JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – With the end of his life approaching, Missouri death row inmate Marcellus Williams was offered an opportunity to make a final statement to the world.
His words were few — neither proclaiming innocence nor admitting guilt in the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was stabbed 43 times during a burglary of her suburban St. Louis home. Williams instead seemed to express peace with his fate, writing simply: “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!!!”
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Williams' execution Tuesday has left others to debate whether it should have occurred.
Missouri's governor, attorney general and top court remain convinced of his guilt. Those who advocated for him continue to insist he was innocent. The St. Louis County prosecutor, citing lingering questions, believes Williams' sentence should have been converted to life in prison. Gayle's family, though not publicly outspoken, also joined in a request to let Williams live.
The Missouri execution, carried out at a prison in Bonne Terre, was one of five scheduled within a week in the U.S., renewing a long-running debate over how the death penalty is applied in the states.
What evidence points to Williams' guilt?
When Gayle was killed, items stolen from her home were later sold by Williams or found in his possession. A former girlfriend and an inmate who shared a cell with Williams also testified at his trial that he confessed to killing Gayle.
The ex-girlfriend told police that when Williams picked her up on the day of the Gayle's death, she noticed he was wearing a jacket even though it was hot outside, and that there was blood on his shirt, scratches on his neck and a laptop in his car. She told police that when she looked in the car's trunk the next day, she found a purse that contained Gayle's identification.
When police searched Williams' car more than a year after Gayle's death, they found a St. Louis Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator that had belonged to Gayle. Police also recovered a laptop stolen from Gayle's home from a man who had bought it from Williams.
Williams' attorneys argued that the ex-girlfriend and cellmate were convicted felons who wanted part of a $10,000 reward. Williams' former cellmate was paid a $5,000 reward. The ex-girlfriend never requested the reward, the governor's office said.
What evidence is cited for Williams' innocence?
Authorities did not find physical evidence at the crime scene linking Williams to Gayle's death.
Williams' attorneys noted that a bloody shoeprint, fingerprints and hair found at the scene did not match Williams. But a prosecutor said such tests were merely inconclusive.
The knife used in the killing also was left at the scene. A crime scene investigator testified at Williams' 2001 trial that the killer had worn gloves. But questions swirled for years about DNA testing of the knife.
The state Supreme Court canceled Williams' scheduled execution in 2015, allowing time for further DNA testing. Just hours before Williams was again scheduled to be executed in 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens also canceled the lethal injection amid DNA questions. Greitens appointed a board of retired judges to investigate the case. But the panel never reached a conclusion before Gov. Mike Parson dissolved it in 2023.
In August, new testing revealed that DNA on the knife matched that of prosecution team members who had handled it without wearing gloves. Without evidence pointing to anyone else, Williams' attorneys quit pursuing an innocence claim in court and refocused their arguments on alleged procedural errors, including that prosecutors had mishandled evidence and wrongly excluded a Black man from the jury based partly on race.
Have innocent people been executed?
There have been no verified instances of an innocent person being executed in the U.S. since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1972, but there have been at least 21 people executed despite “strong and credible” claims of innocence, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The group said that tally includes Williams, who was added to the list Wednesday.
The center’s list also includes two other Missouri men. They are Walter Barton, who was executed in May 2020 for the fatal stabbing of an 81-year-old woman, and Larry Griffith, who was executed in June 1995 for the fatal drive-by shooting of a 19-year-old man.
In addition, the center lists three current death row inmates facing execution despite strong claims of innocence: Richard Glossip, who was convicted in Oklahoma of a murder-for-hire of a motel owner; Toforest Johnson, who is set to die in Alabama for the murder of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy; and Robert Roberson, who was convicted in Texas of murdering his 2-year-old daughter.
Why not let Williams spend life in prison?
At the time of Williams' murder trial, he already had an extensive list of burglary, robbery, theft and assault convictions in other cases. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder for Gayle's death, which in Missouri can be punishable either by death or life in prison without parole. It took jurors just 90 minutes to decide that he deserved the death penalty.
St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, a Democrat who took office in 2019 and is running for Congress, cited a relatively recent Missouri law to reopen the question of Williams' guilt or innocence. Bell struck an agreement in August with the Midwest Innocence Project, which was representing Williams, that would have let Williams enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole.
Bell's position made the case highly unusual, said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which reports on problems with capital punishment and has a database of nearly 1,600 executions.
Maher said it's “highly, highly unusual, very rare" for a prosecutor to side with a prisoner who is facing execution.
But Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey objected, and courts kept in place the death sentence.
Ultimately, the execution decision rested with Parson, who could have used gubernatorial powers to convert Williams' sentence to life imprisonment.
A clemency request submitted on Williams' behalf pleaded for mercy, noting that Gayle's family also supported life imprisonment instead of death. But Parson disagreed, explaining in his own final statement on the case: “No juror nor judge has ever found Williams’s innocence claim to be credible.”
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The story has been corrected to fix the spelling of the Texas death row inmate’s last name. He is Robert Roberson, not Robertson.
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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.