Williams was executed by the state of Missouri for brutally stabbing a young woman to death.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the facts in the case against Marcellus Williams, who was recently executed by the state of Missouri, and we cover more media misses.
Journalists as Judge and Jury
“The Death of Marcellus Williams Proves Justice in America Is a Myth,” writes HuffPost opinion editor Stephen A. Crockett Jr.
That inflammatory headline captures the prevailing narrative that led up to and persisted after Marcellus Williams’s execution last week, a narrative designed to further erode whatever precarious trust remains in our judicial system.
“Missouri set to execute ‘loving father’ whose DNA wasn’t on murder weapon, attorneys say,” read a headline from USA Today.
“Prosecutors say Marcellus Williams is innocent. He’s scheduled to be executed anyway,” reported MSNBC. Afterward the outlet explained “How Marcellus Williams’ execution unveils the double standard in America’s justice system.”
An opinion essay for The Hill called the execution a “tragedy” and dubbed it a “legally sanctioned murder.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian asked, “What kind of country would kill Marcellus Williams despite the doubts about his conviction?”
Williams died by lethal injection in Missouri last week, 23 years after he was first convicted of the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was stabbed to death in her own home.
Gayle was home alone taking a shower in the summer of 1998 when Williams entered her house by breaking a window. As she headed downstairs after her shower, Williams attacked, stabbing and cutting her 43 times with a butcher knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen. He left the knife in her neck when he fled the scene, though he took off with Gayle’s purse and her husband’s laptop.
He put a jacket over his blood-soaked shirt and headed to pick up his girlfriend, Laura Asaro, after the killing. Asaro would later recall asking Williams why he was wearing a jacket in August. When he removed the jacket to reveal his bloody shirt and scratches on his neck, he said he had been in a fight. But when Asaro discovered the stolen laptop and purse in the car the next day, she confronted Williams, who confessed to the killing but threatened to harm Asaro and her family if she told anyone.
Williams was arrested on unrelated charges just two weeks later. Williams’s cellmate, Henry Cole, later told police Williams had bragged about killing Gayle.
When Cole was released from prison in June 1999, he made police aware of Williams’s confession. The police then got in touch with Asaro, who shared her story as well.
Police searched Williams’s car and found items belonging to Gayle and found the stolen laptop in the custody of a man who said he had bought the laptop from Williams.
And the murder was far from Williams’s first run-in with the law; he had 15 felony convictions for a number of offenses including robbery, armed criminal action, assault, burglary, stealing, stealing a motor vehicle, and unlawful use of a weapon.
Shortly after being indicted for Gayle’s murder, Williams was sentenced to 20 years in prison for another crime. The day of the sentencing, he tried to escape the prison and assaulted a guard with a metal bar.
For years, Williams filed appeals in the murder case, but they centered on relatively minor procedural details, not the actual evidence at hand. The appeals argued, among other things, that jury instructions about note taking were improper and his grandfather didn’t have the authority to let police search his car.
But more recently, Williams’s supporters had hoped that DNA evidence could bolster the convicted killer’s claims of innocence. Along the way, the cause received the support of St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell.
Bell, a progressive prosecutor who himself has pledged to never seek the death penalty, filed a motion claiming that new DNA tests had exonerated Williams.
“DNA evidence supporting a conclusion that Mr. Williams was not the individual who stabbed Ms. Gayle has never been considered by a court. 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 wrote.
Bell’s office reached an agreement with Williams to have him enter an Alford plea of guilty to first-degree murder, which would have seen him resentenced to life in prison and spared from the death penalty. Though Gayle’s family and the lower court agreed, the state attorney general’s office stepped in and appealed to the state supreme court, which blocked the agreement.
For all the attention the “new DNA” received in the media, the testing actually showed that the murder weapon had been mishandled before the 2001 trial, thereby contaminating the evidence with the DNA of an assistant prosecuting attorney and an investigator who had handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to the trial. And Cole, Williams’s former cellmate, testified that Williams had said he was wearing gloves when he committed the murder, which would explain the lack of his DNA on the knife.
“In this case, a new round of DNA testing proved the office was right all along; the knife in question has been handled by many actors, including law enforcement, since being found,” the Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey said.
“In addition, one of the defense’s own experts previously testified he could not rule out the possibility that Williams’s DNA was also on the knife. He could only testify to the fact that enough actors had handled the knife throughout the legal process that others’ DNA was present,” Bailey added.
As Missouri governor Mike Parson’s office notes, “Two decades of judicial proceedings and more than 15 judicial hearings upheld his guilty conviction.”
Meanwhile, the Innocence Project has further argued that the case rests on “unreliable testimony of two incentivized witnesses,” but the governor’s office notes that Williams’s girlfriend never requested the reward for information about the murder and that Cole provided information about the crime that was not publicly available at the time but was consistent with crime-scene evidence and Williams’s involvement.
Other individuals were present when Williams bragged about the murder, the office adds.
Other arguments from the Innocence Project regarding Williams’s innocence include “racial bias” having contributed to Williams’s “wrongful conviction,” despite the project itself acknowledging elsewhere that the circuit court recently ruled that it “lacked sufficient evidence on which to find that Mr. Williams is innocent, and that his claims of racially biased jury selection and ineffective assistance of counsel had previously been raised and rejected.”
A significant piece of that argument rested on a prosecutor from the 2001 trial allegedly admitting in an August 28 hearing that he had struck a potential juror from the jury pool because he was black, like Williams. However, the assistant attorney general Michael Spillane said at the hearing that the prosecutor’s comments were being misconstrued. “He said they look like brothers,” Spillane said.
The state Supreme Court ultimately unanimously ruled that Williams’s team had “failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence Williams’ actual innocence or constitutional error at the original criminal trial that undermines the confidence in the judgment of the original criminal trial,” the court’s opinion read.
The Innocence Project further claims, “Williams is devoutly religious and an accomplished poet.”
“He has an exemplary prison record and is widely respected within the prison community and beyond,” it adds.
Yet again, the governor’s office writes: “Williams’ disrespect for others’ well-being and aversion to order have continued in prison, including attacking other inmates and threatening correctional officers.”
Leading up to the execution, and in its wake, media outlets and left-wing groups have either heavily implied that Williams was innocent, or outright declared it.
“Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent Black man,” the NAACP declared. “We will hold Governor Parson accountable. When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice — it is murder.”
The Atlantic asked, “Why Are Innocents Still Being Executed?”
On Tuesday night, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, a man who may well have been innocent of the crime he was convicted of. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in her Missouri home, and his trial was marked by a shoddy defense and a jury-selection process that empaneled 11 white jurors and only one Black juror (Gayle was white; Williams was Black). Williams’s execution had been scheduled and halted twice before amid concerns about his guilt; Missouri’s prior governor, Eric Greitens, not only granted Williams a day-of stay but also appointed a committee to investigate his case. The committee was dissolved by the current governor, Mike Parson, in 2023 without ever issuing a report.
But the governor’s office explains in a recent press release that none of the fact-finding entities that have been asked to consider Williams’s case have been convinced of his innocence, including “(1) a jury of his peers at trial; (2) the Missouri Supreme Court during state habeas proceedings; (3) a Board of Inquiry; nor (4) the St. Louis County Circuit Court.”
Parson also defended his decision to disband the board of inquiry last year, saying, “This Board was established nearly six years ago, and it is time to move forward. We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing. This administration won’t do that.”
Headline Fail of the Week
The Associated Press eulogized Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week with an embarrassingly deferential headline: “Charismatic and shrewd: A look at longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.”
The headline, which received plenty of criticism on social media, was later amended to read: “Who was longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah?”
The piece, written after the IDF confirmed on Friday that Nasrallah was killed in its strike against the group’s Lebanon headquarters, waits until the 14th paragraph to mention that Hezbollah has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Instead, the article opens by calling Hezbollah a “Lebanese militant group” and “one of the most powerful paramilitary groups in the Middle East.”
It lauds Nasrallah as a “fiery, charismatic leader.”
As NR’s editors write in a more appropriately toned obituary, “Ding, Dong Nasrallah Is Dead”:
It would be difficult to overstate Nasrallah’s significance to the terrorist organization he led and the blow to it represented by his death. Nasrallah took the role of Hezbollah’s secretary-general following the demise of his predecessor at the hands of the IDF over 30 years ago. He oversaw the terrorist sect’s councils and sub-councils, its judicial, parliamentary, and jihad assemblies. He led an organization estimated to be capable of fielding upwards of 50,000 fighters with around 150,000 missiles, rockets, and drones at its disposal. He was the most reliable of Iran’s proxies, the commander of its strongest militia in the region. And now he’s gone.
Media Misses
— NPR host Maria Hinojosa says Hispanics are supporting former president Donald Trump because they “want to be white.” “What I said to you when we asked the question was, Latinos want to be white. They want to be with the cool kids,” Hinojosa told MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart. “They want to be — I’m asking Latinos all the time and they just say, ‘Well, isn’t Donald Trump es tan buen negociante? He is such a good businessman.’ It’s like, no, he’s not. He had bankruptcies.”
— While Politico reported in 2020 that the Biden campaign planned to “harness the ‘incredible anger’ among Puerto Rican voters in Florida over Trump’s handling of Hurricane Maria in 2017,” the same outlet now accuses Trump of dragging Hurricane Helene into the 2024 campaign.
Spot the (D)ifference pic.twitter.com/hdmuUXXULs
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) September 30, 2024
— Mother Jones’s editor in chief Clara Jeffery claimed that an Alaska Airlines flight attendant’s wishing her a “blessed” evening on a flight to San Francisco was evidence of “creeping Christian nationalism.” In a post on X, Jeffery argued that several other terms “would have sufficed,” including “great, awesome, fabulous, amazing, fantastic.”
“As my rowmate said, ‘this ain’t Montgomery, sweetie,’” she added.