Marcellus Williams Execution: Lawyer Asks Supreme Court To Intervene

A Missouri man has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after the state’s top court and governor both rejected requests to stop his scheduled execution.
Marcellus Williams, 55, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. on Tuesday for the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former newspaper reporter who was repeatedly stabbed during a burglary of her home in suburban St. Louis in 1998. Williams has long maintained his innocence.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican who has never granted clemency in a death penalty case, on Monday rejected Williams’ request to spare his life and instead sentence him to life in prison. “Nothing from the real facts of this case have led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence,” Parson said in a statement. The governor’s office has been contacted for further comment via email.
The Missouri Supreme Court also rejected a request to stay the execution so that a lower court could make a new determination about whether a trial prosecutor wrongly excluded a potential Black juror for racial reasons.
Attorneys for Williams, who is Black, have an appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Their petition argues that the issues in the case mirror that of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma death row inmate whose case the Supreme Court has agreed to review. The case will be argued in October.
“Like Richard Glossip, Marcellus Williams has been sentenced to death and comes before this Court, seeking relief, after the prosecuting authority who prosecuted him—and had previously defended that conviction—conceded constitutional error warranting relief based on previously unknown evidence developed during post-conviction proceedings,” the petition states.
“Additionally, like Glossip, the prosecuting authority not only conceded these errors, but also joins him in petitioning this Court both to stay his execution and grant his writ of certiorari. At minimum, due to the similarities with Glossip, this Court should enter a stay and hold this case for Glossip’s disposition.”
In a statement provided to Newsweek, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an attorney for Williams, said: “We have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay Marcellus Williams’ execution on Tuesday based on a revelation by the trial prosecutor that he removed at least one Black juror before trial based on his race.
“We were astonished to learn that ‘part of the reason’ for striking a juror was because the juror was a young Black man with glasses, so that he and Mr. Williams ‘looked like they were brothers.’ Under our Constitution, there is a right to a fair trial before a jury of our peers. The prosecutor removed this juror because he looked like Mr. Williams’ peer.”
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell “has confessed constitutional error due to this racial bias during jury selection,” Bushnell said. “We hope the Supreme Court will stay Mr. Williams’ execution based on this new evidence of racial bias and the other serious doubts about the integrity of Mr. Williams’ conviction.”
In an earlier statement, Bushnell had said Missouri is “poised to execute an innocent man,” calling into question “the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system.”
She added: “Given everything we know about Marcellus Williams’ case—including the new revelations that the trial prosecutor removed at least one Black juror because of his race, and opposition to this execution from the victim’s family and the sitting Prosecuting Attorney, the courts must step in to prevent this irreparable injustice.”
Bell, a Democrat who is running for Congress, filed a motion in January to vacate Williams’ conviction, writing in a motion that DNA testing of the knife used in the crime could exclude Williams as Gayle’s killer.
But days before an evidentiary hearing in August, new testing showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutor’s office who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.
Williams then agreed to enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole. Although Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle’s family signed off on the agreement, the state Supreme Court blocked it and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing.
The prosecutor in Williams’ 2001 murder case testified at the hearing in August that the trial jury was fair, though it included just one Black member. He said he had struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams.
Judge Bruce Hilton declined to vacate Williams’ conviction and death sentence earlier in September, a decision that the Missouri Supreme Court upheld on Monday.
Bell is planning to appeal the state Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, his spokesman Chris King said. King has been contacted for further comment via email.
“There are too many questions about the evidence in this case,” Bell wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “It would be a grave mistake to proceed with his execution without fully addressing these concerns.”
The Midwest Innocence Project, the NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have championed Williams’ case. Also, more than 1.3 million signatures have been collected on two petitions calling for his execution to be halted.
The rejection of his clemency request sparked outrage on social media.
“It’s outrageous that Missouri is so close to executing Marcellus Williams,” Sister Helen Prejean wrote on X on Monday night. “He was convicted at a trial where prosecutors intentionally struck at least one Black person from the jury pool. Witnesses were paid to point the finger at Marcellus. His DNA is not on the murder weapon.”
Williams’ fate “rests with the federal courts, where finality is often valued above accuracy, truth, and justice. Please join me tonight in praying for Marcellus and his legal team. They will need all the support they can get.”
Martin Luther King III, the son of the late civil rights icon, wrote: “Marcellus Williams’ execution would be a travesty and a miscarriage of justice. His questionable conviction–including DNA evidence pointing to his innocence–makes a clear case that Gov. Parson must halt this execution. The state cannot–must not–take an innocent life.”
If Williams’ execution goes ahead, he will be the third man put to death by the state this year.
He has twice faced execution before. He was about a week away from being executed in January 2015 when the state Supreme Court withdrew his execution warrant, allowing time for his attorneys to pursue additional DNA testing.
And in August 2017, he was just hours away from being executed in August 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, halted it indefinitely and formed a board of retired judges to examine the case. Last year, Parson dissolved the board tasked with reviewing Williams’ case before it reached a conclusion and ended the stay of execution.