After meddling by Missouri's attorney general, a judge rejected Marcellus Williams’s innocence claim, even though prosecutors mishandled the murder weapon.

A ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Missouri, judge upheld the murder conviction of Marcellus Williams, ruling that a prosecutor who contaminated key evidence by handling it without wearing gloves before Williams’s trial had not acted in “bad faith,” but instead was merely following his normal procedure.

The ruling, issued on Thursday by Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton, dismantles Williams’s latest attempt to prove his innocence and paves the way for his execution on September 24. “There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent,” Hilton wrote. “Williams is guilty of first-degree murder, and has been sentenced to death.”

  • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    4 months ago

    “Procedures were followed and it doesn’t matter if the evidence used to convict was reliable.” is the opposite of justice.

    And that is before this gem:

    Hilton also rejected Williams and Bell’s other claims, including that Williams’s previous attorneys were ineffective in representing him at trial, and that Larner had struck people from the pool of potential jurors on Williams’s case because they were Black, which is unconstitutional. During the hearing, Jonathan Potts, who is working with Williams’s attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project, pressed Larner about his stated decision to strike one potential juror because the man “looked very similar” to Williams. Larner said that what he meant was that they looked like “brothers,” he said. “Like familial brothers, not like Black people.”

    Lamer would be able to know if they were related, so the only reason for excluding the juror is racism.