Marcellus Williams Executed in Missouri Despite New Evidence and Prosecutors' Request to Overturn the Conviction

Marcellus Williams/Missouri Department of Corrections

Missouri inmate Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection Tuesday, although the victim's family and prosecutor opposed his death sentence.

Marcellus, despite steadfastly maintaining his innocence, was convicted of the 1998 stabbing death of journalist Felicia Gayle in her University City, Missouri home. Williams' attorneys, in a valiant effort, argued that there was racial discrimination during juror selection and that DNA evidence in the case was mishandled. They pointed out that Black jurors were excluded from the trial and that there was no physical evidence linking Williams to the crime scene. 

The Victim-Felicia Gayle

Attorneys requested clemency from Governor Mike Parson, who denied the request. Williams' Attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, told CNN's Jake Tapper the state was prepared to kill an innocent man. She said, "They will do it even though the prosecutor doesn't want him to be executed, the jurors who sentenced him to death don't want him executed and the victims themselves don't want him to be executed. We have a system that values finality over fairness, and this is the result that we will get from that."

According to BBC, His execution had been stayed twice - once in 2017 and once in 2015 - due to the discovery of male DNA on the murder weapon that did not match Williams.

EJI reported:

["A lot of physical evidence was collected at the crime scene—including the murder weapon (a kitchen knife), bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, and hairs on the victim’s t-shirt, her hands, and the floor that did not match her or her husband—and none of it can be tied to Mr. Williams, the prosecutor wrote. 

Mr. Williams was excluded as the source of the footprints and hairs, the fingerprints, and male DNA that was recently recovered from the knife handle."

"With no direct evidence linking Mr. Williams to the crime, the State’s case depended on two unreliable witnesses—a jailhouse informant who claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him, and Mr. Williams’s girlfriend, who claimed she saw Mr. Williams with the victim’s laptop. Both implicated Mr. Williams because they wanted reward money and shorter sentences in their own cases, Mr. Williams’s counsel told The Washington Post." 

"New evidence further undermined the witnesses’ credibility, prosecutors wrote. Sworn statements from his own family state the jailhouse informant made up the story about Mr. Williams to get the reward money, and evidence emerged that Mr. Williams had gotten the laptop from his girlfriend, who had her own financial and personal motives to implicate him."

“This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt, as well as additional considerations of ineffective assistance of counsel and racial discrimination in jury selection,” the prosecuting attorney’s office wrote, “casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence.”]

Recently, the top prosecutor in St. Louis County joined Williams' attorneys in asking for the conviction to be overturned after new testimony from the 2001 trial prosecutor and recent DNA testing showed evidence contamination, according to CNN.

Williams reportedly received the lethal injection around 6 pm. CNN reported that about 100 people protested his death outside the prison. His attorneys said he adopted Islam in prison and was an imam for prisoners and a poet. His final words were "All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation"!!!

What are your thoughts on Marcellus Williams' execution?

To subscribe to Volume 82, click the link. To follow our Instagram, click here; for TikTok, click here!