The state of Missouri is set to kill Marcellus Williams tonight. Williams has always maintained his innocence in the 2001 killing of St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Lisha Gayle during a robbery. The jurors, prosecutors and victim’s family are all supporting Williams’s bid for clemency, which has been denied by Missouri’s Republican governor and state Supreme Court. “What we see is a system that’s looking at finality over fairness, rushing to get to an execution date instead of taking the time to stop this execution and look at the merits of what is being argued,” says Williams’s attorney Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, who is now seeking a last-minute reprieve and reassessment of the case from the U.S. Supreme Court.
