Marcellus Williams died by lethal injection Tuesday

Those eight words, released in a statement, were the last shared by Marcellus Willliams, a devout Muslim, an imam for prisoners and a poet before he was put to death at the Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri.

Williams was convicted for the August 1998 lethal stabbing of Felicia Gayle Picus, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, but he maintained his innocence until the end. The 55-year-old was put to death by injection around 6 p.m. Tuesday.

 His attorneys filed a flurry of appeals based on what they described as new evidence, including alleged bias in jury selection and contamination of the murder weapon prior to trial. The victim’s family had asked the inmate to be spared but the Missouri’s supreme court and Gov. Mike Parson refused to grant a stay of execution.

In a statement, Parson said he hoped the execution gave Gayle’s family a sense of “finality” in a case that languished for decades. “No juror, nor judge has ever found Williams’ innocence claim to be credible,” Parson continued. “Two decades of judicial proceedings and more than 15 judicial hearings upheld his guilty conviction. Thus, the order of execution has been carried out.”

In response, the NAACP posted, via X (formerly Twitter): “Missouri lynched another innocent Black man. Governor Parson had the responsibility to save this innocent life, and he didn’t. We will hold Governor Parson accountable. When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice – it is murder.”

Also on X, Congresswoman Cori Bush wrote: “Governor Mike Parson shamefully allowed an innocent man to be executed tonight. We must abolish this flawed, racist, inhumane practice once and for all. Rest in power, Marcellus Williams.”

Forensic experts hired by Williams’ defense concluded that DNA testing on the murder weapon “excluded” Williams as the contributor of the male DNA found on the knife. Williams appellate team also noted that the bloody footprint found at the murder scene was a different size than Williams’ shoe and hair fibers found at the scene didn’t belong to Williams, Gayle or her husband’s.

Williams’ sentencing was carried out under a dark cloud of stereotypes and statistics.

The two key witnesses in his case were a jailhouse snitch with questionable motives and Williams’ former girlfriend the defense team and her family members claimed was a drug-addicted prostitute out for reward money.

The National Registry of Exonerations is an organization that has, since 1989, compiled an extensive database of cases in which the evidence against the exoneree included testimony by jailhouse informants. Under its “Snitch Watch” banner, the registry states: “Jailhouse snitch testimony, as it is commonly known, is notoriously unreliable because the incarcerated witnesses are strongly motivated to say what the prosecution wants, usually because they get substantial reductions in their own sentences in return.”

Experts say that, historically, Black defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants, especially if the victim was white, as Ms. Gayle was.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, states that the “color of a defendant and victim’s skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America.” According to the ACLU, “People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of those currently awaiting execution.”

In a letter to Gov. Parson pleading for clemency, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote: “Killing Mr. Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully convicted of killing a White lady, would quantity to a horrible miscarriage of justice and a perpetuation of the worst of Missouri’s previous.”

Williams’ trial consisted of 11 whites and just one Black person. This was, of course, no accident. The pool of possible jurors in the trial included seven African Americas and all but one was struck by prosecutors.

Usually, prosecuting attorneys are most anxious to uphold successful convictions. But, last year, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell – citing disturbing inconsistencies in Williams’ case – filed a court motion to vacate the prosecution. Last month, Bell reached an agreement with Williams. Under the consent judgment – approved by the court and Gayle’s family – Williams would enter what’s known as an “Alford Plea” of guilt to first-degree murder and be resentenced to life in prison.

However, after intense lobbying from Andrew Bailey, the state’s Republican attorney general, the Missouri Supreme Court scrapped the agreement.

Tricia Rojo Bushnell, a lawyer at the Midwest Innocence Project who has worked on Williams’ case for the past seven years, spoke about the failed agreement saying, “It is very unusual for a prosecutor to seek to vacate a murder conviction, and more unusual for a court not to agree to the prosecutor’s motion.”

Hours before his appeals were denied, Williams had his last meal which included chicken wings and tater tots. Just before 5 p.m., witnesses, including Williams’ son and two of his attorneys, were moved into the viewing area of the prison. Williams was then strapped to a gurney and, at 6: 01p.m, a lethal injection was administered. Less than 10 minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

Roughly 100 demonstrators were present on the prison grounds protesting capital punishment and Williams’ execution. 

In a statement released Tuesday, Bell wrote: “Marcellus Williams should be alive today…if there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”

Bushnell, in a statement Tuesday night, wrote: “Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power.” 

Williams’ execution was the third in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989. Harkening back to the words of Cong. Bush, it seems the “flawed, racist and inhumane practice” in Missouri is nowhere near abolishment.

Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.