Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection in Missouri yesterday after Gov. Mike Parson (R), the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court all refused to save his life. Prosecutors and the victim’s family urged that he be spared based on DNA evidence of innocence. The legal stopgaps for preventing such a tragedy all failed, underscoring a gaping hole in American criminal law: a mechanism for ensuring that people possessing proof of innocence do not lose their life or liberty at the hands of the government.

On August 11, 1998, Felicia “Licia” Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found stabbed to death at her home outside St. Louis. Forensic evidence found at the scene included fingerprints, footprints, hair and DNA on a butcher knife. The footprints and DNA did not match those of Williams, and the fingerprints were lost by the police. Still, the DNA evidence of Williams' innocence is compelling.

Williams was nonetheless convicted of murder based on two jailhouse witnesses who said Williams confessed to them. In exchange for their testimony against Williams, both secured reward money and shorter sentences in their own cases. In addition, six of the seven potential jurors who were black were stricken from the jury pool.

In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the death sentence. Two years later, then-Gov. Eric Greitens (R) granted Williams a reprieve just hours before his execution, based on new DNA testing from the handle of the murder weapon. Numerous scientific experts concluded the DNA could not have belonged to Williams, providing DNA evidence of innocence. Greitens appointed a board to investigate Williams’s request to permanently commute his sentence to life in prison. But when Parson assumed the governorship in 2023, he immediately disbanded the board before it could issue a final report, stating that it was “time to move forward” with the execution.

Meanwhile, upon learning that the knife had been contaminated by a former prosecutor who handled it without gloves, St. Louis County prosecutors offered Williams an “Alford plea,” whereby he could plead guilty without admitting to the crime, thereby commuting his sentence to life in prison. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) and the state Supreme Court both blocked the deal, and Parson later denied his clemency request. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay his execution.

Read the full article about Marcellus Williams' execution by Kimberly Wehle at The Hill.