Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who sought to have his conviction overturned and have supported his claims of innocence.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that has sparked widespread outrage as the office that originally tried the case suggested he was wrongfully convicted.
In an extraordinary move condemned by civil rights advocates and lawmakers across the US, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, pushed forward with the execution against the wishes of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office.
Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. He was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings.
But no forensic evidence linked Williams to the murder weapon or crime scene, and as local prosecutors have renounced his conviction, the victim’s family and several trial jurors also said they opposed his execution.
“We must all question any system that would allow this to occur. 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,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, Williams’s attorney, said in a statement just before the execution. “Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This should never happen, and we must not let it continue.”
Williams, who served as the imam in his prison and dedicated his time to poetry, twice had his execution halted at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri state supreme court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, the Republican governor at the time, granted a reprieve hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’s DNA.
Greitens set up a panel to review the case but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed.
In January, Wesley Bell, the Democratic prosecuting attorney in St Louis who has championed criminal justice reforms, filed a motion to overturn Williams’s conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA testing finding that Williams’s fingerprints were not on the knife.
“Ms Gayle’s murderer left behind considerable physical evidence. None of that physical evidence can be tied to Mr Williams,” his office wrote, adding: “New evidence suggests that Mr Williams is actually innocent.” He also asserted that Williams’s counsel at the time was ineffective.
Additional testing on the knife, however, revealed that staff with the prosecutors’ office had mishandled the weapon after the killing – touching it without gloves before the trial, Bell’s office said. A forensic expert testified that the mishandling of the weapon made it impossible to determine if Williams’s fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier.
In August, Williams and prosecutors reached an agreement to halt his execution: he would plead no contest to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life without parole. His lawyers said the agreement was not an admission of guilt, and that it was meant to save his life while he pursued new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed off on the agreement, as did the victim’s family, but the attorney general challenged it, and the state supreme court blocked it.
Last-ditch efforts by both Williams’s lawyers and St Louis prosecutors were unsuccessful in recent days. In a plea over the weekend, Bell’s office said there were “constitutional errors” in Williams’s prosecution and pointed to recent testimony from the original prosecutor, who said he rejected a potential Black juror because he looked like he could be Williams’s “brother”. The jury that convicted him had 11 white members and one Black member.
The governor also rejected Williams’s clemency request on Monday, which noted that the victim’s family and three jurors supported calls to revoke his death sentence. The US supreme court denied a final request to halt the execution on Tuesday, with the three liberal justices dissenting.
The attorney general argued in court that the original prosecutor denied racial motivations for removing Black jurors and asserted there was nothing improper about touching the murder weapon without gloves at the time.
Bailey’s office has also suggested that other evidence points to Williams’s guilt, including testimony from a man who shared a cell with Williams and said he confessed, and testimony from a girlfriend who claimed she saw stolen items in Williams’s car. Williams’s attorneys, however, contended that both of those witnesses were not reliable, saying they had been convicted of felonies and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.
Bailey and Parson have not commented on their decision to override the wishes of the victim’s family, but have pointed to the fact that the courts have repeatedly upheld Williams’s conviction throughout his years of appeals.
Bushnell, Williams’s attorney from the Midwest Innocence Project, praised Williams’s “evocative poetry” and said he had been a “kind and thoughtful man, who spent his last years supporting those around him in his role as imam”.
“While he yearned to return home, he is a thoughtful man who has worked hard to move beyond the anger, frustration, and fear of wrongful execution, channeling his energy into his faith and finding meaning and connection through Islam. The world will be a worse place without him,” she said.
Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’s attorneys, told the Guardian on Monday that the case would create further mistrust in the criminal process: “The only way you can create public confidence in the justice system is if the system is willing to admit its own mistakes … The public is seeing the justice system at its most dysfunctional here.”
Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she considered Williams a mentor, in an interview before his execution: “He means so much to so many people. He’s a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He’s a teacher. He’s a spiritual adviser to so many other young men.”
Smith said she hoped his case would help the public understand that “capital punishment doesn’t work”.
“I know people who say: ‘We shouldn’t kill innocent people, but other than that, I believe in the death penalty.’ But if you believe in the system at all, that means you’re OK with innocent people being killed, because the system isn’t perfect. It is going to kill innocent people.”
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said she was unaware of another case in which someone was executed after a sitting prosecutor objected and confessed to constitutional errors that undermined the conviction. Since 1973, at least 200 people sentenced to death have been exonerated, according to her group.
Williams’s execution is one of five scheduled across the US in a one-week period. On Friday, South Carolina executed a man days after the state’s main witness recanted his testimony.