A man has been executed in Missouri despite questions about the integrity of the case and the victim’s family saying he should be spared.
Marcellus Williams, 55, was found guilty in 2003 of killing Felicia ‘Lisha’ Gayle, a former newspaper reporter who was stabbed to death in her home in 1998.
He maintained his innocence for 21 years, and the prosecutor’s office that secured his murder conviction went on to express doubts about the integrity of the case - including that key evidence may have been contaminated.
But Williams was executed on Tuesday evening, according to the state's Department of Corrections.
The US Supreme Court, the last body that could have halted the execution, declined to intervene in the case hours before he was put to death by lethal injection at a prison in Bonne Terre.
St Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, whose office handled the original prosecution, had sought to block the execution due to questions about the original trial.
Marcellus Williams was killed today by the state of Missouri for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s a shameful day for Missouri, and a shameful day for Governor Mike Parson, who failed in his duty to protect an innocent man from injustice.
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) September 24, 2024
In court papers, Mr Bell questioned the reliability of the two main trial witnesses.
He also concluded that prosecutors improperly excluded black jurors on the basis of race and noted that new testing found no trace of Williams' DNA on the murder weapon. Williams was African American.
Subsequent tests revealed DNA on the knife from a prosecutor and an investigator who worked on the case, and handled the weapon without gloves.
In Williams' petition for clemency made to the Supreme Court, his lawyers noted that Ms Gayle's own family thought that he should not be executed, given doubts about his guilt, and that they had approved of his life-in-prison plea deal made in August.
Mr Bell said in a written statement after Williams’ execution that "if there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option."
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, a lawyer with the Innocence Project who helped represent Williams, wrote in a statement that "the execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri's obsession with 'finality' over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost."
British billionaire Richard Branson is among those who have also vocally opposed Williams’ execution.
"He’s an innocent person," he told the BBC.
"Even the prosecuting council have told the governor they should not. This man is innocent.”
The contamination of the knife led prosecutors and Williams' attorneys to reach an agreement in August calling for him to enter a no-contest plea and receive a sentence of life in prison, instead of the death penalty.
The state Supreme Court blocked the deal at the request of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. A state judge upheld the conviction earlier this month, finding that the lack of evidence on the knife was not enough to establish his innocence.
The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed that decision on Monday.
In a rare move, the three liberal justices on the US Supreme Court - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson - said on Tuesday they disagreed with the conservative majority and would have granted a stay.
Missouri Governor Mike Parson, a Republican, also turned down Williams' last-ditch request for clemency on Monday.
"We hope this gives finality to a case that has languished for decades, revictimising Ms Gayle's family over and over again," Mr Parson said in a statement after the execution. "No juror nor judge has ever found Williams' innocence claim to be credible."
Laurence Komp and Laine Cardarella, with the Federal Public Defender Office in the Western District of Missouri, who also represented Williams, said in a written statement that they were baffled as to why the "admitted racial discrimination" in Williams' trial was left unaddressed.
His public defenders said Williams adopted the name Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels after converting to Islam. The corrections department released his handwritten final statement in which he said: "All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!"
