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

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

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, is due to be killed by lethal injection at 6pm CT even after the office of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney, which originally convicted him, sought to have his case overturned. Prosecutors have raised concerns about the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle and have said that Williams did not get a fair trial.

Although the prosecuting office and victim’s family backed an agreement to have Williams avoid the death penalty, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, has fought to allow the execution to proceed.

“The public doesn’t want this execution to move forward. The victim’s family doesn’t want this execution to move forward and the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office doesn’t want this execution to move forward,” said Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’s attorneys, in an interview on Monday. “The attorney general’s office, who had nothing to do with this whatsoever, are the ones who are trying to lead him to the death chamber. It’s pretty startling and extraordinary.”

Williams, who has long maintained his innocence, was convicted of first-degree murder 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 no forensic evidence connected Williams to the knife or scene.

Williams, who serves as the imam in his prison, and has dedicated his time to poetry, twice had his execution halted at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri state supreme court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, the Republican governor at the time, granted a reprieve hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’s DNA.

Greitens set up a panel to review the case, but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed.

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

“Ms Gayle’s murderer left behind considerable physical evidence. None of that physical evidence can be tied to Mr Williams,” his office wrote, adding: “New evidence suggests that Mr Williams is actually innocent.” He also asserted that Williams’s counsel at the time was ineffective and that his predecessors in the St Louis prosecutors’ office had improperly removed Black jurors from serving on the trial.

Additional testing on the knife, however, revealed that staff with the prosecutors’ office had 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 if Williams’s fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier.

In August, Williams and prosecutors reached an agreement to halt his execution: he would plead no contest to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life without parole. His lawyers said the agreement was not an admission of guilt, and that it was meant to save his life while he pursued new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed off on the agreement, as did the victim’s family, but the attorney general challenged it, and the state supreme court blocked it.

‘He hasn’t given up hope’

On Monday, Williams’s lawyers pleaded for the execution to be stopped based on arguments that the prosecutor in the 2001 case had excluded a Black juror because he looked similar to Williams. But the state supreme court denied that request. The governor also rejected a clemency request, which emphasized that the victim’s family opposed execution and quoted three trial jurors, who said they had doubts about the case and supported Williams’s petition.

The attorney general argued in court that the prosecutor at the time denied racial motivations for removing Black jurors and asserted there was nothing improper about touching the murder weapon without gloves at the time.

Bailey’s office has also suggested that other evidence points to Williams’s guilt, including testimony from a man who shared a cell with Williams and said he confessed, and testimony from a girlfriend who claimed she saw stolen items in Williams’s car. Williams’s attorneys, however, contended that both of those witnesses were not reliable, saying they had been convicted of felonies and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.

Parson defended the execution in a statement on Monday, saying Williams’s attorneys “chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which courts have repeatedly rejected”. He said Williams had “exhausted due process and every judicial avenue”, adding: “The facts are Mr Williams has been found guilty, not by the governor’s office, but by a jury of his peers, and upheld by the courts.” A spokesperson for Bailey pointed to the state supreme court’s ruling that “there is no credible evidence of actual innocence.”

Bell said in a statement on Monday evening that the St Louis prosecutor’s office “will continue to do everything in our power to save his life”. He added: “Even for those who disagree on the death penalty, when there is a shadow of a doubt of any defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option.”

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

Williams, Potts added, is “someone who has never given 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 heartened … He’s trying to come to terms and reach 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 had been working with Williams since 2021 and considered him a mentor. She talked to him recently after he was transferred to the facility with the execution chamber: “He’s always in good spirits. He is very spiritual and grounded in his faith. And he always checks on other people. He wanted to know how I’m doing, because that’s just who he is.”

Related: South Carolina executes first man in 13 years despite new evidence of innocence

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 adviser to so many other young men. His absence would be a great harm upon so many people.”

Smith said she hoped his 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 at all, that means you’re OK with innocent people being killed, because the system isn’t perfect. It is going to kill innocent people.”

Williams’s son told a local reporter he was hoping for a “miracle” and would attend the execution: “I’m going to stand there firm and show my dad he’s not alone.”

Williams’s execution is one of five scheduled across the US in a one-week period. On Friday, South Carolina executed a man days after the state’s main witness recanted his testimony.

The Associated Press contributed reporting