Marcellus Williams repeatedly insisted that he was innocentEven the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) urged Missouri Governor Michael Parson to stay the execution, and the defense appealed to the Supreme Court to prevent the sentence from being carried out, but their request was rejected.
After exhausting all other options, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, and the state Department of Corrections said he was declared dead at 6:10 p.m.
Williams, who had maintained his innocence in the fatal stabbing of Felicia Gayle in 1998 In a suburb of St. Louis, he was executed by lethal injection.
“We hope this brings closure to a case that has languished for decades,” said Missouri Department of Corrections Director Trevor Foley.
But St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell, who had asked for the conviction to be overturned, said “this outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
““Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said. in a statement. “There were multiple times in history when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the slightest doubt about his innocence, the death penalty should never be an option.”
Williams was sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a social worker and former newspaper reporter, who was found dead in her home after being stabbed 43 times with a kitchen knife during what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong.
The man, who had previously been convicted of burglary and robbery, was convicted on the testimony of a former cellmate and an ex-girlfriend, although their DNA was not found on the knife or at the crime scene.
The jury, made up of eleven white people and one black, found Williams guilty in 2001. He was sentenced to death, despite questionable evidence surrounding his case.
The defense has since maintained that the trial was marred by racial bias and a lack of concrete evidence directly linking him to the crime.
Given the anomalies, her execution was stayed by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2015, and again two years later by then-governor Eric Greitens after male DNA was discovered on the knife that did not match Williams’.
However, this year, Local prosecutors have begun proceedings to overturn his conviction and the state Supreme Court has now ruled in a unanimous decision that it would not stop the execution.
Williams’ son, Marcellus Williams Jr., and two of his attorneys witnessed the execution, according to Dana Rieck of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Missouri Department of Corrections communications director Karen Pojmann noted that no witnesses from Gayle’s family attended the execution; the family had previously said it opposed Williams’ execution.
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