Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence

The only thing linking the laptop to Williams was the testimony of a witness. Even if the witness is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing how Williams obtained the laptop.

By any reasonable standard, all this is extremely flimsy evidence: More than a year after the murder, the police found a "Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator" in the suspect's car that belonged to the victim? And someone testified that Williams had the victim's laptop. And it is on the basis of this pitifully weak evidence that you would justify the execution of Williams, the suspect? Even though, as the Innocence Project correctly observes, there is no direct physical evidence linking Williams to the crime scene, and the DNA recovered from the crime scene does not match Williams?

https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/supreme-court/2003/sc-...

Isn't that less than 10% of the market (i.e. most prisons are not private)

Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.

That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.

But I think we disagree on our trust of the legal system. Once proven guilty under the court of law that must be upheld. If you locked the doors and burned your grandma alive because you thought she was satan you should be executed, not put in a cushy hospital to be "Rehabilitated". If you caused harm to society in such a violent way, justice is not the tax payers paying $2.7m and to forver bear the burden of one who cannot function in our society.

Look... obviously I can't see he did or did not do it with incomplete information. However, it's pretty clear the innocence project is wildly manipulating the story. Moreover, the innocence project frequently calls out the iffi-ness of DNA evidence when it suits them, and are now claiming that we should listen only to it.

The truth is that the police recovered some DNA and it happened to be a man's they cannot connect. It could be her killer. It could not be. It could be a friend; it could be an affair partner; who knows. Either way, that man did not have all her stuff, and did not confess to the murder.

> DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would

DNA exists sure. but no one knows whose DNA was collected, and DNA matching is not 100%.

> none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.

Why would we expect any of the DNA to match? DNA of all sorts of people are everywhere. It doesn't seem there was much struggle. There was no rape. Exactly what do you expect to find?

Here is what the innocence project says (https://dpic-cdn.org/production/legacy/MarcellusWilliamsBoar...):

> The presence on the knife of a male DNA profile is also significant and worthy of additional testing and evaluation. In briefing, the State argued that the presence of DNA on a kitchen knife is unremarkable because anyone in the home could have used the knife. However, the State has long recognized the power of DNA found on a murder weapon and has relied upon such evidence to secure convictions. Here, the only male who lived in the home was the victim’s husband. Additional testing could be performed to develop a profile from the husband for comparison to the profile found on the knife. Assuming the victim’s husband (who is not and never was a suspect) is excluded as a match, it is then clear that the DNA matches the killer. Yet, law enforcement has never conducted such testing.

The innocence project is making the wild claim that the male DNA on the kitchen knife is certainly the killers. Let me ask you... how many men have you had at a dinner party? The idea that their DNA on the murder weapon should be sufficient to indict them, while all the other physical evidence linking Williams to the murder is not sufficient is... a stretch. Under this scheme, Mrs Gayle's dinner guest from the night before is more likely to be the murder culprit than the random attacker who just happens to have a ton of her personal belongings after she is killed? Come on. Let's live in the real world.

What we do know is that Williams has a track record of violence and then not doing anything to address it, while blaming others for his crimes.

Having watched a few FBI interrogations and other true crime related videos there certainly are such proofs.

I have a few of these come to mind, like the dude who killed his ex, took the house surveillance cameras down after the facts but didn't know they were backed up on servers, he was caught with the cameras in his truck shortly after. Most of these publicly known cases have a ridiculously long trail of proofs actually

I'm not saying mistakes don't happen, they obviously do, but in many cases it's extremely easy to prove if someone's guilty or not.

> Even if the suspect is on camera confessing.

That's not enough in most countries

Which, in my opinion, is a fantastic argument against the death penalty.

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf

The problem is the way that the severity of the crime makes juries less reliable.

When there is particularly severe circumstances (like a particularly horrific homocide) the psychological penalty for -not- convicting is much higher, and the desire to feel certain that a perpetrator has been found is much higher than say, a case of property theft.

Combined with the death penalty, these biases add up to a murder machine rather than an instrument of justice.

Estimations based on actual exonerations place the false conviction rate in some states >1%. If 1% are exonerated (which requires extraordinary evidence, often obtained by happenstance in solving other crimes) it’s a pretty safe bet we may be looking at >10% false convictions.

Add to this the fact that even confessions are unreliable, something I have some personal anecdotal experience with.

When I was eleven, school officials accused me of doing something I absolutely did not do. (and in fact there was no evidence that the thing had actually even happened, it was later told to me by the person claiming the event that it was fabricated from whole cloth)

I became so convinced that I did in fact do it that I invented an entire scenario where I had some kind of psychological episode, explaining why I did not directly remember doing the thing, but I was 100 percent sure that I had actually done it.

I am not, and was not , a weak minded person. I did, however, at that time, trust in the idea of authority figures.

It is not hard to to imagine that an adult on the other side of the bell curve that was basically trusting in society might easily fall into the same trap of disbelief->rationalization in an effort to to conform their reality to the “objective truth”.

After this experience,I don’t place much weight in confessions, even less in plea bargains.

The Governor's counterargument being the "girlfriend never requested the reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder, despite claims that she was only interested in money" [1].

The interesting thing is I could see myself, were I on the jury, and if the other facts of the case aligned, finding Williams guilty beyond reasonable doubt where the punishment is life without parole. But I can't reach the certainty I'd want for the death penalty. Yet that implies a tremendous amount of faith in my ability to finely distinguish probabilities of guilt, an ability I don't think I have.

This discussion is confusing because it's about two separate issues: a Rorschach test on your views on capital punishment and an orthogonal one about due process and William's guilt. (They're not orthogonal, but the interaction between those can probably be entirely described by the former.)

[1] https://governor.mo.gov/press-releases/archive/state-carry-o...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/21/us/marcellus-williams-missour...

>And though Picus’ laptop was recovered, the prosecuting attorney’s office says Roberts told investigators Williams said he’d gotten it from Asaro – a claim Roberts reiterated in an affidavit signed in 2020. Jurors at trial never heard this assertion, which the prosecutor’s motion says illustrates “the person with the most direct connection to the crime” was “Laura Asaro, and not Marcellus Williams.”

additionally, they only made the statements after being threatened by police

>The woman at first denied having information about the crime, prosecutors’ motion states. But after meeting with police several times – and being promised charges she was facing would be dropped and told she would be eligible for the reward – Asaro eventually cooperated, telling police she had indeed seen Williams on the afternoon of the murder, the motion states.

Executing him requires there's absolutely no room for a reversal, and from that point of view the evidence isn't that strong.

In this quest for vengeance I think people forget these rules are in place for the State to not abuse it's powers. I'm not against the death penalty because I'm a hippy vegan. I'm against it because I don't think it's a power the state should be able to wield.

“Evidence of innocence” is a very problematic concept. Have you thought through what is your evidence of your innocence? (Not just regarding to this case, but regarding all cases involving dead or missing people.) Should we execute you if you ever come up short?

"evidence of innocence"...

I was once accused of a financial crime, around taking money from an account. I was, admittedly, guilty, however, the amount claimed was nearly triple the amount that I had taken (there were multiple shenanigans happening).

When my attorney and I said "Actually, we think the amount is $X, not $3X, because x y and z", we had an extraordinarily difficult time with the Prosecutor, who wanted US to justify why we thought the amount was only $X.

Apropos of any plea or deal or whatever, no... the onus is on the Prosecution to verifiably demonstrate the loss. Not for me to justify why I think the amount is different. Ironically, the justification we did provide came from the Prosecution. "You said the loss was $Z, including $Y in checks which were diverted. Witness statements and other testimony showed that these checks were NOT diverted, by their own words. Ergo, the loss is $Z-$Y."

Prosecutor was still "you need to show me the math for what that equates to". "No, that amounts to incriminating self, and is, bluntly, not my responsibility. You need to assert how you came to the number you are claiming in the charge."

Be careful, this is hearsay and not evidence. Those people claim that he confessed to them, but there is a lot more context. Here is what the linked story says about the "he confessed" part:

> The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.

> Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. Their statements were inconsistent with their own prior statements, with each other’s accounts, and with the crime scene evidence, and none of the information they provided could be independently verified.

> "There is no reliable evidence proving that Marcellus Williams committed the crime for which he is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24. The State destroyed or corrupted the evidence that could conclusively prove his innocence and the available DNA and other forensic crime-scene evidence does not match him."

DNA evidence is based on proven science, and the DNA evidence that was not destroyed by the state is exculpatory.

Perhaps so. I'm not familiar with the details of the case.

But this I do know: prior felony convictions are manifestly not evidence.

Presenting them as such causes me to seriously doubt the broader argument you are trying to make here.

Reading this thread, it's obvious there's been a big game of telephone with regards to what happened (half saying "a", half saying "the").

I hope this reminds people that they need to chase down sources as close to the original information source as possible as things can get misunderstood or distorted along the way.

This should not be sufficient to justify the death penalty. Whether or not this guy did it, using such an incredibly weak standard will and almost certainly has killed innocent people.

> This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts…whose conviction was based on very strong evidence

“Very strong” evidence should never be enough to sentence someone to death. The evidence should be irrefutable. Anything less is unacceptable and inexcusable.

We really should call them "dysangelical" when they bring death like this (as opposed to warning of death, which is in scope of euangel when there's also a way to avoid it).

There's also testimony of Jesus disrupting an instance of capital punishment (John 8:3–11). There may have been procedural issues in that case, of course – for example, no accusers are said to have claimed witness to the crime itself, which was legally required for an execution – but Jesus points this out after the mob has dispersed, not before, and many Christians interpret that verdict more generally.

Anybody who professes to be a Christian or follower of Christ’s teachings who supports violence in any form is in fact living in contradiction.

I think it’s a question of agency. If you’re an adult that makes their own choices (crime, bad financial decisions, etc.), then you know what the consequences are.

If you’re an unborn child, you’re don’t have agency.

For some there’s probably deeper religious belief in good things (birth) being the work of God and bad things (crime, vice, death) being the work of Satan.

To your point there are plenty of competing religious teachings that could lead some to be pro-choice, pro-welfare and anti-death penalty.

It's obvious the previous poster was making a point of morality, not legality. You can of course disagree with that morality. That's fine. But going "but akshually the law says..." is being highly obtuse.

My personal take - of course he was guilty as unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public. And the property findings.

Saying that I’m not sure killing people is the greatest thing.

The first law I would introduce would be that the death sentance only applies to people who demanded it publically before.

I propose death by hanging for repeat littering and speeding near a school. I bet that’d be effective.

If you want to consider cost, it costs literal millions to execute someone.

It wouldn't. There are cases where we do know someone's guilt with 100% confidence, but in my country we still don't execute them.

Think hard about why someone commits a crime. What is their background, their circustances, and what would have prevented it from happenign. Then think about what you think the purpose is of a sentencing? Is it for revenge, revalidation, setting an example, or removing undesireables from society (temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently)?

Do you have any sources supporting the claim that does actually deter anybody?