The execution of a Missouri man convicted of murdering a social worker in 1998 is expected to go ahead as scheduled Tuesday after the state’s Supreme Court and governor rejected repeated requests to quash the lethal injection.

Marcellus Williams, 55, is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday for the fatal stabbing of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former journalist, during a burglary of her St. Louis home in 1998.

Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson, a former sheriff who has never granted clemency in a death penalty case, has rejected Williams’ request to spare him and commute his sentence to life in prison.

“Nothing in the actual facts of this case has led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence,” Parson said in a statement.

“Therefore, Mr. Williams’ sentence will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

The Missouri Supreme Court also denied a request to quash the execution entirely, allowing time for a lower court to make a new decision on whether a prosecutor excluded a potential black juror for racial reasons during Williams’ 2001 sentencing.

“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in both state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or any evidence of a constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original judgment,” Justice Zel Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court ruling.

The prosecutor for the original trial said at an Aug. 28 hearing that he had removed one potential black juror from the pool, in part because he felt the man looked too much like Williams, which Williams’ attorneys said showed racial bias.

Williams has maintained his innocence, but his attorneys did not attempt to prove his claim in state Supreme Court on Monday. Instead, they focused on the exclusion during jury selection and the prosecutor’s alleged mishandling of the murder weapon, a large butcher knife.

His attorneys, along with groups like the Midwest Innocence Project, have fought for his clemency multiple times. His two previous execution dates, one in January 2015 and one in August 2017, were thrown out by the state Supreme Court and former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, respectively.

St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.

“Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option if there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt,” Bell said in a statement.

Previous questions about DNA evidence prompted Williams’ defense to seek further testing, resulting in a 2017 re-examination of the case by a panel of retired judges and a 2024 hearing to challenge Williams’ alleged guilt.

The panel never reached a definitive conclusion and the hearing was halted after new tests on the murder weapon found the DNA of a member of the prosecution who had handled the butcher knife without gloves.

Attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project subsequently compromised with the prosecution and entered a plea of ​​first-degree murder, allowing Williams to receive a new death sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle’s family agreed, but the Missouri Supreme Court still blocked the compromise at the urging of Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

Gayle was stabbed to death 43 times with a butcher knife on August 11, 1998, when someone broke into her home and stole her purse and her husband’s laptop. Authorities say Williams’ girlfriend saw the missing purse and laptop in his car and sold the computer a few days later.

Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams when he was in prison on unrelated charges in 1999, told prosecutors that his cellmate had confessed to the killing in detail.

With postal wires