Marcellus Williams Sues Gov. Parson for Disbanding Board of Inquiry

The Innocence Project and other advocates have filed a lawsuit against Gov. Mike Parson for disbanding the Board of Inquiry examining the case of a man on Missouri's death row — saying Parson cannot dissolve the board until it issues a report and recommendation in his case.

The lawsuit on behalf of Marcellus Williams was filed in Cole County Circuit Court this afternoon.

Williams came within hours of being executed in 2017. But then-Gov. Eric Greitens responded to protestations that new DNA evidence showed Willliams' innocence by issuing a stay of execution and convening a very rare Board of Inquiry to examine the innocent claims.


Greitens' successor, Parson, announced in June he was disbanding the board and dropped the stay, putting Williams on a path to be executed. Strangely, though, Parson did not share or even allude to the nature of any findings made by the board.

Now Williams' lawsuit — filed on his behalf by the Midwest Innocence Project, the Innocence Project and two attorneys at the law firm of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner — says Parson does not have the right to dissolve the board "before it has satisfied its statutory obligation to produce a report and recommendation."

“The dissolution of the board of inquiry before a report or recommendation could be issued means that, to date, no judge has ruled on the full evidence of Mr. William’s innocence,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said in a statement. “Knowing that, the state of Missouri still seeks to execute him. That is not justice.”

Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, also said this in a statement: “The board of inquiry statute was created so that an independent group of retired judges had an opportunity to review all the evidence in a death penalty case, without any procedural or political obstructions, to make sure an innocent man or woman is not executed. It’s a unique, fail-safe protection.

"By aborting the process before this distinguished group of jurists issued a report, Gov. Parson violated Mr. Williams’ due process rights under the state and federal constitutions to life and liberty."

Williams' case was the subject of an RFT cover story last year.  He was found guilty of the murder of former Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle, which took place in her University City home in 1998. 

But he has always protested that he is innocent, and his attorneys say that as DNA testing has advanced, it supports that claim.

In the words of their lawsuit, "When Felicia Gayle was murdered in 1998, her killer left the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, lodged in her neck. The handle of the knife contained a partial male DNA profile that almost certainly belongs to the person responsible for Mrs. Gayle’s murder. Mrs. Gayle’s killer is also very likely responsible for bloody footprints leading away from her body; for bloody fingerprints that law enforcement lost decades ago; and for the head and pubic hairs that investigators recovered from the carpet on which she was found.

"Modern testing proves that Marcellus Williams’s DNA is not on the murder weapon; his shoes did not make the bloody impressions at the crime scene; and the hairs recovered from around Mrs. Gayle’s body did not come from Mr. Williams. Nevertheless, absent judicial intervention, Mr. Williams will be executed for Mrs. Gayle’s murder."

In their lawsuit, Williams' attorneys suggest the Board of Inquiry actively solicited information from both Williams and the state (likely meaning prosecutors) as recently as 2020.

However, they add, "On information and belief, the State never submitted a reply in response to the Board’s most recent solicitation for information." That suggests the inquiry was stalled, or petered out, rather than concluding. By nevertheless dropping the stay of execution, and issuing an executive order putting in motion a new execution date, Parson has violated Williams' right to due process, they allege.

"By truncating the process and making secret the results (if any) of that process, Executive Order 23-06 took away from Mr. Williams a right created by Executive Order 17-20," the attorneys wrote, referring to Greitens' previous order. "Even if the Board were to issue a report that does not completely exonerate Mr. Williams, that report could 'beget yet other rights to [other] procedures,' including additional court filings, political pressure on Defendant Parson to commute his sentence, and potential action by other members of the executive branch."


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