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By David French

Opinion Columnist

On June 4, the Missouri Supreme Court set a September execution date for a man named Marcellus Williams. There’s a profound problem with this ruling, however. Williams is most likely innocent of the charges against him.

The story — like every story about capital punishment — begins with tragedy and evil. On Aug. 11, 1998, a 42-year-old former Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Felicia Anne Gayle was found stabbed to death in her home. The murder was brutal. She’d been stabbed 43 times; her husband found her with the knife still in her neck.

The crime generated a significant amount of local news coverage. Gayle’s husband was a radiologist, and the murder happened in a quiet gated community. Despite the media coverage and the intense interest in the case, the murder went unsolved for 15 months, until the police charged Williams with the crime.

At first glance, the charges seemed to make sense. Williams is not a sympathetic defendant. He has previous convictions for burglary and armed robbery, and his girlfriend, Laura Asaro, accused him of the crime, along with a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.

Their story was compelling — and dreadful. Cole claimed that he had been locked up with Williams in the City Workhouse, where Williams was detained for an unrelated crime. Cole said Williams told him that he went to the house with the intention of burglarizing it. When he arrived, he knocked (perhaps to discern whether anyone was home), and when no one answered, broke a windowpane on the door to enter the house. When he got inside he heard water running, realized someone was there, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and waited for the person to emerge.

When Gayle came downstairs, he stabbed her to death, and then took her purse, another bag contained a laptop computer and a number of other items. Later, he picked up his girlfriend in his grandfather’s car, which Williams was allowed to drive. Asaro testified that he was wearing a jacket, even though it was a hot summer day, and that she saw scratches on his neck. He first said that he’d been in a fight, but Asaro testified that the next day he confessed to the murder.

To corroborate her story, the state also introduced evidence that it found a ruler and a calculator belonging to Gayle in the grandfather’s car, and it introduced evidence that Williams sold the computer after the murder to a man named Glenn Roberts. During the penalty phase of the trial, the state also introduced evidence of Williams’s extensive criminal history, which included 16 different convictions, including armed robbery and threatening to kill a corrections officer.

That evidence certainly seems damning, and when it’s recounted in a court opinion — like the Eighth Circuit opinion rejecting Williams’s request for post-conviction relief — it can seem airtight.

But there’s a problem. None of the physical evidence from the crime scene supports this story.

The crime scene itself was horrific, and it included a large amount of physical evidence. There were bloody footprints in the house, but they did not match Williams’s shoes. There were bloody fingerprints, but they weren’t a match for Williams, either. Neither was the DNA found under Gayle’s fingernails, and neither were the hair samples found at the scene.

And what of the testimony that Williams sold a laptop belonging to the victim’s family? The trial court excluded testimony that Williams told Roberts that his girlfriend had given him the laptop to sell. Indeed, as the prosecutor’s office later asserted, this evidence made “the person........

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