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on - Aug 22 -
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Matthew Jacober stood to address the judge inside the small, packed courtroom on the third floor of the St. Louis County Courthouse in Clayton, Missouri. Jacober, a special counsel representing the county’s elected prosecutor, had a confession to make: The knife used to kill Felicia Anne Gayle Picus inside her home in August 1998 had been contaminated by the prosecution team that had tried Marcellus Williams for her murder.
Because prosecutors had mishandled and improperly stored the weapon, Jacober said, county prosecutor Wesley Bell had concluded that Williams’s rights had been violated. His conviction — and death sentence — could not stand. “The murder weapon was handled without the proper procedures then in place,” Jacober told Judge Bruce Hilton. “The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office regrets its failure to maintain proper protocols surrounding key physical evidence in this heinous crime.”
It was a stunning admission on the day that Jacober had been slated to present the state’s case that Williams had been wrongly convicted of killing Picus. The fact that the state had so tragically mishandled the murder weapon, which had traces of unknown male DNA, meant that a key piece of evidence that would support Williams’s exoneration was no longer usable.
It was a bitter pill. The judge overseeing Williams’s 2001 trial had denied his request for DNA testing. It wasn’t until 2016 that testing ordered by the Missouri Supreme Court excluded Williams as the source of DNA found on the knife. In other words, he could not be linked to the weapon. Now, Jacober admitted, a new round of testing revealed that a prosecutor’s investigator could not be excluded as the source. Nor could the prosecutor who handled Williams’s trial. Whatever DNA evidence there was connecting the perpetrator to the murder had been irretrievably lost.
While Jacober conceded that Williams’s conviction could not stand, neither could the office point to the unknown DNA on the murder weapon to exonerate him. Instead, after hours negotiating behind closed doors with Williams’s attorneys as spectators waited in the courtroom, the county prosecutors offered Williams a deal: agree to a plea that would take the specter of execution off the table, replaced by a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Williams would have to accept the arrangement to avoid being executed for a crime he insists he did not commit. Wearing a silvery gray thobe and white skull cap, his beard flecked with white, the 55-year-old Williams was still as Jacober spoke. The judge asked Williams if he had agreed to the terms. “Yes,” he said.
Hilton said he agreed with the outcome, as did Picus’s husband, Dan Picus. The judge would formally re-sentence Williams to life in prison the following day.
Everyone, it seemed, was on the same page. Everyone, that is, except Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. By Wednesday night, his office had successfully appealed to the state’s Supreme Court to block the deal. But Bell’s office was determined not to let Bailey have the final word.
Dan Picus came home from work on August 11, 1998, to find his wife dead. The former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter had been stabbed repeatedly and the murder weapon, a knife from the couple’s kitchen, had been left lodged in her neck. Additionally, there were hairs found near Picus’s body, bloody fingerprints on a wall, and a trail of bloody shoeprints. Despite the wealth of physical evidence, the investigation stalled. It wasn’t until months later, after Picus’s family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer, that a jailhouse informant came forward claiming his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, had confessed to the murder. Police later secured a second informant, a former girlfriend of Williams’s, who also claimed he’d taken responsibility.
Notably, none of the physical evidence at the scene tied Williams to the killing. And there was good reason to question the accounts provided by the informants; both were facing prison time for unrelated crimes, and each had a history of ratting out others to save themselves from trouble. Many of the details they offered police shifted over time, while others did not match the murder. Nonetheless, Williams was tried and sentenced to death.
Each of Williams’s appeals were denied. He was on the eve of execution in January 2015 when the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in and ordered DNA testing on the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown DNA. The court summarily dismissed Williams’s claims without considering those results and reset his execution for August 2017.
The Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, turned to Missouri’s then-Gov. Eric Greitens, asking him to halt the execution and to convene what’s known as a board of inquiry to investigate the case. On the day Williams was set to die, Greitens issued an executive order convening a five-member board of retired judges to “assess the credibility and weight of all the evidence” in the case. The board was given subpoena power and, per state law, tasked with reporting back to the governor whether or not Williams should be executed or his sentence commuted.
That process was ongoing when the current governor, Mike Parson, issued his own executive order in June 2023, disbanding the board. It was time to “move forward,” he said. The Midwest Innocence Project sued, arguing that Parson had overstepped his authority by dissolving the panel before it had issued a report as the statute required it to do. The Missouri Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in June 2024 that Parson could do as he wished. The court reset Williams’s execution for September 24.
Meanwhile, the county court was considering a motion that Bell filed in January, seeking to vacate Williams’s conviction. In addition to the foreign DNA on the knife and the sketchiness of the snitch testimony, Bell cited poor defense lawyering at Williams’s trial and misconduct by prosecutors who struck qualified individuals from the jury pool because they were Black. These factors combined cast “inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” the prosecutor argued.
Fast forward to this week: A court was finally slated to consider evidence of Williams’s innocence.
The rows of wooden benches inside the Division 13 courtroom were full by 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, when the hearing was slated to begin. Forty-five minutes later, Hilton stepped into the room without his robes. He was there to explain the delay. The parties were talking, he said, discussing a way to “resolve” the case. Hilton joked that he wanted everyone to know they weren’t waiting around because the judge was late.
It wasn’t until after 1 p.m. that Hilton finally took to the bench and announced that Bell’s office and Williams’s lawyers had come to an agreement. There would be no hearing as had been planned. Instead, Jacober, the special prosecutor, admitted that the state had so mishandled the murder weapon that the physical evidence was no longer probative of Williams’s innocence — or of anyone else’s guilt.
While the state’s incompetence had violated Williams’s rights — prompting the prosecutors to say his current conviction and death sentence couldn’t stand — it also cut off the most tangible path to his exoneration.
Without the DNA evidence, what remains of the case against Williams is the questionable testimony of two snitches, who have both since died. Williams had previously raised the issue of their dubious credibility but was dismissed by the courts. The same is true of his claims about his defense lawyers’ failures at trial and about the prosecution’s striking of Black people from the jury pool. At each turn the courts have shrugged their shoulders. Still, Jacober indicated that Bell’s efforts to make a case for Williams’s innocence were hamstrung without the exculpatory DNA.
Jacober announced that the prosecutors’ office would admit that it had bungled the job and take the death penalty off the table. In exchange, Williams would enter what is known as an Alford plea, accepting a charge of first-degree murder.
Named for the U.S. Supreme Court case North Carolina v. Alford, it is a plea where a defendant maintains their innocence but agrees that the state has enough to convict them and thus pleads guilty to avoid a harsher sentence — in Williams’s case (as in Alford’s), the death penalty.
As part of the deal, Williams would have the right to appeal his sentence if new evidence of his innocence comes to light.
“Marcellus Williams is an innocent man, and nothing about today’s plea agreement changes that fact,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, Williams’s lawyer and executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said in a statement. “The fact that there is DNA on the knife matching members of the trial prosecution team proves the State of Missouri disregarded critical protocols in the investigation of this case, including mishandling pivotal evidence.”
During the hours of negotiations on Wednesday morning, Hilton had spoken to Dan Picus, who affirmed that he does not support the death penalty for Williams. Picus would be in court the following morning to testify at the sentencing hearing, the judge said.
Lawyers with the attorney general’s office were displeased. Andrew Clarke, an assistant attorney general, lodged an objection to the agreement, which Hilton overruled. Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, then appealed to the state’s high court to intervene.
Since being appointed to his post in 2023, Bailey has spent a considerable amount of time attempting to thwart state courts from exonerating the wrongly convicted — or even from considering their claims. Bailey sought to block Williams from ever receiving a hearing, arguing to the state Supreme Court that, by granting a hearing, Hilton was challenging its authority as the highest court in the state. Last month, the court denied Bailey’s motion to scuttle the hearing and clear the way for Williams’s execution.
In a Wednesday evening court filing, the attorney general’s office again argued to the state’s high court that Hilton had overstepped his role by vacating Williams’s conviction and asked it to halt the planned resentencing. The court did just that, issuing an order requiring Hilton to hold the innocence hearing as planned and to issue a ruling by September 13, or to respond to the court explaining why he would not do so.
Picus joined the court session on Thursday morning via video call, but instead of attending Williams’s resentencing, he listened as Hilton responded to the high court’s order. The judge and attorneys had decided to move forward with a hearing on August 28, despite the lack of definitively exonerating DNA. Bell’s office indicated that it would seek to show, without the benefit of dispositive DNA evidence, that Williams’s case was too flawed to withstand scrutiny.
Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said that evidence presented at next week’s hearing would affirm Hilton’s decision to accept the prosecutor’s confession that constitutional error had poisoned Williams’s case.
She also questioned the attorney general’s continued meddling, noting in a statement that the agreement to overturn Williams’s death sentence and to accept the Alford plea was made after careful consideration and with the support of Picus’s family.
“Yet in spite of this, the Attorney General has fought to invalidate that agreement. It is impossible to understand who this decision serves or what justice it provides,” she said. “This decision directly contradicts the will of a duly elected prosecutor and the community he represents, and the wishes of a family who has already lost so much. That is not justice.”
The post A Prosecutor Admits His Office’s Incompetence Cut Off an Innocent Man’s Path to Exoneration appeared first on The Intercept.
