JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (AP) — A Missouri man seeking to avoid execution suffered a double setback Monday: Both the state Supreme Court and the governor rejected a request to cancel his planned lethal injection.
Marcellus Williams is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday for the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle. The social worker and former newspaper reporter was stabbed multiple times during a break-in at her home in a St. Louis suburb.
Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, rejected Williams’ request for clemency to spare him the death penalty and instead sentence him to life in prison. Almost simultaneously, the Missouri Supreme Court also rejected a request to set aside the execution so that a lower court could re-examine whether a prosecutor wrongfully excluded a potential black juror on racial grounds.
Williams’ lawyers can still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Williams, 55, has maintained his innocence, but his lawyer did not pursue that claim in state Supreme Court on Monday, instead focusing on alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged improper handling of the murder weapon.
The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, upheld a lower court ruling that had rejected Williams’ arguments.
“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or proof of constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original verdict,” Justice Zel Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court decision.
Parson said Williams had been given ample legal opportunity to prove his innocence and accused Williams’ lawyers of trying to “obfuscate the situation surrounding DNA evidence” with claims that the courts have repeatedly rejected.
“None of the actual facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence,” Parson said in a statement. “Therefore, Mr. Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”
Parson, a former sheriff, has never granted clemency in a death penalty case.
St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell has sought to overturn Williams’ conviction because of doubts about his guilt. He plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.
“Even for those who oppose the death penalty, irreversible execution should not be an option when there is even the slightest doubt about a defendant’s guilt,” Bell said in a statement.
Williams’ case was supported by the Midwest Innocence Project.
“Missouri is on the verge of executing an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” said Tricia Bushnell, an attorney with the Midwest Innocence Project.
Williams’ execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.
This is the third time Williams has been executed. He was less than a week away from execution in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court has cancelled itto give his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA tests.
In August 2017, he was just hours away from being executed when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, a stay granted And a committee appointed of retired judges to investigate the case. But this body never came to a conclusion.
Questions about DNA evidence also led Bell requests hearing Williams’ guilt. But days before the hearing on August 21, new tests showed that the DNA on the knife came from employees of the public prosecutor’s office who had handled it without gloves after the original tests in the crime lab.
Because there was no DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with prosecutors: In exchange for a new life sentence without parole, Williams would enter a new plea to premeditated murder.
Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at the urging of Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to face a Evidence hearingwhich took place on August 28th.
The prosecutor in the 2001 murder case testified at the August hearing that the jury was fair despite having only one black member on the panel. He said he rejected a potential black juror in part because he looked too much like Williams – a statement that Williams’ lawyers said showed an inappropriate racial bias.
Hilton decided on September 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. That decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court on Monday.
Prosecutors in the original case against Williams said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times as she came down the stairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to hide blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.
Prosecutors also relied on testimony from Henry Cole, who was in a cell with Williams in 1999 when Williams was incarcerated on other charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the murder and provided details about it.
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Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.
