The execution of a Missouri man convicted of killing a social worker in 1998 is set to go ahead as scheduled on Tuesday after the state Supreme Court and governor rejected repeated requests to halt the execution.
Marcellus Williams, 55, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday for the stabbing death of social worker and former newspaper reporter Lisha Gayle during a robbery in her St. Louis home in 1998.
Missouri's Republican governor, Mike Parson, a former sheriff who has never issued a pardon in a death penalty case, rejected Williams' request for pardon and commutation of his sentence to life in prison.
“Nothing in the actual facts of this case leads me to believe that Mr. Williams is innocent,” Parson said in a statement.
“Accordingly, the punishment imposed on Mr Williams will be carried out in accordance with the Supreme Court's order.”
The Missouri Supreme Court also rejected a request to vacate the death penalty entirely to allow time for a lower court to make a new ruling on whether prosecutors had racially excluded black jurors from Williams' 2001 conviction.
“Despite nearly a quarter-century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or constitutional error that would undermine confidence in the original convictions,” Judge Zell Fisher wrote in the state Supreme Court's decision.
During evidence on Aug. 28, prosecutors in the original trial said they had excluded one black potential juror from the jury pool in part because they thought the man looked too similar to Williams, something Williams' lawyers argued showed racial bias.
Williams maintains his innocence, but his defense team did not try to prove his case in state Supreme Court on Monday. Instead, they focused on exclusion during jury selection and prosecutors' alleged improper handling of the murder weapon, a large butcher knife.
His lawyers, working with groups such as the Midwest Innocence Project, have fought multiple clemency attempts. His execution was scheduled for January 2015 and August 2017 but was delayed by the state Supreme Court and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, respectively.
St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.
“Even for those who oppose the death penalty, when there is even the slightest doubt about a defendant's guilt, this irreversible punishment should not be an option,” Bell said in a statement.
Previous questions about the DNA evidence led Williams' defense to pursue further testing, which led to the case being reheard by a panel of retired judges in 2017 and a 2024 hearing to challenge Williams' guilt.
The commission never reached a firm conclusion, and the case was dropped after new tests on the murder weapon showed DNA belonging to the prosecutor who had handled the butcher knife without gloves.
Lawyers with the Midwest Innocence Project then tried to reach a compromise with prosecutors by pleading not guilty to first-degree murder, allowing Williams to receive a new sentence of life in prison without parole rather than the death penalty.
Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle's family agreed, but the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the settlement at the urging of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican.
Gayle was stabbed 43 times with a butcher knife to death on August 11, 1998, when someone broke into her home and stole her purse and her husband's laptop. Authorities said Williams' girlfriend found the purse and laptop missing in his car, and he sold the computer a few days later.
Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 when he was serving time for an unrelated crime, told prosecutors that his cellmate confessed details of the murder.
With post wire
