ST. LOUIS _ Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens has granted a stay of execution to Marcellus Williams, who was facing death by injection Tuesday evening for the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle at her home in University City.
With a little more than four hours to go before the execution was scheduled to begin, Greitens said he was appointing a board of inquiry to investigate the case.
"A sentence of death is the ultimate, permanent punishment," he said in a statement. "To carry out the death penalty, the people of Missouri must have confidence in the judgment of guilt. In light of new information, I am appointing a Board of Inquiry in this case."
Attorneys for Marcellus Williams have insisted he could be innocent, after DNA found on the murder weapon did not match Williams'.
Kent Gipson, a Kansas City-based lawyer for Williams said the governor's action was "good news" and said the appointment of a board of inquiry was a "rare thing" for a Missouri capital case. "I don't think it's ever been done," he said.
Greitens said state law gives him the discretion to appoint a board of inquiry to gather information and report back on whether a person condemned to death should be executed.
He said the five-member board will include retired Missouri judges and have the power to subpoena evidence and compel witnesses to testify.
Williams, 48, was sentenced to death in 2001. The prosecution said Williams was burglarizing the home when Gayle, who had been taking a shower, surprised him. She fought for her life as she was stabbed repeatedly.
Williams' attorneys claim recent DNA tests could prove Williams' innocence. Using technology that was not available at the time of the killing, those tests show that DNA found on the knife matched an unknown male, according to an analysis by Greg Hampikian, a biologist with Boise State University.
The Missouri Supreme Court in 2015 postponed Williams' execution to allow time for the DNA tests, but last week after results of those tests were made available, the same court denied his petition to stop the execution and either appoint a special master to hear his innocence claim or vacate the death sentence and order his sentence commuted to life in prison.
Williams' attorneys have also taken the argument to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, circuit justice for the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Missouri and six other Midwestern states. Gorsuch had not ruled by Monday evening.
In its response to the U.S. Supreme Court, the state said it had a wealth of non-DNA evidence to convict Williams. The state could prove Williams had sold Gayle's laptop to a third party after the killing, and had two witnesses who independently said he confessed to them. And, the state said, the lack of DNA evidence did not mean he was innocent.
Representatives for Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch, whose office prosecuted Williams, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The case has attracted national attention because no forensic evidence has ever pointed to Williams, and now what has been tested points away from him.
"As a matter of fairness, what do you do when you've said somebody should get DNA testing, and they get the DNA testing, and the DNA testing suggests they didn't commit the murder?" asked Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit clearinghouse for studies and reports related to capital punishment. "Missouri is trying to execute him without giving him an evidentiary hearing on what that DNA evidence means."
He said DNA exonerations in the last two decades have "shown us that all the other evidence the jury relied on in those cases was wrong. And in case after case after case, prosecutors and judges had said it doesn't matter because there is overwhelming evidence of guilt."
Gayle was a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter from 1981 to 1992. She left the paper to do volunteer social work with children and the poor.
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