At Missouri Hearing, Lawyers Spar Over Fate of Prisoner on Death Row

In a Missouri prosecutor’s unusual quest to save the life of a man his office once tried to put to death, lawyers called several witnesses to testify in a hearing Wednesday to paint a picture of a murder conviction gone gravely wrong.

A lawyer who represented the man in the 2001 trial said he had not had enough time to mount the strongest defense. An expert on investigative interviewing cast doubt on the credibility of the two key witnesses who were pivotal in the guilty verdict. And the prosecutor from the original trial described how he had repeatedly handled the murder weapon without gloves, potentially contaminating critical DNA evidence that could have proven the man’s innocence.

It was the first time in over a decade that the man, Marcellus Williams, 55, who has long maintained his innocence, had received a hearing in open court. And it could be the last. He is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24.

Mr. Williams was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former reporter for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who was found stabbed to death with a kitchen knife lodged in her neck at her home outside St. Louis.

The case has pitted the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, a Democrat and an opponent of the death penalty, against the state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican who has fought to keep exonerated prisoners behind bars and who is staunchly opposed to the effort to vacate Mr. Williams’s conviction. Both men are up for election in November in different races.

At the hearing in Clayton, Mo., which featured clashes on nearly every point and often turned testy, lawyers from Mr. Bailey’s office said that many of the arguments made by Mr. Bell’s team had been raised before and rejected. Both state and federal courts have upheld the conviction through several unsuccessful appeals.