Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request to halt the execution of a Missouri death row inmate Marcellus Williamswho was convicted of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in a St. Louis suburb.
Williams, who has maintained his innocencewill be put to death by lethal injection at 6:00 p.m. CT.
Previous attempts to stop the execution were refused monday by the Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson. His execution is the third in Missouri this year, and one of five that will take place nationwide in a seven-day period if the remaining three are carried out as scheduled, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have granted the request to stay the execution.
Williams had faced execution twice before after his 2001 conviction for the murder of Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. First, in 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court halted execution plans and appointed a special master to review DNA tests on the handle of the murder weapon, the butcher knife used to stab Gayle 43 times and left embedded in her neck.
Williams’ attorneys said DNA experts who reviewed the results determined he was not the source of the DNA found on the knife. But the special master 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 said I called it off and appointed a panel of five retired judges to examine the DNA evidence. However, the board was disbanded by Parson in June 2023 and never issued a final report.
Given the DNA evidence and other new information in Williams’ case, St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell sought to overturn the conviction on several grounds, including the results of the DNA test and constitutional violations during the jury selection process.
But the night before the hearing was to take place, 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’ attorneys argue in a filing that the DNA results confirm she handled the knife without gloves, contaminating the evidence.
With the DNA evidence unreadable, Williams and Bell, the prosecutor, reached an agreement in which Williams would plead guilty to first-degree murder, carrying a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gayle’s family indicated they did not support Williams’ execution, according to court documents, and a judge signed off on the agreement in August. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, objected to the request.
The state Supreme Court went on to block the plan and ordered a hearing on Williams’ claims of innocence.
During last month’s proceedings, a lawyer who handled the 2001 case said he had removed a black juror candidate because he looked like Williams. When asked if he had removed the juror because of his race, the prosecutor, Keith Larner, said, “No. Absolutely not,” according to court records. Larner said he believed the jury, which consisted of 11 white people and one black person, was fair.
The prosecutor also admitted that he handled the murder weapon without gloves at least five times during witness preparation sessions prior to the trial because he was confident the investigation into Gayle’s murder had been completed.
At the end of the hearing, the St. Louis District Attorney’s Office told the court it recognized the “constitutional error of mishandling of evidence” in Williams’ trial and said “clear and convincing evidence” had been presented of numerous constitutional errors in his prosecution.
However, on September 12, the judge refused to throw away Williams’ conviction and sentence. The Missouri Supreme Court then refused relief.
To urge the Supreme Court to intervene, Williams’ attorneys had asked the justices to wait until they had decided another death penalty case involving an Oklahoma inmate that they say raises similar issues. The high court is scheduled to hear arguments Oct. 9 in The Effort of Richard Glossip to overturn his conviction due to concerns about the fairness of his trial.
“The pervasive undercurrent of residual doubt about Mr. Williams’ innocence plagues this case, even as his execution approaches,” his lawyers wrote in a filing to the high court. “Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence were obtained through a process rife with constitutional flaws, racism, and bad faith, many of which have only recently come to light.”
They called his conviction a “serious miscarriage of justice” and said his execution would be an “unthinkable, irreversible disgrace.”
Missouri officials opposed the request to stay the execution, alleging that Williams had employed a “strategy of extreme delay” in filing the claims and accusing him of attempting to “create a new 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 over baseless claims,” Bailey wrote in a document he filed with the Supreme Court.
Williams was charged more than a year after Gayle’s death. Prosecutors allege he broke into her home in University City, a St. Louis suburb, and, after hearing water running in the upstairs shower, found a butcher knife and waited. After Gayle came down the stairs, Williams attacked her, stabbing her 43 times before leaving with her purse and her husband’s laptop, law enforcement officials said.
Prosecutors said Williams also took a jacket that he used to hide the blood on his shirt. His girlfriend later noticed that he was wearing a jacket despite the summer weather, and after he took it off, she saw that Williams’ shirt was bloody, court documents said.
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 said. About 10 months after Gayle’s death, and after her family offered a reward, a man named Henry Cole, who was a cellmate of Williams’ while he was in prison on unrelated charges, claimed to have confessed to killing Gayle, prosecutors said.
