ST. LOUIS — The Missouri Supreme Court said an outstanding motion to vacate a conviction from the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's Office was not enough to take his execution date off the schedule.
Marcellus Williams has spent 24 years behind bars after he was convicted in the 1998 stabbing death of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and one-time St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. In June, the Missouri Supreme Court announced the execution date for Sept. 24.
Williams appealed and said the execution date should not have been set due to the pending motion from St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell's office. The court unanimously ruled that Williams' request did not meet the requirements to withdraw the execution date.
The ruling said state law does not allow for execution dates to be set while a defendant's post-conviction appeal is outstanding, not a prosecutor's appeal. Since Williams' appeal of his conviction nearly 20 years ago was already denied, the court's decision to set an execution date was authorized under state law, according to the ruling.
"The fact a prosecutor files a § 547.031 motion is not an automatic basis for a stay," Judge Zel M. Fischer wrote in the decision.
It is the first time in the state's history that an execution date was set for someone with an outstanding motion to vacate a conviction from a local prosecutor. A Missouri law passed in 2021 allowed prosecutor offices to go back and challenge prosecutions their office had previously brought, a power previously reserved for the state's attorney general.
Williams was hours from being executed in 2017 when then-Gov. Eric Greitens halted the process and ordered an investigation. Greitens, a Republican, cited new DNA testing that wasn't available at the time of the killing. It showed that DNA found on the knife used to stab Gayle matched an unknown person, not Williams, according to attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project.
After the execution was stopped, a panel of five judges was appointed to investigate the innocence claim, but after six years, no conclusion was reached. Missouri's current Republican governor, Mike Parson, issued an order in June dissolving the board of inquiry, saying it was time “to move forward.” He also lifted a stay of execution for Williams, opening the door for an execution date to be set.
A lower court is still considering Bell's motion to vacate the conviction. When the execution date was set last month, Bell's office said in a statement that his office would continue its work on the case.
"The Missouri Supreme Court has set an execution date for Marcellus Williams when our office has a pending motion before a lower court to vacate the conviction that led to Williams’ death sentence," a spokesperson from the county prosecuting attorney's office told 5 On Your Side in June. "We will proceed with the courts as we see proper and announce any actions we take with the courts after we have taken them. Until then, we will have no further comment."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
