During his short tenure as Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey has spent a considerable amount of time fighting to cement dubious convictions — and, so far, he has been losing the battle.
On July 26, Bailey racked up another loss when the Missouri Supreme Court declined to scuttle a hearing in St. Louis County to determine whether Marcellus Williams was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die in 2001. Bailey had implored the court to stop the August 21 hearing and to clear the way for Williams’s execution in September. While the Supreme Court has declined to delay Williams’s execution, it has at least rebuffed Bailey’s entreaty to grease the wheels.
Bailey’s defeat caps several weeks’ worth of legal volleying between the attorney general, Williams’s lawyers with the Midwest Innocence Project, and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who is seeking to vacate Williams’s conviction because he believes it was wrongly obtained. In pushing back against Bailey’s efforts to block Williams’s innocence hearing, Bell and the Midwest Innocence Project argue that Bailey is attempting to rewrite Missouri law to give himself more power.
The flurry of legal activity also underscores Bailey’s apparent determination to fight off claims of wrongful conviction. In the last two months alone, he has not only tried to block Williams from airing his innocence claim at all, but has also sought to keep two recent exonerees, Christopher Dunn and Sandra Hemme, locked up despite court rulings concluding that they should be freed.
Bailey’s opposition to correcting miscarriages of justice is a feature of his tenure as attorney general, but his recent actions have earned new scrutiny and ire from activists, as well as from his rock-ribbed conservative opponent in the attorney general’s Republican primary race.
Speaking at the state Capitol on Thursday, death row exonerees with the nonprofit group Witness to Innocence called on Bailey to reverse course and support the vetting of innocence claims — starting with Williams’s case.
Bailey’s current position is that it is “acceptable to execute an innocent person,” said Herman Lindsey, the group’s executive director. “We’re here to ask for an honest search for the truth. That’s all.”
“This win-at-all-costs mentality does not serve the people of Missouri.”
Photo: Midwest Innocence Project
Shifting Narratives
Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, a beloved former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed to death in her home in a gated community outside the city on August 11, 1998. When her husband Dan Picus found her, the murder weapon, a knife from the couple’s kitchen, was still lodged in her neck. The house was replete with potential forensic evidence, including bloody fingerprints on a wall and a trail of bloody shoeprints. The kitchen had been ransacked, and closets and drawers upstairs had been opened. Still, nothing of great value had been taken.
Despite extensive physical evidence, the investigation stalled. It wasn’t until months later, after her family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of her killer, that a jailhouse informant came forward with a story about his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, whom he claimed had confessed to the crime. Police subsequently scored a second informant, Williams’s former girlfriend, who also claimed Williams was responsible.
There were ample reasons to distrust the informants’ accounts, including that both were facing prison time for unrelated crimes, and each had a history of ratting on others to save themselves. Many of the details they offered shifted across questioning and others simply did not match the murder. Nonetheless, Williams was tried and convicted in 2001 based primarily on their waffling and contradictory tales.
Williams has maintained his innocence and has twice come close to execution. His lawyers requested DNA testing of crime scene evidence prior to his trial, but the court denied it. It wasn’t until the eve of Williams’s execution in 2015 that the state Supreme Court issued a stay and ordered testing of the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown male DNA and excluded Williams as a donor. Still, without considering what impact that evidence might have had on Williams’s conviction, the court reset his execution for August 2017. Again, the execution was halted, this time by then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, who issued an executive order triggering a little-used Missouri law that allows the governor to empanel a board of inquiry to review a case.
Passed in 1963, the law was designed to protect against wrongful executions. The board, made up of five retired judges, was not yet finished with its work the following year when Greitens left office amid scandal and Mike Parson assumed the job. Over the intervening years, the Midwest Innocence Project provided the board with a host of information to aid its inquiry. Then, in June 2023, Parson abruptly dissolved the board before it could report on the findings of its investigation, which by statute it was required to do. Parson said it was time to “move forward.”
The Midwest Innocence Project sued to block Parson from disbanding the board before it had fulfilled its statutory duty, yet the Missouri Supreme Court dismissed the suit earlier this summer. Louis Circuit Court Judge Michael Stelzer over a similar statute providing for post-conviction relief, arguing that they should be permitted to appear at a hearing in a case where a man was seeking a new trial. Stelzer denied their request. In response, the lawyers filed a petition with the state Supreme Court seeking to have Stelzer’s ruling overturned. The high court declined to intervene.
Louis City Circuit Attorney Gabriel Gore’s tireless efforts to exonerate Christopher Dunn for a 1990 murder he has long maintained he did not commit have finally paid off. Despite opposition from the attorney general’s office, the circuit judge vacated Dunn’s conviction last month, leading to his release on July 30 after the Missouri Supreme Court intervened.
Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s decision to challenge innocence claims has sparked criticism from advocates and legal experts alike. Law professor Peter Joy described Bailey’s actions in trying to keep Dunn incarcerated as “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being.”
Even within his own party, Bailey’s stance has raised eyebrows. Will Scharf, a fellow conservative and Bailey’s opponent in the state’s GOP primary, has distanced himself from Bailey’s approach. Scharf, a former federal prosecutor, emphasized the importance of the clear and convincing evidence standard in cases of wrongful conviction, stating that he would not obstruct the release of someone who has proven their innocence in court.
The contrasting approaches of Bailey and Scharf highlight a key issue in the upcoming primary election, with Scharf positioning himself as a candidate who values justice and fairness in the criminal justice system. As the campaign progresses, the debate over innocence claims and the role of the attorney general’s office in ensuring justice for all individuals wrongfully convicted will likely remain a central point of contention.
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