Marcellus Williams started his legal journey in 1998, being convicted for the stabbing of Felica Gayle. Felica Gayle, a 42-year-old reporter for St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was found dead. She was stabbed in her suburban home 43 times with a butcher knife taken from the home.
Williams maintained his claim of innocence through his whole time of imprisonment, so did his family. After processing, no forensic evidence led no leads to Williams. Many local prosecutors pushed to overturn the conviction, as well as his family and friends, yet the court just did not budge.
On September 24th 2024, Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection. The court bypassed the crowds of people who sought to have his conviction overturned or even reviewed, which aggravated the public. “Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell said in a statement. “There were multiple points in the timeline when decisions could have been made that would have spared him the death penalty. If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option.”
No forensic evidence linked Williams to the weapon or the crime scene, which gained him even more supporters through the long journey. Even some of the jurors voted against his death sentence. Marcellus spent lots of his time in prison working on poetry and was the imam of his prison. His final words were “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!”
