The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams by lethal injection on Tuesday evening, despite the objections of the local prosecutor, whose office had secured Mr. Williams’ murder conviction in 2003.
Mr. Williams, who has claimed his innocence for decades, has in recent days sought clemency from the governor and a stay of execution from the state Supreme Court. But on Monday both Governor Mike Parson and the state Supreme Court rejected his requests, and on Tuesday the US Supreme Court, his last hope, also declined to intervene.
He was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. at the state prison in Bonne Terre, the Missouri Department of Corrections said in a statement.
Mr. Williams's lawyer, Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project, said it was unjust to sentence a man to death even though the prosecutor's office had admitted it was wrong and fought to overturn the death sentence. “Sentencing an innocent man to death is the most extreme expression of Missouri's obsession with truth, justice and finality over humanity,” she said.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” local prosecutor Wesley Bell said in a statement. “There were numerous points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have saved him from the death penalty.”
Mr Williams, 55, has received several stays of execution over the past few years – once in 2015 and once in 2017 – but neither resulted in his sentence being commuted.
A law enacted in 2021 gives him another avenue to challenge his conviction for the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a prominent newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home. Under the law, prosecutors can bring a motion to overturn a conviction if they believe there was a miscarriage of justice. Mr. Bell, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, reviewed Mr. Williams’s case and filed such a motion last January.
This law has been used only a few times. In the three cases that reached the trial stage, judges agreed to acquit the defendants. But Mr. Williams' case turned out to be different.
Mr. Bell's 63-page motion said Mr. Williams' constitutional rights were violated multiple times during the investigation and trial. In the filing, Mr. Bell claimed defense counsel did not present evidence that could have saved Mr. Williams from the death penalty and that prosecutors improperly dismissed black potential jurors, resulting in a jury with 11 white members and one black member. Mr. Williams was black, and the victim, Ms. Gayle, was white.
Mr. Bell, a Democrat who recently won the Democratic primary for a congressional seat, also wrote that there was ample reason to believe that Mr. Williams was innocent. He detailed numerous issues with the credibility of two key witnesses against Mr. Williams and said that Mr. Williams was not the source of footprints or hairs found at the crime scene, nor of the DNA found on the murder weapon.
Mr. Williams had sold a laptop computer that had been stolen from Ms. Gayle's home, but Mr. Bell said there was evidence he had gotten it from his girlfriend, who became one of two witnesses against him, in the belief she would receive leniency in her criminal cases. Both witnesses had died in the intervening years.
While the motion by Mr. Bell’s office was moving through the court system, the state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican facing his own primary election challenge, asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for Mr. Williams. The court set Sept. 24 as the execution date.
A hearing on Mr. Bell's motion was scheduled for August. But just before that date, his office received a new analysis of the DNA on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife. Instead of pointing to an unknown suspect, which would have strengthened Mr. Williams's case for innocence, the analysis showed that the knife had been handled by a prosecutor and an investigator at the trial.
That conclusion led Mr. Bell to back off from his claim that Mr. Williams was innocent. Instead, he offered Mr. Williams a deal that would have spared him the death penalty. Ms. Gayle's widower approved the deal, but Mr. Bailey, the attorney general, objected. He said the law that allowed Mr. Bell to bring a motion to overturn the case did not allow him to seek a new sentence.
The state Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Bailey, saying Judge Bruce Hilton should ultimately hold a hearing. During the hearing, Mr. Bell’s office focused on claims of constitutional violations, questioning the original prosecutor in the case about why he had handled the murder weapon without gloves and why he had struck black potential jurors from the jury pool.
Prosecutor Keith Larner testified that in one case he excluded a potential black juror because he closely resembled the defendant. “They looked like brothers,” he said.
He also said the knife had already been tested and it was not understood at the time that touching could leave traces of DNA on the evidence.
First Judge Hilton and then the state Supreme Court rejected Mr. Bell’s arguments, saying that multiple courts and hearings had found that Mr. Williams was guilty and that there was no credible evidence of constitutional violations. Mr. Williams’s supporters, including the NAACP, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Representative Cori Bush of Missouri and Sir Richard Branson, a music legend and death penalty opponent, called for clemency.
Governor Parson, a Republican, rejected these calls on Monday, saying that Mr. Williams's guilt was a fixed matter.
Mr. Williams converted to Islam while in prison and took the name Khalifa. In recent weeks he has appeared in court wearing a white skullcap, a symbol of Islamic devotion, and has decided to have an imam accompany him to the execution chamber.
When he was given the opportunity to write a final statement in order to be released by the Missouri Department of Corrections, Mr. Williams wrote, “Praise be to Allah in all circumstances!!!”