Washington— The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a bid to halt the execution of Missouri’s death row inmates Marcellus Williamswho was convicted in the 1998 stabbing death of Felicia Gayle in the suburbs of St.
Williams, who has maintain their chastityset to be killed by lethal injection at 6 pm CT.
Previous attempts to stop the execution refuse to exist by the Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Governor Mike Parson. The execution is the third in Missouri this year, and among five nationwide in seven days that three are still on schedule, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would grant a request to halt the execution.
Williams has faced execution twice before after the 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 the execution plan and appointed a special master to examine DNA testing on the handle of the murder weapon, the butcher knife used to stab Gayle 43 times and left in the neck.
Williams’ attorney said a DNA expert who reviewed the results determined that he was not the source of the DNA found on the knife. But a 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 set to be executed, then-Gov. Eric Greiten called death and appointed a panel of five retired judges to investigate the DNA evidence. However, the council was dissolved by Parson in June 2023 and never published its final report.
Faced with DNA evidence and other new information in the Williams case, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell sought to throw out the conviction on many grounds, including the results of DNA testing and constitutional violations during the jury selection process.
But the night before the evidentiary hearing was set to take place, Bell’s office received new test results showing the DNA on the handle of the knife is consistent with the prosecutor who worked on the Williams case and a former investigator with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney. office.
Williams’ lawyer said in the submission that the DNA results confirmed they handled the knife without gloves, contaminating the evidence.
With the DNA evidence destroyed, Williams and Bell, the prosecutor, reached an agreement in which Williams would enter a no contest plea to first-degree murder with a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Gayle’s family indicated they did not support sentencing Williams, according to court filings, and in August, the judge signed off on the agreement. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, denied the request.
The state Supreme Court proceeded to block the plan and ordered an evidentiary hearing on Williams’ claims of innocence.
During proceedings last month, the attorney who tried the 2001 case said he eliminated one potential Black juror because he looked like Williams. When asked if he struck the jury because of his race, prosecutor Keith Larner said, “No. Absolutely not,” according to court records. Larner said he believed the jury, made up of 11 whites and one black, was fair.
Prosecutors also admitted that they handled the murder weapon without gloves at least five times during witness preparation sessions before the trial, as they believed the investigation into Gayle’s murder was over.
At the end of the hearing, the St. Louis Prosecutor’s Office told the court that it recognized the “constitutional error of mishandling evidence” in Williams’ trial, and said “clear and convincing evidence” of many constitutional errors in the prosecution which was presented. .
Still, on September 12, the judge refuse to throw out Williams’ conviction and sentence. The Missouri Supreme Court later denied relief.
In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Williams’ attorney asked the judge to wait until he decides another death penalty case involving an Oklahoma inmate, which he said raises similar issues. The high court is ready to hear the arguments on October 9 the work of Richard Glossip to throw out his convictions out of concern for the fairness of his trial.
“The ever-present undercurrent of residual doubt as to Mr. Williams’ innocence plagues this case, even as the execution looms,” his lawyer wrote in a filing with the high court. “Mr. Williams’s conviction and death sentence have been secured through a trial riddled with constitutional error, racism, and bad faith, most of which have only recently occurred.”
He called his conviction a “serious miscarriage of justice” and said executing him would be an “irreparable and irreversible travesty.”
Missouri’s top officials opposed the request to cancel the execution, saying that Williams had engaged in an “extreme delaying strategy” to bring the lawsuit and accused him of trying to “produce another emergency through dilatory tactics.”
“The state of Missouri, the victims of crime, whose cases have dragged on for decades without resolution, and the entire criminal justice system are harmed by endless lawsuits,” Bailey wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.
Williams’ was charged more than a year after Gayle’s death. Prosecutors claim he broke into her home in University City, a suburb of St. Louis. After Gayle came down the stairs, Williams attacked and stabbed her 43 times, then left with her husband’s wallet and laptop, law enforcement officials said.
Prosecutors said Williams also took the jacket he used to hide the blood on his shirt. Her boyfriend later noticed that she was wearing a jacket despite the hot weather, and after she took it off, she noticed that Williams’ shirt was covered in blood, according to court filings.
The girlfriend also testified that she saw a laptop in the car and a wallet in the trunk, and claimed Williams confessed to killing Gayle, according to court records. About 10 months after Gayle’s death, and after the family offered a monetary reward, a man named Henry Cole, who was Williams’ cellmate while he was in jail on unrelated charges, pleaded guilty to killing Gayle, prosecutors said.
