.
Nor does it change the fact that there is no other physical evidence linking Williams to this terrible crime. None of the hairs and bloody footprints at the crime scene were his.
Gayle’s family signed off on the plea deal, and does not want Williams executed, but that’s not good enough for Bailey.
“Too often,” the AG said in his statement, “people forget about all of the evidence that was used to convict the defendant — the evidence the jury relied on.”
In this case, the jury relied on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a former cellmate, Henry Cole, who were allegedly promised money and leniency in their separate criminal cases in exchange for their cooperation. This is how wrongful convictions happen.
“A witness testified that Williams had sold the victim’s laptop to him,” Bailey said in his Thursday statement.
But what Bailey didn’t say, and what the jury never heard, is that Williams claimed to have received that laptop from Asaro.
And if what the legal system has decided is so sacred, then why, just this summer, did Bailey keep three people in prison after they were found to have been wrongfully convicted?
Bailey called defense efforts on Williams’ behalf “legal games.”
But none of this is a game, and it’s a shame that our attorney general sees it that way.
We can argue about the morality, fairness and cost of state executions, which we oppose.
But executing someone who is or even might be innocent is not defensible, and people who really care about the rule of law need to let Andrew Bailey know that.
