Whether the prosecutor's racially discriminatory peremptory strike of a Black juror during Mr. Williams' capital trial violated his constitutional right to equal protection under Batson v. Kentucky

No question identified. : 1 To the Honorable Brett M. Kavanaugh, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and Circuit Justice for the Eighth Circuit: The State of Missouri has scheduled the execution of Marcellus Williams for September 24, 2024 , at 6:00 p.m., central time . Mr. Williams respectfully requests a stay of execution pending consideration and disposition of the petition for a writ of certiorari, concurrently filed with this Court . PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND Mr. Williams was convicted and sentenced to death in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County in August 2001 for the murder of Ms. Felicia Gayle. But from the moment law enforcement developed Mr. Williams as a suspect, there were significant holes in the case against him. Although the perpetrator left behind a plethora of forensic evidence at the crime scene, including normal hairs, pubic hairs, shoeprints, fingerprints , and DNA evidence under Ms. Gayle’s nails, Mr. Williams was not the source of any of that forensic evidence. The State’s case was built on the testimony of two incentivized witnesses whose stories of how Mr. Williams supposedly confessed to them conflicted with each other and with the crime scene evidence. The only physical piece of evidence that tied Mr. Williams to the crime was a laptop computer stolen from the victim’s house, which he pawned to a neighbor —but that neighbor affirme d that Mr. Williams had said the laptop belonged to his girlfriend and that she had asked him to pawn it for her. The trial court prohibited the neighbor from testifying about this and the jury never heard the full circumstances of the 2 transaction. Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence have always stood on shaky evidence. Just as troubling as the lack of evidence against Mr. Williams (and the problems with the trial evidence) are the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s actions in securing Mr. Williams’ conviction and sentence. Of the seven Black venirepersons,1 the trial prosecutor used peremptory strikes against six of them . His reasoning for excluding one of those venirepersons, Venireperson 64, was that he “reminded” him of Mr. Williams. He thought the men looked similar and that both had “piercing eyes.” App. 89a. On direct appeal, the Supreme Court of Missouri found that reasoning to be race-neutral. State v. Williams , 97 S.W.3d 462, 471-72 (Mo. banc 2003) . Twentythree years later, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the very same office that once brought capital charges against Mr. Williams, admitted to committing constitutional violations during Mr. Williams’ trial. Among those conceded errors was that the office had committed violations of Batson v. Kentucky , 476 U.S. 79 (1986) . 2 To remedy those errors and correct what the office now believes to be a wrongful conviction and sentence, Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell filed a 1 There were 131 venirepersons total. 2 The Prosecuting Attorney also conceded to mishandling the evidence in violation of Arizona v. Youngblood , 488 U.S. 51 (1988) , after it was revealed that the DNA found on the murder weapon lodged in the victim’s neck was consistent with the DNA profiles of the trial prosecutor and the trial investigator, both of whom admitted to handling the knife before and during trial without wearing gloves or using other evidencesaving techniques. 3 Motion to Vacate Mr. Williams’ judgment under Section 547.031 RSMo Supp. (2021) on January 26, 2024.3 Astonishingly , at the evidentiary hearing on the Motion to Vacate held in the Circuit Court of St. Louis Count on August 28, 2024, the trial prosecutor, on the stand and testifying under an adversarial process for the first time in this case’s history, admitted that he had struck Venireperson 64 because like Mr. Williams, Venireperson 64 was Black . He proclaimed that “part of the reason” for his peremptory strike was because the Venireperson 64, a Black man, looked like Mr. Williams , also a Black man, and