Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams

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After a flurry of last-ditch efforts and press, Marcellus Williams was executed by the State of Missouri for a 1998 murder conviction that has been called into question.

Washington Post:

Williams, 55, was pronounced dead at the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point.

After two last-minute execution reprieves starting almost a decade ago, momentum to reexamine Williams’s decades-old conviction gathered from unlikely sources, including the local prosecutor from the office that convicted him. Williams received an outpouring of support from legal groups such as the Midwest Innocence Project and a member of Congress. The family of the victim in the 1998 St. Louis stabbing came to oppose Williams’s execution.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay Williams’s execution. The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — disagreed and said they would have granted the request to halt the execution.

In a statement after the high court’s decision, an attorney for Williams listed people who had opposed his execution and fought for his removal from death row, including the St. Louis County prosecutors who “now admitted they were wrong and zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life.”

“That is not justice,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell said in a statement. “And we must all question any system that would allow this to occur. The execution of an innocent person is the most extreme manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over truth, justice, and humanity, at any cost.”

But for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Gov. Mike Parson, Republicans who opposed efforts to vacate Williams’s conviction, the state long ago met its burden in finding Williams guilty.

The NAACP, which had supported Williams’s attempt to leave death row, called the execution a lynching.

“Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent Black man,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “When DNA evidence proves innocence, capital punishment is not justice — it is murder.”