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Published: Aug. 28, 2024 at 6:23 PM CDT

An attorney for a Missouri man facing execution argued Monday that the state Supreme Court should halt the lethal injection because a trial attorney prevented a Black man who he thought looked similar to the defendant from serving on the jury.The arguments on behalf of Marcellus Williams came one day before he is scheduled to be executed for the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle in the St. Louis suburb of University City.Williams, 55, has asserted his innocence. But his attorney did not pursue that claim Monday before the states highest court, instead focusing on alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecutions alleged mishandling of the murder weapon.The state Supreme Court should correct an injustice either by declaring that a prosecutor wrongly excluded a potential juror for racial reasons or by sending the case back to a lower court to determine that issue, attorney Jonathan Potts argued on behalf of Williams. Either action could effectively cancel Tuesdays scheduled execution.Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Baileys office has argued for the execution to proceed. The trial prosecutor has denied that he had racial motivations in removing potential jurors and did nothing improper based on procedures at the time by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it already had been tested by a crime lab, Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said in arguments to the state Supreme Court.Attorneys for Williams also have an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, a clemency request before Republican Gov. Mike Parson focuses largely on how Gayles relatives want the sentence commuted to life in prison without parole. The NAACP also is urging Parson, a Republican, to stop the execution of Williams.The execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.Williams was less than a week away from execution in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court called it off, allowing time for his attorneys to pursue additional DNA testing.He was just hours away from being executed in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay after reviewing DNA evidence that found no trace of Williams DNA on the knife used in the killing. Greitens appointed a panel of retired judges to examine the case, but that panel never reached a conclusion.Questions about DNA evidence also led Democratic St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new testing showed that the DNA evidence was spoiled because members of the prosecutors office touched the knife without gloves before the original trial.With the DNA evidence unavailable, Midwest Innocence Project attorneys reached a compromise with the prosecutors office: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole.Judge Bruce Hilton signed off on the agreement, as did Gayles family. But at Baileys urging, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place Aug. 28.Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that his arguments all had been previously rejected.There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding, Hilton wrote.On Tuesday, Williams attorney argued that circumstances are different, because the trial prosecutor had not previously been questioned in court by Williams attorney about the reason he removed a specific juror.The prosecutor in the 2001 first-degree murder case, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that the trial jury was fair, even though it included just one Black member on the panel. Larner said he struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams. He didnt explain why he felt that mattered.The clemency petition from the Midwest Innocence Project focuses heavily on how Gayles relatives want the sentence commuted to life without parole. Parson, a former sheriff, has been in office for 11 executions, and has never granted clemency.Prosecutors at Williams original trial said he broke into Gayles home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower, and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times when she came downstairs. Her purse and her husbands laptop computer were stolen.Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. Williams girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors Williams confessed to the killing and offered details about it.Williams attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted of felonies and wanted a $10,000 reward.

Children who used the weight loss drug liraglutide in a late-stage trial lost significantly more weight than children who got a placebo, according to a new study.Video above: Study suggests link between weight loss drugs, suicidal thoughtsDoctors say it can be extremely difficult for anyone with obesity to lose weight, no matter their age. Most adults and children 12 and older have access to highly effective new medicines called GLP-1 receptor agonists, but younger children must rely on lifestyle changes like diet, exercise and counseling alone to lose weight. Even with more aggressive interventions, children generally have only modest results, doctors say.The first study on the effects of the GLP-1 drug liraglutide, which is sold under the brand names Saxenda and Victoza, on younger children found that the medication could have a significant impact on their body mass index (BMI), the measure that practitioners use to determine whether a person has obesity.Liraglutide was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2014 to help adults lose weight. In 2020, that approval was extended to children ages 12 to 17.The study was published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual European Association for the Study of Diabetes conference by its lead co-author, Dr. Claudia Fox, a pediatrician who works with the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis.The researchers looked at the effects of the drug on children between the ages of 6 and 12 who had what's considered to be a high BMI. The average 10-year-old in the study, Fox said, weighed about 155 pounds.The trial included 82 children, of whom 56 got a liraglutide injection once a day. The rest got a placebo. All of the children also got counseling to encourage a healthier diet and exercise of moderate to high intensity for at least an hour a day.The groups had significantly different results. In just over a year, the BMIs of the children who got the medicine fell 7.4 percentage points more than those in the placebo group. Children in the liraglutide group had a 5.8% drop in BMI. Those in the placebo group had a 1.6% increase.The study was funded by drugmaker Novo Nordisk.The results were in line with other studies done in teenagers, Fox said, but the younger children had stronger results."That to me was the most surprising, and it makes me think that maybe we should be intervening at younger ages," Fox said.The study does not directly compare weight loss among age groups, so more research would be needed to determine whether her theory could be correct.Liraglutide was considered safe for the young children in the study, but participants in both the placebo group and the medication group had some adverse events.Stomach problems like nausea, diarrhea and vomiting were more common in the group that got the medicine, but Fox said very few people dropped out of the study because of the side effects. Stomach problems tended to appear early in the study and decreased over time, she said.The research was also not designed to address how long children would have to stay on the drugs. When the trial period was over and the children were no longer using the medication or getting counseling, their BMI crept up again. However, the increase wasn't as significant for this younger age group as it was for teens in earlier studies, and that could mean the drugs have a more robust longer-term outcome if used earlier."We do know that obesity is a chronic disease," Fox said. "As soon as the intervention is over, the disease can come back, and that is true of any other chronic disease, whether it's diabetes, asthma, hypertension any chronic disease that requires chronic treatment."Any drug that could help children with obesity could make a big impact on the public's health. Obesity is considered the most common chronic health problem for children in the United States, with nearly 20% of all children having what's considered a high BMI. And the number has been growing, with the prevalence more than tripling since the 1970s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Obesity isn't just a problem in the short term, as children with obesity usually become adults with obesity and can face a lifetime of health problems related to it, Dr. Simon Cork, a senior lecturer in physiology at Anglia Ruskin University, told the Science Media Centre."The evidence that liraglutide is both safe and effective in children is positive," said Cork, who was not involved with the research.Developing anti-obesity medicine for children is complicated because children are still growing, he said. More studies that monitor children for longer periods will be needed to make sure appetite suppression does not have consequences later in development. There were no indications in the new study that liraglutide was detrimental for changes in height or child's puberty, but scientists will need to make sure that medicines don't stunt growth.Early puberty can be a problem for children with obesity, as can type 2 diabetes, and down the road they may develop heart problems, liver and kidney diseases and cancers. But a weight loss drug that proves to be effective in the long term could do a lot more for health than helping lose weight. Children with obesity can also face significant bias and stigma, studies show."Because treating children and adolescents living with obesity has the potential to have longer-lasting health benefits, although these medications are currently costly, their value for reducing risk of conditions associated with obesity and improving longer-term health must be considered," Dr. Nerys Astbury, an associate professor of diet and obesity at the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care Sciences at the University of Oxford, told the Science Media Centre. Astbury was not involved with the new study.In December, draft guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force which influence whether insurance will cover medical care recommended that doctors provide intensive behavioral interventions to help children lose excess weight, but it did not recommend weight loss medications or surgery.The American Academy of Pediatrics, which updated its own guidelines on managing patients with obesity in 2023, recommended both options for some people.Although doctors and even parents don't always agree, Fox believes that weight-loss medications and surgical procedures such as gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy should be an option for children."There's a feeling among patients' families that they just need to work harder to lose weight, but going to the park more and eating better food isn't always enough," she said. "We can't just rely only on behavioral interventions for a biological disease and get significant improvement."

Apple juice that is sold across the country is being recalled due to concerning levels of inorganic arsenic.