On Tuesday, a man sentenced to death was executed in Missouri, despite objections from prosecutors who called for the conviction to be overturned and for his protestations of innocence to be supported.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that had sparked widespread outrage as the prosecutor who originally tried the case claimed he had been wrongfully convicted.
In an extraordinary move condemned by civil rights activists and lawmakers across the United States, Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey pushed for the execution against the wishes of the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office.
Williams was convicted of the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings.
However, there was no forensic evidence linking Williams to the murder weapon or the crime scene. And although the local prosecutor’s office overturned his conviction, the victim’s family and several jurors also opposed his execution.
Williams’ execution was postponed twice at the last minute. In January 2015, the execution was just days away when the Missouri Supreme Court granted his lawyers more time to conduct a DNA test. In August 2017, then-Republican Governor Eric Greitens granted a stay hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA tests on the knife that showed no trace of Williams’ DNA.
Greitens set up a commission to review the case, but when current Republican Governor Mike Parson took office, he disbanded the commission and pushed for the execution to go ahead.
In January, Wesley Bell, the Democratic district attorney in St. Louis who advocates for criminal justice reform, filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA tests that showed Williams’ fingerprints were not on the knife.
“Ms. Gayle’s killer left behind substantial evidence. None of it can be linked to Mr. Williams,” his office wrote, adding, “New evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is in fact innocent.” He also claimed that Williams’ attorney at the time was ineffective.
However, further examination of the knife revealed that prosecutors’ employees had mishandled the weapon after the murder – they had handled 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 whether Williams’ fingerprints could have been on the knife beforehand.
In August, Williams and prosecutors reached an agreement to stop his execution: he would plead guilty to premeditated murder in exchange for a new life sentence without parole. His lawyers said the agreement was not an admission of guilt and that it was to save his life while he sought new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed 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 Williams’ lawyers and the St. Louis district attorney’s office have been unsuccessful in recent days. In a plea deal over the weekend, Bell’s office said there were “constitutional errors” in the prosecution of Williams and pointed to recent testimony by the original prosecutor, who said he rejected a potential black juror because he looked like he might be Williams’ “brother.” The jury that convicted him included 11 white members and one black member.
The governor also rejected Williams’ request for clemency on Monday, saying the victim’s family and three jurors supported the request to overturn the death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final request to stay the execution on Tuesday.
The Attorney General argued in court that the original prosecutor denied racist motives for excluding black jurors and claimed that there was nothing inappropriate about touching the murder weapon without gloves at the time.
Bailey’s office has also suggested that other evidence points to Williams’ guilt, including the testimony of a man who lived in a cell with Williams and said he confessed, as well as the testimony of a girlfriend who claimed to have seen stolen items in Williams’ car. However, Williams’s lawyers have argued that both witnesses are unreliable because they have been convicted of serious crimes and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.
Bailey and Parson did not comment on their decision to comply with the wishes of the victim’s family, but pointed out that the courts had repeatedly upheld Williams’ conviction over the years of his appeal.
Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’ lawyers, told the Guardian on Monday that the case would fuel further distrust in the criminal justice system: “Public confidence in the justice system can only be strengthened if the system is prepared to admit its own mistakes… The public is seeing the justice system at its most dysfunctional.”
Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, said in an interview before his execution that she considered Williams a mentor: “He means so much to so many people. He is a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He is a teacher. He is a spiritual advisor to so many other young men. His absence would be a great loss to so many people.”
Smith said she hoped his case would help the public understand that “the death penalty doesn’t work.”
“I know people who say, ‘We shouldn’t kill innocent people, but otherwise I believe in the death penalty.’ But if you believe in the system at all, that means you’re OK with innocent people being killed, because the system isn’t perfect. It’s going to kill innocent people.”
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said she knew of no other case in which someone was executed after a sitting prosecutor objected and acknowledged constitutional errors that undermined the verdict. Since 1973, at least 200 death row inmates have been rehabilitated, according to her group.
Williams’ execution is one of five scheduled to take place in the United States within a week. On Friday, a man was executed in South Carolina, days after the state’s key witness recanted his testimony.
