Williams was found guilty of the 1998 murder of former Post-Dispatch writer Felicia “Lisha” Gayle. Bell filed a motion to vacate that conviction in St. Louis County late Friday.

As he writes, DNA evidence discovered in 2017 has cast serious doubt on the jury’s conviction. The River City Journalism Fund reported on those doubts in a 2022 RFT cover story.

In his brief, Bell writes, “This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection, casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”

That same DNA evidence led Governor Eric Greitens to convene a board of inquiry and halt Williams’ scheduled execution just hours before he was slated to die. That inquiry later stalled, and Governor Mike Parson disbanded the board before it issued any findings (which led to a lawsuit by the Innocence Project, which still pending).

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