The execution of a Missouri man convicted of killing a social worker in 1998 will take place as scheduled on Tuesday after the state Supreme Court and governor rejected repeated requests to repeal lethal injection.
Marcellus Williams, 55, will be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday. He is accused of stabbing to death social worker and former newspaper reporter Lisha Gayle during a 1998 burglary at her St. Louis home.
Missouri's Republican Gov. Mike Parson, a former sheriff who has never granted clemency in a death penalty case, rejected Williams' request to spare him and commute his sentence to life imprisonment.
“The actual facts of this case do not lead me to believe Mr. Williams' innocence,” Parson said in a statement.
“As such, Mr. Williams' sentence will be imposed as ordered by the Supreme Court.”
The Missouri Supreme Court also denied a request to cancel the execution entirely to give the lower court time to decide whether the trial prosecutor had excluded a potential black juror for racial reasons during Williams' 2001 sentencing.
“Despite nearly a quarter-century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original verdict,” Judge Zell Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court decision.
Prosecutors in the original trial said at an Aug. 28 evidentiary hearing that they removed a potential black juror from the group because they thought the man looked like Williams, which Williams' attorneys said showed racial bias.
Williams has insisted he is innocent, but his lawyers did not try to prove his claim in the state Supreme Court on Monday. Instead, they focused on the boycott during jury selection and the prosecution's alleged misuse of the murder weapon, a large butcher knife.
His lawyers, along with groups like the Midwest Innocence Project, have fought his clemency multiple times before. His two previous execution dates, one in January 2015 and the other in August 2017, were canceled by the state Supreme Court and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, respectively.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court's decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.
“Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of a doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible punishment of capital punishment should not be an option,” Bell said in a statement.
Previous questions about DNA evidence prompted Williams' defense to seek further testing, resulting in a panel of retired judges being formed to reexamine the case in 2017 and a hearing in 2024 to challenge Williams' alleged guilt.
The panel never reached a firm conclusion and the trial was dropped after a new test on the murder weapon found DNA belonging to a member of the prosecution office who had handled the butcher knife without gloves.
Attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project entered a no contest plea to first-degree murder in a settlement with the prosecutor’s office so that Williams could receive a new death penalty-free sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle's family agreed, but the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement at the behest of Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
Gayle was stabbed 43 times with a butcher knife and killed on Aug. 11, 1998, after someone broke into her home and stole her purse and her husband's laptop. Authorities said Williams' girlfriend noticed the missing purse and laptop in his car and she sold the computer a few days later.
Henry Cole, who had been in the same cell with Williams in 1999 when he was in prison for unrelated charges, told prosecutors that his partner had confessed to the killing in detail.
with post wire
