Attorney General asks court to block hearing on DNA evidence in Marcellus Williams case

On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a writ of prohibition with the state Supreme Court calling on it to block the St. Louis County Circuit Court hearing for Marcellus Williams.

Williams was sentenced to death in 2001 for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was killed in her home during a burglary in 1998.

In January, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell filed a motion to vacate Williams’ conviction and death sentence after DNA evidence came to light ruling Williams out as a suspect.

The Circuit Court of St. Louis County previously announced that it would hear Bell’s motion on August 21 at 8:30 a.m.

In an expedited opinion handed down earlier this month, the state Supreme Court overruled a motion to withdraw Williams’ motion of execution.

In its filing, the Bailey points to this decision and the court’s previous decisions to hear Williams’ claims and set an execution date.

“Respondent exceeded his authority by taking any action other than granting the motion to dismiss because every claim raised in the motion to vacate or set aside has been denied by this Court; Article V, § 2 of Missouri’s Constitution forbids a lower court from reversing, overruling, or otherwise declining to follow the previous decisions of this Court that populate the long procedural history in Williams’s case,” Bailey wrote.

The respondent in this filing is the circuit court judge who agreed to hear the case, Bruce Hilton.

Bailey added that as the state’s highest court has already made its decision regarding Willams’ execution date, it is up to them alone to reverse it if they choose, not a lower court.

“For these reasons, the Attorney General asks this Court to issue a preliminary writ of prohibition directed at Respondent in his official capacity ordering Respondent to take no further action except to vacate his July 2, 2024, order and grant the Attorney General’s motion to dismiss,” he wrote.

The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

One of Williams’ attorneys, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, said in a statement that instead of trying to prevent the evidence from being heard in Williams’ case, he should be joining his team in the “truth-seeking process.”

“Instead of using the office’s time and resources to review the merits of Marcellus Williams’s innocence claim, the Attorney General seeks to delay a court from even hearing the evidence until it is too late,” Bushnell said. “Indeed, when the prosecutor filed a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’s conviction in January, the Attorney General told the circuit court it was planning to file an opposition but waited four months—until after an execution date was set—to argue the court cannot hear the case. The evidence could have been heard in those four months. It can still be heard now.”

Williams is set to be executed on Sept. 24.