Marcellus Williams is set to be executed on Tuesday night. A prosecutor raised concerns about his murder conviction, pointing to new evidence, but the US Supreme Court denied his request to delay the execution without explaining their decision, which is standard for emergency cases.
In two of Williams’ appeals, there were no dissenting opinions. However, in a third appeal, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed that they would have supported a request to delay the execution. The 55-year-old man is scheduled to undergo lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT at the state prison located in Bonne Terre.
The US Supreme Court’s decision followed the Missouri Supreme Court and the governor’s refusal to delay the execution just a day earlier. Williams’ legal team has launched multiple appeals, citing new evidence that includes claims of bias in jury selection and contamination of the murder weapon before the trial.
A jury found Williams guilty for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a 42-year-old journalist, who was brutally stabbed 43 times, with the murder weapon left embedded in her neck.
Wesley Bell, the current prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, has expressed doubts about the conviction secured by his predecessor, raising alarms about potential violations of Williams’s constitutional rights and suggesting that he might be innocent. Additionally, court documents indicate that the victim’s husband opposes the imposition of the death penalty.
The Midwest Innocence Project has supported Williams’s case, with his legal representatives arguing in court that executing him would be a “shocking injustice” that highlights “systemic issues that extend far beyond Mr. Williams’s individual situation.”
“The ever-present undercurrent of residual doubt as to Mr. Williams’ innocence plagues this case, even as his execution looms. Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence were secured through a trial riddled with constitutional errors, racism, and bad faith, much of which only came to light recently,” his defense team wrote in an emergency request to delay the execution.
Williams seized upon new information regarding the mishandling of the murder weapon before the trial commenced. Recently, fresh testing revealed that the knife contained DNA from two individuals connected to the prosecution of his case. Furthermore, a trial attorney has confessed to having handled the knife multiple times without wearing gloves.
Williams’s defense team alleged that an attorney involved in the trial acknowledged having dismissed a potential juror partly due to their race, which would violate Supreme Court guidelines.
However, the state disputes this assertion. The attorney quickly responded, “No, absolutely not,” when questioned about the racial basis for the juror’s dismissal, clarifying that the decision was made because both he and Williams wore glasses and had similar striking eyes.
“He struck this potential juror in part because he thought Williams and this potential juror looked similar, but not because he was black,” the state wrote in court filings.
For over twenty years, Williams has been on death row, facing imminent execution on several occasions. However, it now seems that his planned lethal injection is set to proceed this Tuesday at a state facility in Bonne Terre, Missouri.