A death row inmate named Marcellus Williams came into the national spotlight in the week before his execution. Viral TikTok videos pointed out discrepancies in his case and his possible innocence. People publicly protested his death sentence: They made phone calls, sent faxes, and held up signs in front of courthouses. None of their efforts could change the result.
On September 24, Marcellus Williams was executed for a 1998 murder he may not have committed.
Williams was Black. The victim was white. From the beginning, the Missouri case was fraught with questionable witness testimony, unclear DNA evidence, and racial bias.
Since his conviction in 2001, Williams always maintained his innocence, one of his attorneys said. The victim’s family, and even a prosecutor on the case, wanted Williams to live.
Williams’s situation captured local attention in Missouri for years. But days before his execution date, social media went wild trying to save him from death row. Millions of people learned Williams’s story.
It began in 1998.
1998: A killing with no leads
Twenty-six years ago, a former journalist named Lisha Gayle was stabbed to death in her Missouri home. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.
Almost a year later, investigators still had no suspects.
In May of 1999, Gayle’s family offered a $10,000 reward for information about the killing. Only then did two people who knew Williams come forward.
An inmate who shared a cell with Williams, while Williams served jail time for a charge unrelated to Gayle’s killing, claimed that Williams had confessed to him about committing the murder.
The second informant was Williams’s girlfriend. She said that on the day of the killing, she saw blood on Williams’s shirt, as well as a purse and a laptop in Williams’s car.
Williams was arrested based on this testimony.
Williams’s attorneys pointed out that both informants were convicted of felonies and may have benefited from turning against Williams.
Messy evidence, messy investigation
When police searched Williams’s car more than a year after the murder, they found items that belonged to Gayle, according to the Associated Press. The buyer of Gayle’s husband’s stolen laptop identified Williams as the seller. But authorities never found evidence at the crime scene that linked Williams to the killing.
Williams’s attorneys have said that a shoeprint, fingerprints, and hair found at the crime scene did not match Williams. But prosecutors argued that the test results were uncertain: They neither matched Williams nor ruled him out.
The knife used in the killing was also collected as evidence at the scene. DNA testing results were unclear and remained so for the next two decades.
Murky DNA evidence
Williams’s execution was originally scheduled for 2015, but the Missouri Supreme Court postponed the date to allow more time for DNA testing.
On Williams’s new execution date in 2017, then-Missouri Governor Eric Greitens canceled it again, citing more questions about DNA evidence.
Greitens appointed a board to investigate the case, but a new governor took office in 2018: Mike Parson.
Parson dissolved the board in 2023, saying too much time had been spent on the case.
Williams was back on death row.
In August of this year, prosecutors said DNA on the knife matched an investigator who was involved in Williams’s 2001 trial.
The evidence was contaminated. The knife could no longer prove Williams’s innocence nor guilt.
In light of the mishandled evidence, Williams’s attorneys appealed his death sentence.
St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell said in January that he believed Williams was innocent and that the conviction should be overturned.
Gayle’s family also opposed Williams’s death sentence in favor of life in prison instead.
After the DNA evidence was revealed to be contaminated, lawyers from the Midwest Innocence Project reached an agreement with the prosecutor’s office that would have offered Williams a sentence of life in prison without parole.
The agreement had the support of a judge and Gayle’s family, but it was blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Questionable testimony, lack of evidence, racial bias
While Williams was on death row, the Midwest Innocence Project and the Innocence Project represented him. Both organizations advocate for people who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes.
The Innocence Project’s website said there was “far too much uncertainty” in Williams’s case for an execution to be appropriate.
The Innocence Project pointed out several other reasons why Williams should not have been on death row:
The case was based on testimony from two potentially unreliable witnesses who may have been incentivized by money.
No evidence from the crime scene connected to Williams, and key evidence — the murder weapon — was mishandled and contaminated.
Racial bias in jury selection contributed to Williams’s 2001 conviction. The prosecutor at the time, Keith Larner, is said to have removed six of seven potential Black jurors. Williams was convicted by a jury of 11 white people and one Black person.
In a court hearing in August, Larner said he had dismissed one of the potential Black jurors because he “looked similar” to Williams.
Despite the controversy surrounding Williams’s conviction, the Missouri Supreme Court blocked any action to change Williams’s death sentence.
On September 24, in Williams’s last hours, the United States Supreme Court also declined to delay the execution.
The final decision rested in Parson’s hands. He could have used his powers as governor to change Williams’s death sentence to a life sentence in prison.
Parson did not take action.
“No juror nor judge has ever found Williams’s innocence claim to be credible,” Parson said, as reported by the Associated Press.
TikTok took notice
In the weeks before his execution, the name “Marcellus Williams” became widely known.
Among the viral online content highlighting Williams’s story was a TikTok video by @xeviuniverse posted four days before Williams’s execution date.
“All people are asking for is time,” Xevi said in the video. “They’re not asking he walks out [of prison].”
In his post, Xevi encouraged his audience to spread as much awareness as possible about Williams.
It worked: the video attracted more than 10 million viewers.
Content about Williams continued to appear on social media. Creators and commenters urged people to protest Williams’s death sentence.
@yuvaltheterrible five a day for marcellus williams, faxzero dot com. #marcelluswilliams #innocenceproject #calltoaction
♬ original sound – Yuval
A TikToker named Yuval Ben-Hayun posted a video the day before Williams was scheduled to be executed. In the video, Ben-Hayun said the only person who could change the situation at that point was Missouri’s governor.
Ben-Hayun encouraged viewers to contact Parson through social media and call his phone number, although he said the governor would likely not pick up.
One workaround, Ben-Hayun said on TikTok, was to reach the governor in a way that is louder and harder to ignore than a phone call: by sending him a fax.
“We have a fax machine at our work, and trust me THEY’LL NOTICE if that thing is ringing and printing fax reports constantly,” one commenter wrote.
In his video, Ben-Hayun also shared the address of the Missouri Governor’s Mansion.
People showed up.
A video posted by Missouri journalist Joe McLean showed people lining up outside Parson’s office in the Missouri State Capitol. They slowly filed inside, delivering stacks of paper that contained hundreds of thousands of petition signatures in support of Williams.
The law at work?
People fought for Marcellus Williams.
There were informational videos, phone calls, petitions, and protests up until the minute Williams was executed.
More than a million people — including Gayle’s family and a prosecutor — opposed the decision to execute Williams.
Efforts to change the outcome were to no avail.
In Williams’s final hours, his fate was in the hands of a select few: the Missouri governor and the United States Supreme Court justices.
Criminal defense attorney Arash Hashemi said state laws determine how the death penalty is applied, and public opinion should not sway how laws are implemented.
“People don’t get to vote whether someone gets executed or not,” Hashemi said.
Hashemi said the Missouri state government argued that Williams had exhausted every legal remedy available to him, including an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
While the American legal process for determining guilt or innocence is fairly good, the system does not do a great job when initial guilty verdicts are challenged, said Michael Benza, a professor of practice at Case Western University School of Law.
Hashemi said that during the appeals process, “you’re not arguing facts anymore. You’re arguing procedure.”
In the end, Benza said, one of the problems was that Williams ran out of legal options for the courts to stop his execution.
Marcellus Williams’s Legacy
Hashemi said he believes that in future cases that resemble that of Williams, prosecutors will be held to higher standards when asking for the death penalty. They will need flawless, unquestionable evidence.
“The sad reality is that it’s really not that unusual of a case,” Benza said about Williams’s execution.
The Innocence Project shared estimates that in the United States, at least 20,000 innocent people are in prison.
Just two days after Williams was put to death, another death row inmate with a similar story was scheduled to be executed.
Emmanuel Littlejohn was convicted of a fatal 1992 shooting and sent to death row despite uncertainties about whether Littlejohn was the shooter.
People on social media tried to raise awareness and protest Littlejohn’s sentence.
Littlejohn was executed as scheduled on September 26.
Williams and Littlejohn were two of five inmates put to death in the same week. It was the highest number of weekly executions in the United States in decades, according to the Associated Press.
Hashemi said he believes Williams’s story will bring more attention to the argument of whether the death penalty should be allowed.
“I don’t know if he was an innocent man until the day he died,” Hashemi said, “but I don’t know if he should have been executed either.”