Missouri to execute Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors’ objections and claims of innocence | Missouri

Missouri is set to execute a man on death row Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who suggested he was wrongly convicted.

Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams, 55, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection, although the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office, which originally convicted him, has sought to have his trial thrown out. Prosecutors have expressed concerns about the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle and have said Williams did not receive a fair trial.

Although prosecutors and the victim’s family supported a plea deal that would allow Williams to avoid the death penalty, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, fought to allow the execution to go ahead.

“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 has absolutely nothing to do with this case, is the one trying to put him on the deathbed. It’s quite astonishing and extraordinary.”

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

Williams, who serves as the imam of his prison and devotes his time to poetry, has had his execution delayed twice at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri Supreme Court granted his lawyers additional time to conduct DNA testing. In August 2017, then-Republican governor Eric Greitens granted a stay of execution hours before the scheduled execution date, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’ DNA.

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

In January, St. Louis Democratic District Attorney Wesley Bell, who has championed criminal justice reforms, filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA testing that revealed Williams’ fingerprints were not on the knife.

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

Further examination of the knife, however, revealed that prosecutors’ office staff mishandled the weapon after the killing, touching 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 earlier.

In August, Williams and prosecutors reached a deal to stay his execution: He would plead not guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. His lawyers said the deal was not an admission of guilt and was intended to save his life while he searched for new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed the deal, as did the victim’s family, but the attorney general challenged it and the state Supreme Court blocked it.

“He has not lost hope”

On Monday, Williams’ lawyers argued for a stay of execution, arguing that the prosecutor in the 2001 case excluded a black juror because he looked like Williams. But the state Supreme Court denied that request. The governor also rejected a request for clemency, which noted that the victim’s family opposed the execution.

The attorney general argued in court that the prosecutor at the time denied any racial motivation for excluding black jurors and said there was nothing inappropriate about touching the murder weapon without gloves at that time.

Bailey’s office also suggested that other evidence pointed to Williams’ guilt, including testimony from a man who shared a cell with Williams and said he confessed, and testimony from a girlfriend who said she saw stolen items in Williams’ car. Williams’ attorneys, however, argued that both witnesses were unreliable, saying they had been convicted of crimes and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.

Parson defended the execution in a statement Monday, saying Williams’ attorneys “chose to muddy the waters over DNA evidence, allegations that the courts have repeatedly rejected.” He said Williams had “exhausted all avenues of legal recourse,” adding, “The facts are that Mr. Williams was convicted, not by the governor’s office, but by a jury of his peers, and upheld by the courts.”

The St. Louis district attorney “will continue to do everything in his power to save his life,” Bell said in a statement Monday night. “Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option,” he added.

Potts, Williams’ attorney, said the case would create further distrust in the criminal process: “The only way to create public confidence in the justice system is for the system to be willing to admit its own mistakes… The public is seeing the justice system at its most dysfunctional.”

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

“The few times he’s had the opportunity to show the courts evidence of his innocence and how his rights were violated, that’s when I’ve seen him most comforted… He’s trying to come to terms and find his own personal peace with what might happen in the next 24 hours. But he hasn’t 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 spoke to him recently after he was transferred to the execution-chamber facility: “He’s always in a good mood. He’s very spiritual and grounded in his faith. And he’s always checking in on 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’s a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He’s a teacher. He’s a spiritual advisor to so many other young men. His absence would be a great loss to so many people.”

Smith said she hoped her case would help the public understand that “capital punishment doesn’t work.”

“I know people who say, ‘We shouldn’t kill innocent people, but other than that, I believe in the death penalty.’ But if you believe in the system, that means you accept that innocent people are going to be killed, because the system is not perfect. It’s going to kill innocent people.”

Williams’ execution is one of five scheduled in the United States in a week. On Friday, South Carolina executed a man days after the prosecution’s key witness recanted.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.