Missouri Supreme Court Rejects Marcellus Williams’s Bid to Block Execution

The governor of Missouri on Monday turned down a bid for clemency for a man scheduled to be executed this week for murder, and a short time later the state’s highest court rejected the man’s latest legal challenge, all but clearing the way for his execution on Tuesday night.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the man, Marcellus Williams, is expected to be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Central time at the state prison in Bonne Terre.

Mr. Williams, found guilty of murder 21 years ago, has been fighting his conviction for decades, and this year he won the support of the prosecutor’s office that brought the original case. But the state attorney general maintained that Mr. Williams, now 55, was guilty, and the legal battle between the state and the county has been playing out for months in Missouri’s courts.

In a statement accompanying his decision on clemency, Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, said, “Mr. Williams has exhausted due process and every judicial avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to argue his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury nor court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, have ever found merit in Mr. Williams’ innocence claims.”

The clemency decision and the ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court came hours after a hearing before the court in which Mr. Williams’s lawyers argued that his rights were violated during his trial in 2003.

In its opinion, the court noted that the prosecutor who had moved to have Mr. Wiliams exonerated had more recently backed away from its claims that Mr. Williams was innocent. “Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any showing of a constitutional error undermining confidence in the original judgment,” the opinion said.