Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite objections and claims of innocence by prosecutors | Missouri

A man sentenced to death in Missouri is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who suggest the verdict was wrong.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection despite efforts by the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office, which originally convicted him, to overturn the case against him. Prosecutors have raised concerns about the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle and said Williams did not receive a fair trial.

Although prosecutors and the victim’s family supported a plea agreement that would spare Williams the death penalty, Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey fought to keep the execution going.

“The public does not want this execution to happen. The victim’s family does not want this execution to happen and the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office does not want this execution to happen,” Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’ attorneys, said in an interview Monday. “The Attorney General’s Office, which had nothing to do with this at all, is trying to lead him to the death chamber. That is pretty horrifying and extraordinary.”

Williams, who long maintained his innocence, was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Williams was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings, but there was no forensic evidence linking Williams to the knife or the crime scene.

Williams’ execution was postponed twice at the last minute. In January 2015, the execution was just days away when the Missouri Supreme Court granted his lawyers more time to conduct a DNA test. In August 2017, then-Republican Governor Eric Greitens granted a stay hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA tests on the knife that found no trace of Williams’ DNA.

Greitens set up a commission to review the case, but when current Republican Governor Mike Parson took office, he disbanded the commission and pushed for the execution to go ahead.

In January, Wesley Bell, the Democratic district attorney in St. Louis who advocates for criminal justice reform, filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA tests that showed Williams’ fingerprints were not on the knife.

“Ms. Gayle’s killer left behind substantial evidence. None of it can be linked to Mr. Williams,” his office wrote, adding that “new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is in fact innocent.” He also claimed that Williams’s attorney at the time was incompetent and that his predecessors in the St. Louis district attorney’s office improperly excluded black jurors from the trial.

However, further examination of the knife revealed that prosecutors’ employees had mishandled the weapon after the murder – they had handled it without gloves before the trial, Bell’s office said. A forensic expert testified that the mishandling of the weapon made it impossible to determine whether Williams’ fingerprints could have been on the knife beforehand.

In August, Williams and prosecutors reached an agreement to stop his execution: he would plead guilty to premeditated murder in exchange for a new life sentence without parole. His lawyers said the agreement was not an admission of guilt and that it was to save his life while he sought new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed the agreement, as did the victim’s family, but the attorney general challenged it and the state Supreme Court blocked it.

“He has not given up hope”

On Monday, Williams’ lawyers asked to stop the execution, arguing that the prosecutor in the 2001 case had excluded a black juror because he looked like Williams. But the state Supreme Court denied that request. The governor also rejected a clemency petition that emphasized that the victim’s family opposed the execution.

The Attorney General argued in court that the prosecutor at the time had denied the exclusion of black jurors on racial grounds and claimed that there was nothing inappropriate about touching the murder weapon without gloves at the time.

Bailey’s office has also suggested that other evidence points to Williams’ guilt, including the testimony of a man who lived in a cell with Williams and said he confessed, as well as the testimony of a girlfriend who claimed to have seen stolen items in Williams’ car. However, Williams’s lawyers have argued that both witnesses are unreliable because they have been convicted of serious crimes and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.

Parson defended the execution in a statement Monday, saying Williams’ lawyers “decided to cover up the DNA evidence issue despite the courts’ repeated rejection of those claims.” He said Williams had “exhausted all legal avenues,” adding, “The fact is that Mr. Williams was found guilty, not by the governor’s office, but by a jury of his peers, and the courts have affirmed that.”

Bell said in a statement Monday night that the St. Louis District Attorney’s Office would “continue to do everything in its power to save his life.” He added: “Even for those who oppose the death penalty, irreversible execution should not be an option when there is even the slightest doubt about a defendant’s guilt.”

Potts, Williams’ lawyer, said the case would fuel further distrust in the criminal justice system: “Public confidence in the justice system can only be strengthened if the system is willing to admit its own mistakes… The public is seeing the justice system at its most dysfunctional.”

Williams, Potts added, was “someone who never gave up hope.”

“The few times he has had the opportunity to present evidence to the courts of his innocence and the violation of his rights were the moments when I saw him most encouraged… He is trying to come to terms with what might happen in the next 24 hours and make his personal peace. But he has not given up hope,” Potts said.

Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she has worked with Williams since 2021 and considers him a mentor. She recently spoke to him after he was transferred to the facility with the execution chamber: “He’s always in a good mood. He’s very spiritual and strong in his faith. And he’s always checking in on other people. He wanted to know how I was doing, because that’s just the way he is.”

Smith added: “He means so much to so many people. He is a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He is a teacher. He is a spiritual advisor to so many other young men. His absence would be a great loss to so many people.”

Smith said she hoped his case would help the public understand that “the death penalty doesn’t work.”

“I know people who say, ‘We shouldn’t kill innocent people, but otherwise I believe in the death penalty.’ But if you believe in the system at all, that means you’re OK with innocent people being killed, because the system isn’t perfect. It’s going to kill innocent people.”

Williams’ execution is one of five scheduled to take place in the United States within a week. On Friday, a man was executed in South Carolina, days after the state’s key witness recanted his testimony.

The Associated Press contributed to the reporting