A Missouri man convicted of murder was executed Tuesday evening after efforts by his attorneys as well the prosecutor’s office to halt it were rejected by the governor and Supreme Court.
Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1998 murder Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, a newspaper reporter found stabbed to death in her home in the St. Louis area. He maintained his innocence.
Williams was executed at a prison in Bonne Terre and pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. local time (7:10 p.m. ET), the state Department of Corrections said.
“Tonight, Missouri executed an innocent man,” The Innocence Project, which along with others tried to halt the execution, said in a statement.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier Tuesday denied a stay of execution. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, and the Missouri Supreme Court on Monday rejected requests to halt it.
Williams’ attorneys argued that his DNA was not on the murder weapon and that his 2001 trial was unfair, saying a trial lawyer dismissed a juror based on race and there was only one Black juror on the panel. Williams is Black.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell also sought to halt the execution, saying DNA experts concluded Williams was excluded from DNA found on the murder weapon through testing that was not available at the time of the trial.
Bell sought a term of life in prison instead, and Gayle’s family agreed to that. Bell said Tuesday night that Williams should not have been executed.
“If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option,” Bell said after Williams was executed. “This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
Williams in a final statement wrote, “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!!!” His last visit was with Imam Jalahii Kacem Tuesday morning, the Department of Corrections said.
On Monday, a day before Williams was executed by injection, his lawyers argued before the Missouri Supreme Court that his execution should be halted because the trial lawyer for the prosecution in the 2001 trial said at a recent hearing that he struck a Black man from the jury because of his race and that the prosecution mishandled the murder weapon.
“The prosecutor in Marcellus Williams’ case has admitted under oath that he struck a juror in part because of his race,” attorney Jonathan Potts said at Monday’s hearing.
Potts said the trial prosecutor struck a Black man “in part because he was a young man with glasses” and looked similar to Williams.
“He admitted that there was actually a racial component here, and that is unconstitutional,” he said.
The jury included one Black member.
Potts also argued that the trial prosecutor mishandled the murder weapon in bad faith when he held it without gloves, contaminating the knife, which they say could have been used to prove Williams was innocent.
Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane denied that the potential juror was struck because he was Black, saying: “There’s no clearly convincing evidence here. There’s no evidence at all.”
He also said that based on procedures at the time, the attorney did not mishandle the evidence.
The state Supreme Court rejected Williams’ arguments, saying that, “Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment.”
At the time of the trial, an inmate who shared a cell with Williams and a former girlfriend both said Williams confessed to them that he was responsible for the murder. His attorneys have said the two were seeking reward money.
In January, Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, filed a motion to vacate or set aside Williams’ conviction and sentence, citing the DNA experts who said Williams was excluded from DNA on the murder weapon.
Ahead of that hearing, tests showed the DNA was consistent with that of members of the prosecution team from the original trial, who had touched the knife without gloves.
With that piece of evidence allegedly contaminated, the office of Bell, a Democrat, and attorneys for Williams reached a deal that would spare Williams the death penalty in exchange for life in prison without parole.
A St. Louis County circuit judge and Gayle’s family also agreed to the deal, but state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, opposed it, and the state Supreme Court agreed.
A judge ultimately rejected the motion to vacate, a ruling Williams’ attorneys appealed to the state Supreme Court on Monday.
The NAACP also asked Missouri’s governor in a letter last week to stop the execution, saying it “would amount to a horrible miscarriage of justice and a perpetuation of the worst of Missouri’s past.”
“Taking the life of Marcellus Williams would be an unequivocal statement that when a White woman is killed, a Black man must die. And any Black man will do,” the NAACP said in the letter.
Parson said after Tuesday’s execution that “No juror nor judge has ever found Williams’s innocence claim to be credible.”
“Two decades of judicial proceedings and more than 15 judicial hearings upheld his guilty conviction, thus, the order of execution has been carried out,” Parson said in a statement
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, who represents the St. Louis area, called for an end to the death penalty.
“Governor Mike Parson shamefully allowed an innocent man to be executed tonight. We must abolish this flawed, racist, inhumane practice once and for all,” she wrote on X. “Rest in power, Marcellus Williams.”
Tuesday was the third time Missouri sought to execute Williams. His execution was stayed twice before — in 2015 and 2017.
In 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens, also a Republican, stayed Williams’ execution hours before he was to have been put to death after evidence showed he was not the source of the DNA on the murder weapon.
Greitens convened a “board of inquiry” to investigate Williams’ claims, Williams’ attorneys argued in a motion seeking a U.S. Supreme Court stay, but that board was dissolved by Parson in 2023 without issuing a report or recommendations.
“It is believed the BOI never reached a decision,” Williams’ attorneys wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have granted the stay of execution, the court wrote.
