Death Row Inmate Marcellus Williams Agrees to Plea Deal

Missouri death row inmate Marcellus Williams agreed to a no-contest plea on Wednesday, opting for a life sentence without parole and dropping his claim of innocence.
The plea deal comes after nearly two decades of legal battles over his 1998 conviction for the brutal murder of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and a former journalist in suburban St. Louis. Prosecutors at Williams’ trial said he broke into Gayle’s home on August 11, 1998, and found a large butcher knife and stabbed her 43 times. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were also stolen.
On Wednesday, Williams entered an Alford plea—a legal move that allows him to assert his innocence while acknowledging that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict him.
Williams’ decision, part of a deal with St. Louis County prosecutors, means he avoids execution, which was scheduled for September 24. He’ll be resentenced Thursday as the agreement calls for life in prison without parole. Williams has also agreed not to appeal.
“Marcellus Williams is an innocent man, and nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact,” Williams’ attorney, Tricia Bushnell, said in a statement, adding that Gayle’s family supports setting aside the death penalty, and the plea “brings a measure of finality” to the family, the Associated Press reported.
The plea deal comes as Louis County Circuit Judge Bruce Hinton was expected to oversee a hearing requested by Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell that was initially set to reconsider Williams’ conviction, based on new DNA evidence that was not available during his trial, the AP reported.
Newsweek has reached out to Bell’s office via email for comment.
This evidence, which emerged years after his conviction, indicated that DNA found on the murder weapon did not belong to Williams, raising significant doubts about his guilt. However, further DNA testing revealed on Monday contamination of the evidence due to the handling of the weapon by a former assistant prosecutor and investigator. The contaminated evidence complicated efforts and made it impossible to show that someone else may have been the killer.
“The murder weapon was handled without proper procedures in place,” Matthew Jacober, a lawyer for the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said, per the AP.
The improper handling occurred several years before Bell took office.
However, according to the AP, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, led by Republican Andrew Bailey, strongly opposes the new consent judgment and has vowed to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court in an effort to proceed with the execution.
Bailey argued that a circuit court doesn’t have the authority to overrule the state Supreme Court that set the execution date.
“Throughout all the legal games, the defense created a false narrative of innocence in order to get a convicted murderer off of death row and fulfill their political ends,” Bailey said in a statement. “Because of the defense’s failure to do their due diligence by testing the evidence that supposedly proved their point, the victims have been forced to relive their horrific loss for the last six years.”
The plea deal comes as the case against Williams has continued to be contentious as Williams, who is Black, was originally convicted by a jury composed of 11 white jurors and one Black juror. His case has drawn attention to issues of racial bias and the reliability of eyewitness testimony, as the key witnesses against him were both convicted felons.
In addition, more contentious came after then-Governor Eric Greitens halted Williams’ execution in 2017, following the revelation of the new DNA evidence. That decision led to further examination of Williams’ case under a Missouri law that allows prosecutors to challenge potentially wrongful convictions.
“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” Bell’s motion stated.
According to the AP, Williams’ case is also the first to challenge a death row conviction under Missouri’s new 2021 law, which has already led to the exoneration of several other wrongfully convicted individuals.