Marcellus Williams: Missouri executes ‘innocent’ man despite push to free him, advocates say

Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old Missouri man convicted of killing a former reporter in 1998, was executed Tuesday evening by lethal injection despite objections from prosecutors, defence lawyers and the victim’s family.

Advocates aggressively pushed for Williams’ execution to be paused in the days leading up to his death, but the U.S. Supreme Court, Missouri Supreme Court and Missouri governor refused to grant a stay. Early this year, St. Louis’ top prosecutor filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction, based on new DNA evidence and allegations of evidence mishandling and racial discrimination in the jury selection process. Williams’ lawyers have further argued that two key witnesses who testified against the 55-year-old were bribed.

The push to free Williams continued even on the day of his execution. Dozens of activists hand-delivered pages upon pages of signatures, asking Republican Gov. Mike Parson to pause the execution, according to video shared by the WE project.

Despite these efforts, Williams was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday around 6 p.m. local time. He had served as his prison’s imam and dedicated his time to poetry. His last written statement was “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!!!”

Williams’ son and two lawyers watched from another room. No one was present on behalf of the victim’s family, who expressed in the run-up to the execution that they did not want Williams to die.

“The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” Williams’ clemency petition stated. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”

After Williams’ death, the NAACP wrote: “Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent Black man.”

“When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice—it is murder,” the civil rights organization wrote, adding that it holds Parson responsible.

The Innocence Project echoed the NAACP’s words, writing that Williams was an “innocent man” and that his “story echoes that of too many others caught in our country’s broken criminal legal system.”

Williams was convicted of stabbing Lisha Gayle to death in 1998. Gayle, a social worker and one-time St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, was stabbed 43 times in her St. Louis home. Her purse and her husband’s laptop had also been stolen.

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Prosecutors at the time heard testimony from Williams’ girlfriend, who said that she saw the stolen laptop in his car and that Williams sold it a day or two later. One of Williams’ cellmates also testified that he confessed to the killing and offered details about it.

Williams’ lawyers responded that the girlfriend and cellmate were both convicted felons out for a US$10,000 reward.

In January this year, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell presented new DNA analysis that suggested Williams’ DNA was not on the knife used to murder Gayle. Three DNA experts examined testing from the knife “and each has independently concluded that Mr. Williams is excluded as the source of the male DNA on the handle of the murder weapon,” the court filing reads. This kind of DNA testing was not available at the time of Williams’ conviction.

But in August, new DNA test results revealed that the murder weapon had been mishandled by the original prosecutors, who likely touched the evidence without gloves, sometime between 1998 and 2001.

“As a result, DNA was likely removed and added,” according to Matthew Jacober, a special counsel for Bell’s office.

Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, argued that this DNA testing did not prove Williams’ innocence. He said that because “enough actors had handled the knife throughout the legal process” it was impossible to determine if Williams’ DNA had once been on it.

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The contaminated evidence was a gut punch to Williams’ case, and lawyers devised another strategy to get him off death row. Prosecutors and defence lawyers agreed that Williams should enter an Alford plea, which is not an admission of guilt but an acknowledgment that there is enough evidence for a conviction. In exchange, his death sentence would be commuted to life without parole.

Gayle’s relatives gave their blessings to the agreement but, acting on an appeal from Bailey’s office, the state Supreme Court nullified it.

Bailey argued that Williams’ willingness to plead guilty in exchange for being taken off death row suggested that he was not innocent.

“Instead of taking the opportunity to prove his innocence at the hearing scheduled originally, Williams instead tried to plead guilty to a crime he claims he did not commit. No innocent man is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison unless he knows he is guilty,” Bailey wrote.

Bell’s office further argued that Williams was subject to an unfair trial because of racial discrimination in the jury selection process of his original trial.

The prosecutor at the time, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that he struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams — a statement that Williams’ lawyers asserted showed improper racial bias. Larner contended that the jury selection process was fair.

On Monday, Parson and the state’s Supreme Court rejected Williams’ appeals for a stay in his execution. The U.S. Supreme Court also declined to intervene hours before he was put to death. Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the majority opinion and said they would have granted the pause.

Williams was the third Missouri inmate put to death this year, and the 100th since the state resumed use of the death penalty in 1989.

— With files from The Associated Press