JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man was executed Tuesday for breaking into a woman’s home and killing her, despite demands from her family and the prosecutor who put him on death row to let him spend the rest of his life in prison.
Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle. The woman was stabbed multiple times during a break-in at her home in a St. Louis suburb.
Williams’ hopes of having his sentence commuted to life were doubly dashed on Monday when Republican Gov. Mike Parson denied him a clemency request and the Missouri Supreme Court refused to grant him a stay of execution at almost the same time. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene on Tuesday.
Williams was executed despite his lawyers raising questions about jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His clemency appeal focused heavily on Gayle’s relatives’ desire to commute Williams’ sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
“The family defines closure as the life of Marcellus,” the petition states. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”
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Last month, Gayle’s relatives gave their blessing to an agreement between the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office and Williams’ lawyers to commute the sentence to life in prison. But on appeal by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office, the state Supreme Court voided the agreement.
Williams was among those sentenced to death in five states scheduled to be executed within a week – an unusually high number that comes despite years of decline in the use of and support for the death penalty in the United States. The first death penalty was carried out in South Carolina on Friday. An inmate was also scheduled to be executed in Texas on Tuesday evening.
Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Prosecutors in Williams’ trial said he broke into her home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard the shower running and found a large butcher knife. Gayle 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. His girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. She 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 he was incarcerated on other charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the murder and provided details about it.
Williams’ lawyers responded that both the girlfriend and Cole had been convicted of serious crimes and asked for a $10,000 reward. They said fingerprints, a bloody shoe print, hair and other evidence at the crime scene did not match Williams’.
An investigator at the crime scene testified that the killer was wearing gloves.
Tuesday was Williams’ third execution date. In January 2015, he was less than a week away from being executed when the state Supreme Court canceled the execution and gave his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA tests.
In August 2017, Williams was about to be executed when then-Republican Governor Eric Greitens granted a stay. Greitens convened a panel of retired judges to investigate the case, but that panel never reached a conclusion.
Questions about DNA evidence also prompted St. Louis District Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that the DNA on the knife came from prosecutors’ employees who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.
Because there was no DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with prosecutors: Williams would plead guilty again to first-degree murder in exchange for a new life sentence without parole. A guilty plea is not an admission of guilt, but it is treated as such in sentencing.
Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle’s family agreed. But Bailey appealed, and the state Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to go through an evidentiary hearing, which took place last month.
Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all previously been rejected. That decision was affirmed by the state Supreme Court on Monday.
Lawyers for Williams, who was black, also questioned the fairness of his trial, particularly the fact that only one of the 12 jurors was black. Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said the prosecutor in the case, Keith Larner, excluded six of seven black potential jurors.
Larner testified at the August hearing that he rejected a potential black juror in part because he looked too much like Williams – a statement that Williams’ lawyers said showed inappropriate racial bias.
Larner claimed that the jury selection process was fair.
Williams was the third inmate executed in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1989.
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