GOOD EARTH, Missouri — A Missouri man is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Tuesday night after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state to proceed with its execution plan, rejecting a final request to intervene on his behalf.
The justices rejected two separate appeals to spare the life of Marcellus Williams, over the objections of liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, a day after the Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson declined to intervene on Williams’ behalf.
Williams, 55, has long maintained his innocence in the 1998 death of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former journalist who was stabbed multiple times during a burglary of her suburban St. Louis home. The execution is contested by both Gayle’s family and the district attorney’s office, which placed Williams on death row in an unprecedented combination.
“The family considers that the end of the story is to let Marcellus live,” the clemency request reads. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”
Williams is among five inmates scheduled to be executed in five U.S. states, an unusually high number that defies the decline in the use and support for the death penalty in the United States for years. The first execution was carried out Friday in South Carolina. The others are scheduled for Tuesday in Texas, and Thursday in Oklahoma and Alabama.
Williams’ hopes of having his sentence commuted to life in prison suffered a double setback Monday when, almost simultaneously, Parson denied clemency and the Missouri Supreme Court declined to grant a stay of execution.
Lawyers working on Williams’ behalf filed motions Monday night challenging the state Supreme Court’s decision.
“We asked the United States Supreme Court to stay the execution of Marcellus Williams on Tuesday based on a disclosure by the trial prosecutor that he dismissed at least one black juror before the trial because of his race,” Tricia Bushnell, Williams’ attorney, said in a statement.
The prosecutor in the 2001 murder case, Keith Larner, testified at an August hearing that he dismissed a potential black juror in part because he looked too much like Williams — a statement that Williams’ lawyers said demonstrated inappropriate racial bias.
Bushnell said Larner screened out six of seven potential black jurors. The jury ultimately consisted of 11 white members and one black member. Larner argued the jury selection process was fair.
The Missouri attorney general’s office filed a response Tuesday, saying the only effect of a stay of execution would be another delay in a case “that has already been delayed for many years by Williams’ litigation over meritless claims.”
The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision Monday afternoon, upheld a lower court ruling rejecting Williams’ arguments.
Parson accused Williams’ attorneys of trying to “muddy the waters about DNA evidence” with claims that courts have repeatedly rejected.
“Nothing in the actual facts of this case has led me to believe that Mr. Williams is innocent,” Parson said in a statement.
Parson, a former sheriff, has never granted clemency in a death penalty case. Williams’ execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.
St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell has asked to overturn Williams’ sentence, citing doubts about his guilt. His office joined attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a stay.
“Even for those who disagree about the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible sentence of execution should not be an option,” Bell said in a statement.
This is the third time Williams has been sentenced to death. He was less than a week away from lethal injection in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court halted the execution, giving his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA testing.
He was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay and appointed a panel of retired judges to review the case. But that panel never reached a conclusion.
Questions about the DNA evidence also led Bell to request a hearing to challenge Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the district attorney’s office who handled it without gloves after initial crime lab tests.
With no DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the district attorney’s office: Williams would again plead no contest to first-degree murder in exchange for another life sentence without parole.
Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at the request of Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the state Supreme Court blocked the deal and ordered Hilton to proceed to an evidentiary hearing, which took place on August 28.
On September 12, Hilton ruled that Williams’ first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. That decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court on Monday.
Prosecutors in Williams’ original trial said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times as she was walking downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to cover up blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he was wearing 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 imprisoned on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about it.
Williams’ attorneys said fingerprints, a bloody shoe print, hair and other evidence at the crime scene did not match Williams’.
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AP reporter Mark Sherman contributed from Washington. Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.
