After years of preventing to show his innocence, 55-year-old Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams was executed in Missouri on Tuesday, forsaking a touching and easy message as his final assertion.
Prosecutors, Williams’ protection attorneys and the sufferer’s household agreed that his homicide trial had been mishandled and that his life ought to have been spared. A groundswell of on-line supporters had referred to as out the dearth of proof towards him, and Williams had maintained that he was not concerned within the 1998 homicide for which he’d been convicted.
Regardless of that, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) denied his request for clemency.
“All reward be to Allah in each state of affairs!!!,” Williams wrote in a ultimate assertion that was filed with the state corrections division.
Missouri Division of Corrections
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, Williams’ legal professional, described her shopper in an announcement earlier than his dying as a “type and considerate man, who spent his final years supporting these round him in his position as Imam.”
“We are going to keep in mind him for his deeply evocative poetry and his love for and repair to his household and his neighborhood,” Bushnell mentioned. “Whereas he yearned to return dwelling, he’s a considerate man who has labored exhausting to maneuver past the anger, frustration, and worry of wrongful execution, channeling his power into his religion and discovering which means and connection by means of Islam.”
The Innocence Undertaking shared a few of Williams’ poetry on-line. He instructed the group that his most significant items have been those he wrote to help and keep in mind his fellow incarcerated individuals.
Photograph courtesy of Marcellus Williams Authorized Workforce
A predominately white jury discovered Williams responsible in 2001 for the 1998 homicide of Felicia Gayle, a reporter for the St. Louis Publish-Dispatch who was discovered useless inside her dwelling with 43 stab wounds. Williams was sentenced to dying that very same 12 months.
However his protection attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Undertaking argued in a movement to vacate his conviction that his trial was unfair, utilizing witnesses who weren’t credible and forensic proof that had no match with Williams. The St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Workplace, which tried the case in 2001, additionally mentioned the conviction needs to be overturned. Prosecutors reached an settlement with Williams’ protection crew to take him off dying row in trade for all times in jail, however the state’s legal professional basic blocked the settlement.
In response to a joint transient filed over the weekend by prosecutors and the protection, there was no forensic proof that linked Williams to Gayle’s homicide. The bloody shoe prints present in Gayle’s dwelling didn’t match Williams’ shoe measurement, the hairs that have been discovered close to her physique didn’t belong to him, and the fingerprints discovered on the kitchen knife used within the crime didn’t match his.
Present prosecutors even acknowledged the unique trial prosecutors’ “mishandling, contamination, and destruction of proof” and the racial bias that Williams had confronted in courtroom.
“Marcellus Williams needs to be alive at this time.”
– Wesley Bell, prosecuting legal professional for St. Louis County
Nonetheless, Circuit Choose Bruce F. Hilton mentioned earlier this month in his judgment that there was “no foundation for a courtroom to search out that Williams is harmless” and denied the movement to vacate his conviction.
After denying Williams’ request for clemency, Parsons criticized media protection of the case.
“The details are Mr. Williams has been discovered responsible, not by the Governor’s Workplace, however by a jury of his friends, and upheld by the Courts,” he mentioned.
In response to Bushnell, those that opposed Williams’ execution included Gayle’s household, the jurors who sentenced him and greater than 1 million involved residents and religion leaders.
“The execution of an harmless particular person is essentially the most excessive manifestation of Missouri’s obsession with ‘finality’ over fact, justice, and humanity, at any value,” Bushnell mentioned.
Wesley Bell, prosecuting legal professional for St. Louis County, mentioned in an announcement to JHB that Williams needs to be alive at this time.
“There have been a number of factors within the timeline when selections might have been made that may have spared him the dying penalty,” Bell mentioned. “If there’s even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the dying penalty ought to by no means be an choice. This consequence didn’t serve the pursuits of justice.”
A crew from the federal public defender’s workplace that labored on his case additionally launched an announcement on Tuesday, saying that they had by no means “met somebody like him, and by no means will we once more.”
“His religion was a lot part of his id and there was all the time an acknowledgment of remorse he expressed in not discovering it earlier,” the assertion continued. “Whereas he would readily admit to the wrongs he had completed all through his life, he by no means wavered in asserting his innocence of the crime for which he was put to dying tonight.”