Injustice is how Missouri NAACP President Nimrod Chapel Jr. calls the situation surrounding the Marcellus Williams case. He, along with over a half-million other people call for the exoneration of Williams, saying that the prisoner is innocent.
Williams was convicted in the 1998 stabbing death of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle.
Chapel told Missourinet that Williams is scheduled to be executed Tuesday because of the man’s “inability to exonerate himself.”
“The reason that he cannot produce any more evidence to exonerate himself is because the prosecutor and the police officers destroyed it,” Chapel said. “They touched it in such a way that you cannot even get DNA off of it to be able to determine who was or was not on the murder weapon.”
The death penalty is “unfair” said Chapel, citing a report from a national nonprofit organization that said there are disproportionate sentences based on skin color.
“For a black man to be accused of committing a crime against a white woman where there was a murder involved and he’s poor and without power, you can have a better expectation that he’s going to end up on death row than anybody else,” he said. “All the inequities of the system, plus the fact that he didn’t do it.”
Killing Williams would be “an incredible miscarriage of justice,” said Chapel. Chapel told Missourinet that there has to be a way to correct a “flawed” system that can produce “inaccurate results.” Lawyers for Williams have alleged that DNA evidence found on the knife used to stab the victim was not his DNA.
“In Missouri, only DNA evidence can be used to exonerate somebody on death row,” he said. “So, if you have life imprisonment, you can’t use additional forms of evidence to try to get to prove your innocence.”
A state board of inquiry established during the Greitens administration tasked with examining new DNA evidence in the case was dissolved by Gov. Mike Parson. Williams was originally scheduled to die by lethal injection in August of 2017, and his latest date with the executioner is this Tuesday, unless Parson or a higher court steps in.
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