By Jeremy Allen, Executive Editor
(Source Atlanta Daily World)
“All praise be to Allah in every situation.”
Those were the final words spoken by Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams before he was executed by the state of Missouri by lethal injection on Sept. 24, 2024, shortly after 7 p.m. EST.
He was given a five-gram dose of pentobarbital that coursed through his veins, in accordance with the state of Missouri’s lethal injection protocol and was pronounced dead a few moments thereafter.
Despite attempts from hundreds of thousands of online petitioners, his attorney, the prosecutor, and even members of the victim’s family to commute his lethal injection, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson and the Missouri Supreme Court denied Williams’ clemency on Monday. On Tuesday, hours before his scheduled execution, the U.S. Supreme Court also declined to stop it. The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said they would have granted Williams a stay, but the sum of the Supreme Court did not, and they offered no explanation for the decision, as is customary in emergency docket cases.
“The public doesn’t want this execution to move forward. The victim’s family doesn’t want this execution to move forward, and the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office doesn’t want this execution to move forward,” said Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’ attorneys
Ever since his conviction for the Aug. 11, 1998, murder of Lisha Gayle, a former police reporter for the St. Louis Dispatch, Williams had maintained his innocence. Gayle was killed during a burglary at her home in a St. Louis suburb, where she was stabbed 43 times with a kitchen knife taken from her own home.
Her killer entered her home – on a private, gated street – in the morning through the front door after breaking a glass window on the door. When Gayle, 42 years old, finished her shower and came downstairs, she was confronted by the burglar and brutally murdered. Her husband, a physician, found her body on the floor of their foyer upon his arrival home that evening and called 9-1-1.
Police said they found bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, a knife sheath, and the suspect’s hair on Gayle’s shirt, hands, and the floor. The suspect left the house with Gayle’s purse and jacket, and her husband’s laptop.
Despite having all of this forensic evidence, none of it connected back to Williams. His fingerprints and hair didn’t match what police collected from Gayle’s home.
Twice in the last 10 years Williams has had his execution halted. During the most recent halt, Gayle’s husband signed off on avoiding the death penalty in favor of life in prison while Williams pursued another appeal.
In his initial trial, Williams was not granted his constitutional rights to be tried by “a jury of his peers.” Instead, the prosecutors fought to keep Black jurors off the trial and the makeup of the jury was 11 white people and just one Black person. Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney in St. Louis, argued that Williams’ initial counsel was ineffective in arguing the for further DNA evidence to exonerate him, and Bell hinted at prosecutorial mis-conduct due to the previous prosecuting team forcing the jury to be racially imbalanced. Prosecutors dismissed one Black juror because “he looked like Williams,” and three trial jurors because they said they had doubts about the case and supported Williams’ petition to accept a first-degree murder plea without admitting guilt as a means to stay alive and continue fighting for his innocence.
Williams’ son, Marcellus Williams Jr., said before his father’s execution that “This is a murder.”
“Tonight, we all bear witness to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power,” Williams’ attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, said in a statement, emphasizing how prosecutors have “zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life.”
In his reasoning for going forward with Williams’ execution, Gov. Parsons said that Williams had “exhausted due process and every judicial avenue” and that Williams’ attorneys “chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which courts have repeatedly rejected.” Additionally, Parsons said “The facts are Mr. Williams has been found guilty, not by the governor’s office, but by a jury of his peers, and upheld by the courts.”
Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she had been working with Williams since 2021 and considered him a mentor. “He means so much to so many people. He’s a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He’s a teacher. He’s a spiritual adviser to so many other young men. His absence would be a great harm upon so many people.” Until his final days, Williams served as an Imam, spiritually advising other prisoners and counseling them through his faith.
But on Sept. 24, 2024, all of the 26 years of fighting, all of the petitioning, and all of the public outrage still couldn’t save Williams. He took his final breath, and was put to death unjustly, according to all the evidence – evidence that even convinced the victim’s husband that Williams was, at the very least, underserving of the death penalty.
By many accounts, Williams’ death was a miscarriage of justice. It’s probably that an innocent man was killed over Gayle’s murder. It’s possible that William’s was indeed Gayle’s killer, but there were several instances in this decades-long appeal process that showcased how Williams was unfairly tried (everything from the crime scene investigators’ bare-handed handling of the murder weapon to the dismissal of Black jurors). But dismissing all of what is “possible” or “probable,” it is undeniably true is that a death sentence in a case with so many injustices and unanswered questions is yet another example of a failed system — one not designed to protect Black men. This time, the failures cost Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams his life.
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