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After a string of courts failed to intervene and the state’s governor declined to offer clemency, Missouri prison officials executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday evening for a 1998 murder he said he did not commit.
The state-sanctioned killing was not supported by the family of the victim, former newspaper reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, who was stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. In August, Picus’s husband Dan told court officials and representatives of state Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office that while he believed Williams was guilty, he did not want to see Williams executed.
It was Bailey’s actions that cleared the way for Williams’s execution. In mid-August, a St. Louis County Circuit Court judge approved a deal between Williams and the county’s prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, that would have resentenced Williams to life in prison. Bailey scoffed at the deal and intervened to stop it.
On Monday evening, Gov. Mike Parson declined to offer Williams clemency, and, over the dissent from the court’s three more liberal justices, on Tuesday afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.
Missouri’s execution of Williams puts the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: With four states slated to conduct four executions by the end of this week, the country will soon reach its 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. While public support for capital punishment continues to decline and juries are voting far less to impose capital punishment, officials in states like Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma continue to schedule executions — including in cases like Williams, where questions about the underlying conviction and its fairness persist — Democrats scrubbed their long-standing goal of ending capital punishment from their platform this year. To date, 200 people on death row have been exonerated: a rate of 1 exoneration for every 8 executions carried out.
In the days leading up to Williams’s execution, more than 1 million people contacted Parson’s office asking that he spare Williams’s life, and billionaire abolitionist Richard Branson took out a full-page ad in the Kansas City Star asking readers to do the same. In denying to offer clemency, Parson criticized the media as biased and said that nothing from the “real facts” of the case lead him to believe Williams was innocent.
Rage at the execution bubbled up online Tuesday evening, with Williams’s last statement and pieces of his poetry going viral after he was killed. “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!!!” Williams wrote.
Missouri killed Williams despite lingering questions about the fairness of his 2001 trial. In January, Bell filed a motion seeking to vacate Williams’s conviction, saying that the paucity of evidence against Williams had “cast inexorable doubt” on the case.
Among the issues that Bell has cited was the handling of the murder weapon without protective gloves by the prosecutor who tried the case, which tainted the evidence and made it impossible to extract from it any potential DNA left by the killer. None of the crime scene evidence linked Williams to the killing. The prosecutor’s contamination of the evidence unconstitutionally deprived Williams of a fair trial, Bell argued.
During an evidentiary hearing in August, that now-retired prosecutor, Keith Larner, admitted to handling the weapon barehanded on at least five occasions before the trial, which he said was his normal practice. Larner said he thought it was acceptable to do so because he had decided, based on an investigator’s assertion, that whoever killed Picus had worn gloves during the attack. There is no evidence in the case to confirm this suspicion.
Bell also pointed to Larner’s striking of potential jurors at least in part because they were Black. Using race as a basis to strike jurors is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said. Court records reveal that Larner struck six of the seven Black potential jurors from service. In explaining his decision to strike one of them, Larner testified last month that he did so because the man and Williams “looked like brothers, like familial brothers, not like Black people.”
At every step of the way, Bailey has intervened to argue that the conviction was righteous, that Larner had done nothing wrong, and that Williams should be executed. Williams’s ordeal is just the latest in a string of cases where Bailey has deployed the power of his office to defeat claims of wrongful conviction and even to keep court-exonerated people locked in prison.
Despite Bell’s concession that constitutional error had rendered Williams’s conviction unreliable, and despite Dan Picus’s desire that the state not go through with its plans, Bailey has insisted that his actions represent justice and that Williams and his lawyers have been on a crusade to mislead the public and free a murderer. “The public has been deceived every step of the way,” the attorney general said in an August press release. “That is why the truth of this matter must get out.”
On September 12, Circuit Court Judge Bruce Hilton ruled that there was no legal reason to vacate Williams’s conviction.
In a flurry of subsequent legal action, lawyers working with the Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, along with attorneys representing Bell sought relief in a series of other courts, including the federal district court, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Missouri Supreme Court, to no avail.
Although the federal appeals court denied Williams’s attempts to appeal a lower court decision based on procedural rules, Judge Jane Kelly wrote a concurring opinion, expressing concern that the underlying issues in the case “call into question the fundamental fairness of Williams’ proceedings.”
“The hardest thing to explain, and what we cannot understand, is how rote application of a process to protect finality outweighs finding truth and achieving fairness.”
In a statement after Williams’s execution, attorney Larry Komp, with the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Kansas City, which also represented Williams, highlighted the ways the system failed to address serious issues raised in his case.
“It is hard to explain how admitted racial discrimination is ignored and never meaningfully addressed. It is hard to explain how a prosecutor can admit that he contaminated evidence his entire legal career … but nothing is done,” Komp said. “The hardest thing to explain, and what we cannot understand, is how rote application of a process to protect finality outweighs finding truth and achieving fairness.”
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