A St. Louis man has been sentenced to death for a 1998 murder that attorneys say he did not commit.

Marcellus Williams was pronounced dead by injection at 6:10 p.m. Tuesday, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court denied several last-minute requests to halt the execution. The state Supreme Court the execution was allowed to continue Monday, the same day that Governor Mike Parson refused to grant clemency.

In a final statement, Williams, who became a devout Muslim during his time in prison, gave “all praise to Allah in every situation.”

Imam Jalahii Kacem, who spent time with Williams earlier in the day, was in the room with Williams when the execution was carried out. Media witnesses at the execution said Williams appeared calm.

Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said in a statement: “Tonight we are all witnesses to Missouri’s grotesque exercise of state power. Let it not be in vain. This must never happen, and we must not allow it to continue.”

Parson said he hoped the execution would “bring final closure to a cause that has languished for decades.” He said the trial had “revictimized” the family of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was fatally stabbed in her University City home in August 1998.

Gayle’s family, who believed Williams was guilty of her murder, opposed his execution. They made no statements and none of her family were present at the Bonne Terre prison for the execution.

Williams had always maintained that he had nothing to do with Gayle’s murder. Police found some of Gayle’s belongings in a car that belonged to Williams, and he pawned a laptop computer belonging to her husband. But no forensic evidence, such as DNA, hair or fingerprints, ever connected him to the crime scene. He was convicted largely on the testimony of a former girlfriend, Laura Asaro, and a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole.

In 2017, Asaro called an activist from Kansas City, reportedly to retract her statements against Williams. But Asaro’s mother allegedly did not allow her to finish the conversation. Asaro and Cole have both since died.

St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell believed Williams was innocent of the crime, and a motion was filed to vacate the conviction in January.

He said in a statement on Tuesday that the execution was not in the interest of justice.

“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said. “If there is even a shadow of a doubt about his innocence, the death penalty should never be an option.”

He initially turned to three experts who said that unknown DNA on the handle of the knife used as the murder weapon could not have belonged to Williams. But further testing revealed that the DNA most likely belonged to two former employees of the prosecution. One of them would later admit in court that he had handled the knife without gloves several times before the trial. While those findings meant that the evidence was contaminated, they also no longer pointed to an unknown killer.

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public Radio

In an effort to save Williams’ life, his attorneys and Bell’s office an agreement has been reached in which Williams would not contest the murder charge in exchange for a life sentence. When Attorney General Andrew Bailey objected, St. Louis County Judge Bruce Hilton terminated the deal and continued with a hearing about the proposal for eviction.

With their evidence of an unknown killer thrown out, Bell’s office and Williams’ lawyers moved to argue that the knife’s handling represented a “bad-faith failure to preserve evidence.” They also alleged that prosecutors had prevented a juror from serving simply because he was black, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky. But both Hilton and the state Supreme Court agreed that the “clear and convincing evidence” required under the state law governing motions to overturn a conviction was lacking.

“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’s unanimous opinion Monday.