Missouri Supreme Court upholds execution order for man convicted of 1998 murder

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man seeking to avoid execution suffered a double setback Monday, with the state’s highest court and the governor each rejecting requests to cancel his scheduled lethal injection.

Marcellus Williams is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday for the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former journalist who was stabbed multiple times during a burglary of her suburban St. Louis home.

Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson rejected Williams’ request for clemency to spare him the death penalty and sentence him to life in prison. The Missouri Supreme Court also almost simultaneously rejected a request to set aside the execution so a lower court could make a new decision on whether a prosecutor wrongly excluded a potential black juror on racial grounds.

Williams’ lawyers still have one appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Williams, 55, has maintained his innocence. But his attorney did not pursue that charge Monday in the state’s highest court, focusing instead on alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged misuse of the murder weapon.

The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, upheld a lower court’s decision rejecting Williams’ arguments.

“Despite nearly a quarter-century of litigation in state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or showing of constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original judgment,” Justice Zel Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court decision.

Parson said Williams has had numerous legal opportunities to try to assert his innocence and accused Williams’ attorneys of trying to “muddy the waters about DNA evidence” with claims that courts have repeatedly rejected.

“Nothing in the actual facts of this case has led me to believe that Mr. Williams is innocent,” Parson said in a statement. “Therefore, the sentence imposed on Mr. Williams will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

Parson, a former sheriff, has never granted clemency in a death penalty case.

St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell has asked to overturn Williams’ sentence, citing doubts about his guilt. He plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.

“Even for those who disagree about the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible sentence of execution should not be an option,” Bell said in a statement.

Williams’ case was championed by the Midwest Innocence Project.

“Missouri is on the verge of executing an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” said Tricia Bushnell, attorney for the Midwest Innocence Project.

Williams’ execution would be the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.

This is the third time Williams has been sentenced to death. He was less than a week away from execution in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court overturned the death sentence, giving his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA testing.

He was hours away from execution in August 2017 when then-Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, granted a stay and appointed a panel of retired judges to review the case. But that panel never reached a conclusion.

Questions about the DNA evidence also led Bell to request a hearing to challenge Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the district attorney’s office who handled it without gloves after initial crime lab tests.

With no DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with the district attorney’s office: Williams would again plead no contest to first-degree murder in exchange for another life sentence without parole.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at the request of Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the deal and ordered Hilton to an evidentiary hearing, which took place on August 28.

The prosecutor in the 2001 murder case testified at the August hearing that the trial jury was fair, even though it included only one black member. He said he dismissed a potential black juror in part because he looked too much like Williams — a statement that Williams’ lawyers said demonstrated improper racial bias.

On September 12, Hilton ruled that Williams’ first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments had all been previously rejected. That decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court on Monday.

Prosecutors in Williams’ original trial said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times as she was walking downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to cover up blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he was wearing a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was imprisoned on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about it.