The fate of Marcellus Williams – whose execution is expected in less than a month – now lies in the hands of a St. Louis County district judge.

Judge Bruce Hilton took six hours of testimony Wednesday on a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. He is required by court order to rule on the motion by Sept. 13.

“This is a difficult process for everyone,” Hilton said. “It will be a decision that I will consider carefully.”

Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle and is scheduled to be executed on Sept. 24. He has always maintained his innocence. Earlier this year, St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell wrote that he no longer had confidence in the verdict and asked for it to be overturned.

No forensic evidence such as hair, fingerprints or DNA could ever link Williams to the crime, although investigators suspected the killer may have been wearing gloves. Police found some of Gayle’s belongings in Williams’ car. He also pawned a laptop that belonged to her husband.

Bell initially focused on three experts who said the unknown DNA found on the handle of the knife used as the murder weapon could not have come from Williams. However, further testing showed that those samples matched the profile of Ed Magee, who was an investigator for the state’s attorney’s office at the time. The investigation also found that Keith Larner, a veteran prosecutor who had handled the Williams case in 2001, could not be ruled out as an accomplice.

While these findings meant that the evidence had been tampered with, they also no longer pointed to an unknown killer. This tampering with the possible evidence became a central argument of the prosecutors and Williams’ lawyers.

Prosecutor Larner admitted in court that he handled the knife without gloves at least five times when he showed it to witnesses before the original trial. He said it was common practice at the time for prosecutors to handle murder weapons in court without gloves.

“In my opinion, it was worthless at the time,” Larner said of the knife. “I knew I didn’t want any more tests. I assumed the lab did the most thorough job, I didn’t even know of any others (tests) that could be done.”

In an update to its motion, Bell’s office described the improper handling of the knife as “fraudulent failure to preserve evidence.” Michael Spillane of the Attorney General’s Office strongly disagreed with that characterization.

At the time of the trial in 2001, Spillane said, no one knew that simply touching an object could leave enough DNA behind for a test.

“I don’t like the fact that he’s being accused of sloppy evidence because he did nothing wrong,” Spillane said of Larner, who retired in 2014 after more than 30 years with the district attorney’s office.

Bell’s office and Williams’ attorneys also used the hearing to voice their ongoing concerns about the two key witnesses in the case. Williams’ conviction was based largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole. Both Cole and Asaro had criminal pasts, and Cole had a proven history of mental health issues. Family members swore in affidavits that he often made things up, and he asked for reward money before giving information to police.

Under state law governing the process for overturning a conviction, a judge must grant it if there is “clear and convincing evidence” of a person’s innocence or if an error occurred at the original trial that undermines confidence in the verdict.

Jonathan Potts, a lawyer for Williams, said that standard was clearly met on Wednesday.

“Marcellus Williams did not receive the defense he deserved,” he said. “Prosecutors deliberately falsified the evidence. Prosecutors deliberately ensured that he was not convicted by a jury of his peers.”

Williams, Potts said, “will not wake up on September 25 unless this court acts.”

As he had done throughout the case, Spillane explained to the judge that the issue was one of rule of law.

“I don’t think there’s any point in dragging this out year after year with legally unfounded allegations,” he said.

Gayle’s family has said they do not support Williams’ execution and are seeking closure in the case. a submitted letter Laura Friedman, the wife of Gayle’s then-husband Daniel Picus, wrote to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 14 that the family was “desperate and exhausted” by the ongoing legal battle, which she said “forces the family to relive the worst days of their lives and denies them the closure they deserve.”

Williams prosecutors and attorneys previously reached an agreement That would have resulted in him pleading not guilty in exchange for a life sentence for Gayle’s murder. Hilton initially accepted the offer but withdrew it after the Missouri Supreme Court temporarily stayed it and scheduled a hearing for Wednesday.

Friedman and Picus were in court on Wednesday to observe the proceedings and declined to comment to the media.

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