MID-MISSOURI – Marcellus Williams was executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Bonne Terre.
Although Governor Mike Parson rejected Williams’s pardon for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in St. Louis County, protesters gathered across central Missouri before his execution, calling for Parson to spare his life.
Jim Kemnna, a volunteer at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, attended a demonstration at the state capitol on Tuesday organized by the organization Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, which submitted over a million petitions to Governor Parson’s office urging him to spare Williams’ life.
“How do we teach through killing that killing is wrong? I volunteer at the Jefferson City Correction Center and the men I know there are human beings. Killing them for things they’ve done in the past, they don’t deserve that. As a state, we’re better than that,” Kemnna explained.
In Columbia, a protest took place on the lawn in front of the Bonne County Courthouse.
“If we had known that Felica Gayle was going to be killed in 1998, we would have intervened immediately to prevent it. In this situation, the murder is even more premeditated,” said Jeff Stack, one of the protesters in Columbia.
