Supreme Court allows Missouri to execute Marcellus Williams

The Supreme Court refused to block Missouri from executing Marcellus Williams on Tuesday amid questions about the jury selection process and key evidence used in convicting him of murder in 2001.

Williams, 55, who maintains his innocence, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Tuesday at 6 p.m. CDT.

Moments before, the Supreme Court denied his emergency requests to halt the execution. The three justices appointed by Democratic presidents — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — voted to block it.

A jury convicted Williams in the 1998 murder of 42-year-old newspaper reporter Felicia Gayle, who was stabbed 43 times with the knife left lodged in her neck. 

Wesley Bell, St. Louis County’s current prosecuting attorney, does not stand behind the conviction won by his predecessor, citing concerns Williams’s constitutional rights were violated and he may be innocent. Court records show the victim’s widower also does not want the death penalty used.

The Midwest Innocence Project backed Williams’s defense, with his legal team in court filings calling his execution a “horrifying injustice” that reveals “systemic problems bigger than even Mr. Williams’ case.” 

“The ever-present undercurrent of residual doubt as to Mr. Williams’ innocence plagues this case, even as his execution looms. Mr. Williams’ conviction and death sentence were secured through a trial riddled with constitutional errors, racism, and bad faith, much of which only came to light recently,” his defense team wrote in an emergency request to delay the execution. 

Williams latched on to revelations that the murder weapon was mishandled ahead of trial. Last month, new test results indicated the knife had DNA on it belonging to two people involved in prosecuting the case. A trial attorney has also admitted to repeatedly touching the knife without gloves.

Williams’s legal team also claimed that attorney recently admitted he struck a potential juror in the case in part because they were Black, which would run afoul of Supreme Court precedent. 

The state contests that interpretation. The attorney moments later said, “No, absolutely not,” when asked if the person was struck because of their race, saying that it was because he and Williams both wore glasses and had similar piercing eyes.

“He struck this potential juror in part because he thought Williams and this potential juror looked similar, but not because he was black,” the state wrote in court filings. 

Williams has spent more than two decades on death row and has been on the cusp of execution multiple times. But it now appears his scheduled injection is set to move forward Tuesday at a state prison in Bonne Terre, Mo. 

Then-Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R) paused Williams’s execution in 2017 and charged a board with collecting evidence about whether he was innocent. Current Gov. Mike Parson (R), who succeeded Greitens, later disbanded the board and last year began a push to set an execution date. 

After the Missouri Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the execution to proceed, Parson declined to intervene to block it. 

“Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims. At the end of the day, his guilty verdict and sentence of capital punishment were upheld,” Parson said in a statement earlier Tuesday. 

The Supreme Court rarely agrees to take emergency action to block executions. It previously denied 14 requests this year while only granting one, according to an analysis by The Hill. 

Williams asserted that his case mimics one the Supreme Court is set to soon consider next: Death row inmate Richard Glossip’s trial faces similar scrutiny, and the Supreme Court has set oral arguments in his appeal for next month. 

As compared to Williams’s appeal to the high court on its emergency docket, Glossip’s case is being heard in its normal course, with a decision expected by summer 2025.