Last Words of Marcellus Williams go Viral, “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation,” Why Was Marcellus Williams Executed- Details Here

Last Words of Marcellus Williams go Viral, “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation,” Why Was Marcellus Williams Executed- Details Here

Marcellus Williams, a Muslim man convicted of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in Missouri, was executed on Tuesday after spending 22 years on death row. His last words are now making rounds on social media.

His execution, the third in Missouri this year, followed years of legal challenges and appeals, including two previous stays of execution.

His last words were posted online, including by US presidential candidate Jill Stein. Williams’ last words were: “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation.”

Williams maintained his innocence, citing mishandled DNA evidence and claims of racial bias in jury selection.

 

His attorneys argued that the lack of forensic evidence linking him to the crime scene, coupled with the contamination of the murder weapon by a prosecutor who handled it without gloves after initial testing, raised serious questions about his conviction.

Despite these concerns, and the dissenting opinions of three Supreme Court justices who would have granted a stay, the Missouri governor and courts rejected his clemency pleas.

Even the victim’s family supported a life sentence, and the local prosecutor sought to overturn the conviction. While Williams’ son and lawyers witnessed the execution, no members of Gayle’s family were present.

Prominent figures, including Richard Branson, actively campaigned against the execution, highlighting concerns about Williams’ innocence.

Who was Marcellus Williams?

Williams, a Black man, was a devout Muslim, an imam for prisoners and a poet, according to his legal team.

He spent 23 years in prison, and during his time he devoted much of his time to studying Islam and writing poetry, according to The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works with people whom it believes have been wrongly convicted.

He also acted as the imam for Muslim inmates at Potosi Correctional Center and was referred to as “Khaliifah,” which means leader in Arabic.

What was Williams accused of?

In 2001, Williams was convicted for the murder of Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter and a social worker, who was found stabbed to death in her home in 1998.

During the trial, prosecutors said that Williams broke into her home on August 11, 1998, noticed the shower running and picked up a large butcher knife. When Gayle came downstairs, she was stabbed 43 times, and her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said that during that day, Williams wore a jacket to hide blood on his shirt. His girlfriend questioned why he would wear a jacket on such a hot day and later saw the stolen purse and laptop in his car. Williams sold the laptop a day or two afterwards.

Prosecutors also presented testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed for an armed robbery of a doughnut shop. Cole claimed that Williams confessed to the murder and provided specific details.

What did Williams’s defence argue?

Lawyers argued that there was no forensic evidence connecting Williams to the crime scene and that the murder weapon had been mishandled, casting doubt on the DNA evidence.

Testing showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutors’ office who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.

According to a report by The Associated Press, Williams’s defence also argued that both the girlfriend and Henry Cole had felony convictions and were seeking a $10,000 reward. They also noted that other evidence such as a bloody shoeprint and hair found at the crime scene did not match Williams’s.

According to local media reports, Williams did sell a laptop computer that was stolen from Gayle’s home, but the local prosecutor Wesley Bell said there was evidence that he had received the computer from his girlfriend. Both witnesses – his girlfriend and Cole – died in the intervening years.

Over the years, Williams was spared from executions in 2015 and 2017, but this did not result in his conviction being overturned.

Bell also said that a prosecutor had improperly rejected Black potential jurors, resulting in a jury with 11 white members and one Black member.

“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” Bell said in a statement on Tuesday. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty.”

Williams maintained his innocence for decades.

What other mechanisms were used to defend Williams?

Questions about the DNA led Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’s guilt. The date was set for August 21.

But days before the August 21 hearing, new tests revealed that the DNA found on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutor’s office.

With no DNA evidence pointing to any alternative suspects, the lawyers reached a compromise with the prosecutor’s office: Williams would enter a new no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence without parole.

A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is treated as such for the purpose of sentencing.

Judge Bruce Hilton approved the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. However, Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed, leading the state Supreme Court to block the agreement and order Hilton to conduct an evidentiary hearing.

Prosecutor Keith Larner said that he had excluded a potential Black juror because of how similar they were, saying, “They looked like they were brothers.

“Familial brothers,” he continued. “I don’t mean Black people.”

He also mentioned that the knife had already been tested and that it was not recognised at the time that touch could leave DNA traces on evidence.

Experts say that racism remains a significant issue in the US, and could have played a role in this case.

“If I’m representing some white person who kills a Black person, it’s relatively easy to get them off,” Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer and director of the UK charity 3DC told Al Jazeera.

“But if it’s a Black person who kills a white person, it is vastly harder. And that’s totally racism,” Stafford Smith, who has defended many death row prisoners, added.

“And the other element of it with Marcellus, of course, was that the prosecutor got rid of the Blacks from the jury. So you have this white jury judging a Black man.”

(With Inputs From Agencies)

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