Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request to block the execution of a Missouri death row inmate. Marcellus Williamswho was convicted of the 1998 stabbing death of Felicia Gayle in a St. Louis suburb.
Williams, who has maintained his innocenceis scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. CT.
Previous efforts to stop the execution have been refused Monday The Missouri Supreme Court and Republican Gov. Mike Parson have decided to execute him. His execution is the third in Missouri this year, and among five that will take place nationwide in a seven-day period if the other 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 already been sentenced to death twice after his 2001 conviction for the murder of Gayle, a social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. First, in 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the execution plan and appointed a special expert to review DNA testing on the handle of the murder weapon, the butcher knife that was used to stab Gayle 43 times and that remained lodged 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 judge sent the case back to the Missouri Supreme Court, and a second execution date was set for August 2017.
Then, hours before Williams was executed, then-Governor Eric Greitens, canceled it and appointed a panel of five retired judges to investigate the DNA evidence. The committee was, however, disbanded by Parson in June 2023 and never released its final report.
Faced with DNA evidence and other new information in Williams’ case, St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell sought to overturn the conviction on numerous grounds, including the DNA test results and constitutional violations during the jury selection process.
But the night before the scheduled hearing to review the evidence, Bell’s office received new test results indicating that DNA on the knife handle was consistent with that of a prosecutor who worked on Williams’ case and a former investigator with the St. Louis County District Attorney’s Office.
Williams’ attorneys said in a filing that DNA results confirmed they handled the knife without gloves, contaminating evidence.
With the DNA evidence spoiled, Williams and Bell, the prosecutor, reached a deal in which Williams would plead guilty to first-degree murder and face a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gayle’s family said they did not support Williams’ execution, according to court documents, and in August a judge signed off on the deal. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, opposed the request.
The state Supreme Court then ruled block the plan and ordered a hearing to consider evidence regarding Williams’ claims of innocence.
At last month’s trial, a lawyer who argued the 2001 case said he dismissed a potential black juror because he looked like Williams. When asked if he dismissed the juror because of his race, prosecutor Keith Larner said, “No, absolutely not,” according to court documents. Larner said he thought the jury, which consisted of 11 white people and one black person, was fair.
The prosecutor also admitted to handling the murder weapon without gloves at least five times during witness preparation sessions before the trial because he believed the investigation into Gayle’s murder was over.
At the end of the hearing, the St. Louis district attorney’s office told the court that it acknowledged “constitutional error of mishandling of evidence” in Williams’ trial, and said there had been “clear and convincing evidence” of numerous constitutional errors in his prosecution.
However, on September 12, the judge refused to throw away Williams was convicted and sentenced. The Missouri Supreme Court later denied him relief.
In urging the Supreme Court to intervene, Williams’ lawyers asked the justices to wait until they have ruled on another death penalty case involving an Oklahoma inmate, which they say raises similar issues. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 9. Richard Glossip’s efforts to overturn his conviction due to concerns about the fairness of his trial.
“The lingering doubt about Mr. Williams’ innocence hangs over this case, even as his execution looms,” his lawyers wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court. “Mr. Williams’ death sentence was obtained after a trial marred by constitutional errors, racism, and bad faith, much of which has only recently come to light.”
They called his conviction a “grave miscarriage of justice” and said his execution would be an “unthinkable and irreversible travesty.”
Senior Missouri officials have opposed the request to halt the execution, saying Williams engaged in a “strategy of extreme delay” in filing the requests and accusing him of trying to “manufacture another emergency through delaying tactics.”
“The State of Missouri, crime victims whose cases continue for decades without resolution, and the criminal justice system are all harmed by endless litigation of meritless claims,” Bailey wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court.
Williams was charged more than a year after Gayle’s death. Prosecutors say 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 downstairs, Williams attacked her and stabbed her 43 times, then left with her purse and her husband’s laptop, law enforcement said.
Williams also took a jacket, which he used to cover up the blood on his shirt, prosecutors said. His girlfriend later noticed he was wearing a jacket despite the summer weather and, after removing it, saw that Williams’ shirt was stained with blood, according to court documents.
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 show. About 10 months after Gayle’s death, and after her family offered a cash reward, a man named Henry Cole, who was Williams’ cellmate when he was in prison on unrelated charges, claimed to have confessed to killing Gayle, prosecutors said.
