Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request to prevent the execution of a death row inmate in Missouri Marcellus Williamswho was convicted in 1998 of stabbing Felicia Gayle to death in a St. Louis suburb.
Williams, the protested his innocenceis scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT.
Previous attempts to prevent the execution were Monday rejected by the Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson. His execution is the third in Missouri this year and one of five nationwide within seven days if the other three executions go ahead as scheduled, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they granted the request to stay the execution.
“Tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man… The victim’s family opposes his execution. The jury that originally sentenced him to death now opposes his execution. The prosecution that convicted and sentenced him to death has now admitted they were wrong and is fighting diligently to reverse the verdict and save Mr. Williams’ life,” attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said in a statement. “This is not justice. And we all must challenge any system that allows this to happen.”
Williams has faced execution twice before, after being convicted in 2001 of murdering Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court halted the execution plans and ordered a special prosecutor to review DNA testing of the handle of the murder weapon, the butcher knife used to stab Gayle 43 times and which was lodged in her neck.
Williams’ lawyers said DNA experts who reviewed the results concluded he was not the source of the DNA found on the knife. However, the special counsel sent the case back to the Missouri Supreme Court and a second execution date was set for August 2017.
Then, hours before Williams was to be executed, then-Governor Eric Greitens has cancelled it and appointed a panel of five retired judges to examine the DNA evidence. However, the panel was disbanded by Parson in June 2023 and never released its final report.
Given the DNA evidence and other new information in the Williams case, St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell sought to overturn the conviction on numerous grounds, including the results of the DNA testing and constitutional violations during the jury selection process.
But the night before the scheduled evidentiary hearing, Bell’s office received new test results indicating that DNA on the knife handle matched that of a prosecutor who had worked on Williams’ case and a former investigator with the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office.
Williams’ lawyers said in a filing that DNA results confirmed they handled the knife without gloves, contaminating the evidence.
Because the DNA evidence was destroyed, Williams and prosecutor Bell reached a plea agreement whereby Williams would plead guilty to first-degree murder and be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gayle’s family said they would not support Williams’ execution, according to court records, and a judge signed the agreement in August. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, objected to the plea deal.
The Supreme Court of the State block the plan and ordered an evidentiary hearing on Williams’ claims of innocence.
During proceedings last month, a trial lawyer who tried the 2001 case said he had excluded a black potential juror because he looked like Williams. When asked if he had rejected the juror because of his race, prosecutor Keith Larner said, “No. Absolutely not,” according to court records. Larner said he believed the jury, which consisted of 11 whites and one black, was fair.
The prosecutor also admitted that he handled the murder weapon without gloves at least five times during witness preparation before the trial because he assumed that the investigation into Gayle’s murder was complete.
At the end of the hearing, the St. Louis District Attorney’s Office informed the court that it acknowledged the “constitutional error of mishandling evidence” in the case against Williams and that “clear and convincing evidence” had been presented of numerous constitutional errors in his prosecution.
Nevertheless, the judge said on 12 September refused to throw away Conviction and sentence of Williams. The Supreme Court of Missouri subsequently refused to reinstate him in custody.
Williams’ lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to intervene. They had asked the justices to wait to decide another death penalty case involving an Oklahoma inmate that they say raises the same issues. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 9. Richard Glossip’s efforts to overturn his conviction due to concerns about the fairness of his trial.
“The ever-present undercurrent of doubt about Mr. Williams’ innocence weighs on this case even as his execution looms,” his lawyers wrote in a motion to the Supreme Court. “Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence were obtained in a trial riddled with constitutional errors, racism, and malice, much of which has only recently come to light.”
They called his conviction a “serious miscarriage of justice” and said his execution would be an “unthinkable, irreversible farce.”
Senior officials in Missouri rejected the request to stay the execution, claiming that Williams had pursued a “strategy of extreme delay” in making the claims and accusing him of trying to “create another emergency through delaying tactics.”
“The state of Missouri, crime victims whose cases drag on for decades without resolution, and the criminal justice system are all harmed by endless litigation with baseless claims,” Bailey wrote in a petition to the Supreme Court.
Williams was charged more than a year after Gayle’s death. Prosecutors allege he broke into her home in the St. Louis suburb of University City and, after hearing water running in the upstairs shower, found a butcher knife and waited. When Gayle came down the stairs, Williams attacked her, stabbing her 43 times. He then fled with her purse and her husband’s laptop, police officials said.
Prosecutors said Williams also took a jacket with him to cover up the blood on his shirt. His girlfriend later noticed he was wearing a jacket despite the summer weather, and when he took it off, she saw that Williams’ shirt was bloody, court records show.
The girlfriend also testified that she saw the laptop in the car and the purse in the trunk, and claimed that Williams confessed to killing Gayle, court records show. About 10 months after Gayle’s death, and after her family put a bounty on her head, a man named Henry Cole, who was Williams’ cellmate when he was in prison on other charges, claimed he confessed to killing Gayle, prosecutors said.
