Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors’ push to overturn conviction.
4 min read
Williams long maintained his innocence and the killing was opposed by victim’s family, jurors and office that tried him.
Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who sought to have his conviction overturned and have supported his claims of innocence.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that has sparked widespread outrage as the office that originally tried the case suggested he was wrongfully convicted.
In an extraordinary move condemned by civil rights advocates and lawmakers across the US, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, pushed forward with the execution against the wishes of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office.
Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. He 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 murder weapon or crime scene, and as local prosecutors have renounced his conviction, the victim’s family and several trial jurors also said they opposed his execution.
“We must all question any system that would allow this to occur. The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, Williams’ attorney, said in a statement just before the execution. “Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue.”
Williams’ son and two of his attorneys watched the execution from another room, the AP reported. Williams appeared to speak with a spiritual adviser by his side in his final moments. In a written “last statement” released by corrections officials, he said: “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!!!”
Williams, who served as the imam in his prison and 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’ 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’ conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA testing finding that Williams’ 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’ counsel at the time was ineffective.
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’ fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier.
Officers patrol as protesters opposed to the execution of Marcellus Williams pray outside the state prison on 24 September 2024, in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Photograph: Zachary Linhares/AP
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.
Last-ditch efforts by both Williams’ lawyers and St Louis prosecutors were unsuccessful in recent days. In a plea over the weekend, Bell’s office said there were “constitutional errors” in Williams’ prosecution and pointed to recent testimony from the original prosecutor, who said he rejected a potential Black juror because he looked like he could be Williams’ “brother”. The jury that convicted him had 11 white members and one Black member.
The governor also rejected Williams’ clemency request on Monday, which noted that the victim’s family and three jurors supported calls to revoke his death sentence. The US supreme court denied a final request to halt the execution on Tuesday, with the three liberal justices dissenting.
The attorney general argued in court that the original prosecutor 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’ 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’ car. Williams’ 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.
Bailey and Parson have not commented on their decision to override the wishes of the victim’s family, but have pointed to the fact that the courts have repeatedly upheld Williams’ conviction throughout his years of appeals.
Culled from www.theguardian.com
