Missouri Man Executed After Long Fight for Exoneration

Marcellus Williams, who was convicted of a 1998 murder in suburban St. Louis, maintained he was innocent. But the courts and the governor were not persuaded.

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on Tuesday evening by lethal injection, over the objections of the local prosecutor whose office obtained Mr. Williams’s murder conviction in 2003.

Mr. Williams, who for decades maintained his innocence, had in recent days sought clemency from the governor and a stay of execution from the State Supreme Court. But on Monday, both the governor, Mike Parson, and the State Supreme Court turned him down, and on Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court, his last hope, declined to intervene.

He was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. at a state prison in Bonne Terre, the Missouri Department of Corrections said in a statement.

Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Tricia Rojo Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project, said it was unjust to execute a man when the prosecutor’s office had admitted it was wrong and had fought to overturn the death sentence. “The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with finality over truth, justice and humanity,” she said.

“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” the local prosecutor, Wesley Bell, said in a statement. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty.”

Over the years Mr. Williams, 55, had received stays of execution — one in 2015 and one in 2017 — but neither led to his conviction’s being thrown out.

A law enacted in 2021 gave him another path to challenge his conviction in the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a well-known newspaper reporter, in her suburban St. Louis home. Under the law, prosecutors can bring a motion to overturn a conviction if they believe there has been a miscarriage of justice. Mr. Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, reviewed Mr. Williams’s case and filed such a motion last January.

The law has been used only a handful of times. In the three cases that proceeded to the hearing stage, judges agreed to exonerate the defendants in question. But Mr. Williams’s case turned out to be different.

Mr. Bell’s 63-page motion contended that there had been several violations of Mr. Williams’s constitutional rights during the investigation and the trial. In the filing, Mr. Bell asserted that a defense lawyer had not presented mitigating evidence that could have spared Mr. Williams the death penalty and that a prosecutor had improperly rejected Black potential jurors, resulting in a jury with 11 white members and one Black member. Mr. Williams was Black, and Ms. Gayle, the victim, was white.

Mr. Bell, a Democrat who recently won the Democratic primary for a congressional seat, also wrote that there was ample reason to believe that Mr. Williams was innocent. He detailed multiple issues with the credibility of the two key witnesses against Mr. Williams and noted that Mr. Williams was not the source of footprints or hairs found at the crime scene, nor of DNA found on the murder weapon.

Mr. Williams did sell a laptop computer that was stolen from Ms. Gayle’s home, but Mr. Bell said there was evidence that he had received the computer from his girlfriend, who became one of the two witnesses against him in the belief that she would receive leniency in her own criminal cases, he said. Both witnesses died in the intervening years.

While the motion by Mr. Bell’s office wended its way through the court system, the state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican who was facing his own primary election challenge, asked the State Supreme Court to set an execution date for Mr. Williams. The court scheduled the execution for Sept. 24.

A hearing on Mr. Bell’s motion was scheduled for August. But just before that date, his office received a new analysis of the DNA on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife. Instead of pointing to an unknown suspect, which would have bolstered the case for Mr. Williams’s innocence, the analysis showed that the knife had been handled by a prosecutor and an investigator at the trial.

The finding led Mr. Bell to back away from the assertion that Mr. Williams was innocent. Instead, he offered Mr. Williams a deal that would have taken him off death row. Ms. Gayle’s widower approved of the deal, but Mr. Bailey, the attorney general, objected. He said that the law that had allowed Mr. Bell to bring the motion to overturn did not allow him to come up with a new sentence.

The State Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Bailey, saying that the judge, Bruce Hilton, had to hold the hearing after all. At the hearing, Mr. Bell’s office focused on the claims of constitutional violations, questioning the original prosecutor in the case about why he had handled the murder weapon without gloves and why he had struck Black prospective jurors from the jury pool.

The prosecutor, Keith Larner, testified that in one case he had excluded a prospective Black juror because he closely resembled the defendant. “They looked like they were brothers,” he said.

He also said that the knife had already been tested and that it was not understood at the time that touch could leave traces of DNA on evidence.

First Judge Hilton and then the State Supreme Court rejected Mr. Bell’s arguments, saying that multiple courts and hearings had found that Mr. Williams was guilty and that there was no credible evidence of constitutional violations. Supporters of Mr. Williams, including the N.A.A.C.P., the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Representative Cori Bush of Missouri and Sir Richard Branson, the music magnate and death penalty opponent, called for clemency.

Governor Parson, a Republican, declined those calls on Monday, saying that Mr. Williams’s guilt was a settled matter.

Mr. Williams became a Muslim while in prison and took the name Khaliifah. He appeared in court in recent weeks in the white skullcap that signifies Islamic devotion, and he chose to have an imam present with him in the execution chamber.

When he was offered the chance to write a final statement to be released by the Missouri Department of Corrections, Mr. Williams wrote, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!!!”