Missouri Execution of Marcellus Williams Creates Rare Supreme Court Divide

Marcellus Williams’ death penalty case pitted liberal Supreme Court justices against conservative justices and the divide among the court is something rarely seen in requests for stays of execution.
Williams’ 2001 murder conviction was called into question by the current prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri, who questioned if the 55-year-old’s constitutional rights were violated. The victim’s family also opposed his execution and Williams hoped for a last-minute stay from the Supreme Court to halt his execution, something the court has only granted once this term.
Hours before Williams’ execution in Missouri was set to take place, the Supreme Court denied a petition to stay his execution. Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have granted the request, although, they did not make note of why.
The Supreme Court has ruled on nearly 30 death penalty stays in the last term and was united in their opinions in all but three cases, including Williams’. On Friday, the Supreme Court denied Freddie Owens’ request to stay his execution, but Sotomayor said she would have granted it. Days before the 46-year-old’s execution, a key witness, Steven Golden, told the South Carolina Supreme Court that he lied on the stand.
“I thought the real shooter or his associates might kill me if I named him to the police,” Golden said in a court filing.
Owens wasn’t even at the convenience store when Irene Graves, a clerk, was fatally shot in 1997, according to Golden, a co-defendant in the case. South Carolina Supreme Court rejected requests to stay his execution, calling recanted testimony “among the least reliable evidence.” Owens died by lethal injection on Friday night.
In October, the Supreme Court agreed to vacate a stay of execution for Jedidiah Murphy, a Texas man convicted of the 2000 fatal shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham. Murphy challenged the DNA testing of evidence used to convict him at his 2001 trial and the 5th Circuit of Appeals upheld a federal judge’s order delaying the execution. However, the Texas attorney general appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which sided in Texas’ favor and overturned the lower court’s stay, allowing the execution to proceed.
Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson all disagreed with the majority of the court and said they would have denied the application to overturn the stay.
It’s extremely rare for the Supreme Court to grant a stay of execution and has only happened once this term. In July, the Court granted a last-minute stay for Ruben Gutierrez, who was convicted in 1999 for killing an elderly woman in Texas during a robbery. He argues that DNA testing would prove he wasn’t involved in her murder. The Supreme Court previously halted his execution in 2020, as well.
Williams was convicted of killing Felicia Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 11, 1998. Williams’ DNA didn’t match forensic evidence that was found at the crime scene and he maintained his innocence. His attorneys argued that the witnesses used to convict him were unreliable, and in 2017, former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens appointed a board of inquiry to investigate Williams’ DNA claims.
However, when Governor Mike Parson came into office in 2023, he disbanded the board before it could issue its final report and the attorney general set a new execution date for Williams.
“We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing,” Parson said in June 2023. “This administration won’t do that.”