Supreme Court’s Conservatives Let Missouri Execute Man Despite Prosecutor’s Doubts

On Tuesday, Marcellus Williams was executed for a 2003 murder, which he maintained he did not commit

Despite objections from the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office, jurors involved in his trial, and the victim’s family, Marcellus Williams was executed Tuesday evening in Missouri at Potosi Correctional Center. Hours before the execution was set to take place, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the stay of execution, with the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting.

In his final statement written and signed on Sept. 21, Williams wrote (via KMOV), “All Praise Be to Allah In Every Situation!!!”

Williams, who maintained his innocence, was one of five men scheduled to be executed in the span of seven days; Freddie Owens was executed in South Carolina last Friday, Travis Mullis is also scheduled to die Tuesday in Texas, and, on Thursday, Alan Eugene Miller is scheduled to be executed in Alabama, while Emmanuel Littlejohn faces lethal injection that same day in Oklahoma.

“Tonight, Missouri will execute an innocent man, Marcellus ‘Khaliifah’ Williams,” Williams’ attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell said in a statement prior to the execution. “The victim’s family opposes his execution. Jurors, who originally sentenced him to death, now oppose his execution. The prosecutor’s office that convicted and sentenced him to death has now admitted they were wrong and zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life. More than one million concerned citizens and faith leaders implored Governor [Mike] Parson to commute Marcellus’s death sentence. Missouri will kill him anyway.”

“That is not justice. And we must all question any system that would allow this to occur,” she continued. “The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost.”

In 2003, Williams was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of social worker and reporter Felicia Gayle in the suburbs of St. Louis. Williams allegedly robbed the woman, then stabbed her to death, hiding her purse and husband’s laptop in the trunk of his car. Two witnesses sealed his fate: a girlfriend, who says she discovered the evidence (and that Williams confessed to her), and his former cellmate, Henry Cole, who said that Williams confessed to the murder while in jail for unrelated charges. The defense argued, though, that Cole and the girlfriend were felons who were out for the $10,000 reward money. Regardless, Williams was found guilty and scheduled to be executed in August 2017.

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Williams was saved at the last minute by then-Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who called for the process to be stayed in light of what the defense claimed was newly discovered DNA testing on the murder weapon, which suggested that an unknown man was, in fact, the killer — not Williams. He then formed a Board of Inquiry to look into the matter. Last year, Gov. Mike Parson (R) — who did not provide comment to Rolling Stone — dissolved that board before its work could be completed, according to the Innocence Project.

Williams’ lawyers and the Innocence Project continued to fight, though — even when it was alleged that the murder weapon was mishandled and the DNA evidence was inconclusive. Initially, both a judge and Gayle’s family agreed to resentence Williams to life without parole, but due to the urgings of Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, that agreement was blocked. On Sept. 12, that same judge upheld the death penalty for Williams, writing: “Every claim of error Williams has asserted on direct appeal, post-conviction review, and habeas review has been rejected by Missouri’s courts. There is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder, and has been sentenced to death.”

A clemency petition to the governor soon followed, as well as a petition calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to review Williams’ case and stay his execution. Lawyers also alleged that Williams’ jury was racially uneven. They wrote in a filing that the state used most of its peremptory strikes to block out six of seven potential jurors who were Black. During a last-ditch hearing on Monday, though, Michael J. Spillane, a lawyer from the attorney general’s office, denied that the jury was composed based on race, per The New York Times.

The fight for Williams’ life came down to the wire, with both sides battling it out at Monday’s hearing and the NAACP, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and United States Representative Cori Bush of St. Louis asking for mercy. Even Virgin Records Group founder Sir Richard Branson went to bat for Williams, taking out a full-page advertisement in The Kansas City Star asking citizens to advocate for the death row inmate.

Parson, the state’s Republican governor, announced Monday evening he had rejected the clemency petition and the execution would go forward as planned. “Capital punishment cases are some of the hardest issues we have to address in the Governor’s Office, but when it comes down to it, I follow the law and trust the integrity of our judicial system,” he wrote in a statement.

The governor also rejected the defense’s claims regarding DNA evidence, claiming that “DNA technology and testing before trial did not examine ‘touch DNA,’ based on standard techniques and practices at the time.” He added: “Mr. Williams’ attorneys chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which Courts have repeatedly rejected.” He also stated that Williams’ girlfriend never asked for reward money, and claimed that Williams threatened her should she go to the police.

On Tuesday evening, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court announced it would not grant Williams a stay — allowing the state of Missouri to execute him.

“As dark as today is, we owe it to Khaliifah to build a brighter future,” said his lawyer, Rojo Bushnell. “We are thankful to the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney, for his commitment to truth and justice and all he did to try to prevent this unspeakable wrong. And for the millions of people who signed petitions, made calls, and shared Khaliifah’s story.

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“Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue.”

This is a developing story…