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The Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Mike Parson have refused to halt Tuesday’s execution of a death row inmate who prosecutors say is innocent. His fate now rests with the U.S. Supreme Court, with less than 24 hours to go before he is to die by lethal injection.

“Mr. Williams has exhausted all due process and legal remedies, including more than 15 hearings attempting to prove his innocence and overturn his conviction,” Parson said in a statement.

“No jury or court, including at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, has ever found Mr. Williams’ claims of innocence valid. Ultimately, his conviction and death sentence were upheld. Nothing in the actual facts of this case has led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence, and as such, Mr. Williams’ sentence will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted of murdering Felicia Gayle, a former journalist who was found stabbed to death in her home in 1998. Williams has long maintained his innocence. And in an unusual move, St. Louis County’s top prosecutor filed a motion in January to overturn Williams’ 2001 conviction and sentence.

But that motion was denied. With new information about possible evidence contamination, prosecutor Wesley Bell and Williams’ attorneys recently filed a joint request with the Missouri Supreme Court to send the case back to a lower court for a “more extensive hearing” on the request in January by Bell, a Democrat now running for Congress.

Williams’ case raises the specter of a potentially innocent person being executed — an inherent risk of the death penalty. At least 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have later been exonerated, including four in Missouri, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Williams is expected to die by lethal injection at approximately 6 p.m. CT on Tuesday.

The NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have called on Parson to halt Williams’ execution. The governor previously revoked a stay of execution in the case ordered by his predecessor, allowing plans to execute Williams to proceed.

According to the state’s judiciary, the court considered several questions.

The first question is whether the prosecutor in Williams’ 2001 trial removed a potential juror from the jury “as a result of discriminatory intent.”

Williams’ lawyers have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, based on “newly discovered evidence from the prosecution’s testimony” last month.

During a hearing on a motion to dismiss on August 28, a prosecutor in Williams’ trial admitted that he had removed a potential juror from the jury pool because, like Mr. Williams, the potential juror was black, Williams’ attorneys wrote in an emergency request to the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

During Monday’s hearing at the Missouri Supreme Court, Williams’ attorney Jonathan Potts alleged that the prosecutor rejected the potential juror “in part because he was a young black man with glasses.”

“There was a racial component to it,” Potts said.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office disputed this idea, arguing that the prosecution did not intend to eliminate potential jurors because of their race.

“What did he say when he was asked directly, ‘Did you hit somebody in part because the reason you hit somebody was because you’re black?’ He said no, absolutely not,” Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said during Monday’s hearing. “And he explained that that would be a violation.”

Another question the court considered was whether sufficient evidence had been presented that the prosecution “engaged in bad faith in destroying potentially favorable evidence,” according to the state judiciary.

That includes “whether the prosecutor destroyed DNA evidence on the murder weapon by touching it without gloves.”

Ultimately, the state Supreme Court unanimously decided not to halt the execution of Marcellus Williams because the prosecutor “failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence Williams’ actual innocence or constitutional wrongdoing at the original trial, which undermines confidence in the original trial’s verdict,” the opinion said. The opinion also stated that “because this Court dismisses this appeal on the merits, the motion for a stay of execution is dismissed as moot.”

In a statement following Monday’s decision, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an attorney for Williams, said the “courts must intervene to prevent this irreparable injustice.”

“Missouri is on the verge of executing an innocent man, an outcome that calls into question the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system,” she said.

Bell said in his own statement Monday that he and other advocates will continue the fight to save Williams’ life.

“Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, the irreversible punishment of execution should not be an option if there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt,” Bell said.

In their joint plea, attorneys for Bell and Williams argue that the St. Louis County court failed to consider newly disclosed evidence that contradicts the prosecution’s statements in Williams’ 2001 trial and in his earlier appeals.

The prosecution, which handled Williams’ trial, argued in its January motion that DNA testing of the murder weapon could eliminate Williams as Gayle’s killer. But the argument fell apart last month after new DNA testing revealed that the murder weapon had been misfired, tainting evidence that was supposed to exonerate Williams and complicating his quest to prove his innocence.

Attorneys for both sides “received a report indicating that the DNA on the murder weapon belonged to an assistant district attorney and an investigator who had handled the murder weapon without gloves prior to trial,” according to a summary of the case.

“However, the court concluded that there was no new evidence sufficient to overturn the conviction or establish Williams’ innocence.”

Williams’ attorneys said the prosecution’s contamination of DNA evidence before Williams’ trial violated his due process rights. They joined with the county’s current top prosecutor in asking the Missouri Supreme Court to vacate the district court’s decision and send the case back to give both sides time to present evidence and the court enough time to carefully consider the case.

Attorneys for Bell and Williams are seeking to overturn the conviction because of “overwhelming evidence” showing that Williams’ trial was unfair, said one of his attorneys, Tricia Rojo Bushnell.

The prosecution has also raised other concerns about Williams’ conviction, including the allegation that he was convicted based on the testimony of two unreliable informants who were struggling with their own legal problems and were further incentivized by a $10,000 reward.

But ultimately, a state judge ruled against Bell’s request to throw out Williams’ conviction and sentence.

“There is no basis for any court to find Williams innocent,” Judge Bruce F. Hilton wrote in his opinion, “and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder and is sentenced to death.”

The case has pitted Bell, who took office in 2018, against Republican state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is seeking re-election. Bailey had opposed Bell’s January motion, saying new DNA test results showed the evidence would not exonerate Williams.

Last month, Bell’s office announced that it had reached an agreement with Williams. Under the consent judgment approved by the court and Gayle’s family, the inmate would have entered an Alford plea of ​​guilty to first-degree murder and would have been resentenced to life in prison.

But the state attorney general’s office opposed the deal and appealed to the state Supreme Court, which blocked the agreement.

Former GOP Gov. Eric Greitens previously stayed Williams’ execution indefinitely and created a commission to review his case and decide whether to grant him clemency.

But after Parson took office, he disbanded the board that investigated Williams’ case and revoked the stay of Williams’ execution in 2023.

“This council was created almost six years ago and it’s time to move forward,” Parson said last summer. “We can spend another six years stalling and delaying, delaying justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo and not solving anything. This administration will not do that.”

According to Williams’ lawyers, this move effectively deprived Williams of his right to a fair trial.

“The Governor’s actions violated Williams’ constitutional rights and created an exceptionally urgent need for the Court’s attention,” the court documents said.

But Parsons’ decision to dissolve the Williams investigation does not mean the governor has decided whether or not Williams should be executed, spokesman Johnathan Shiflett wrote in an email to CNN earlier Monday.

“That is for the courts to decide.”

CNN’s Dakin Andone, Lauren Mascarenhas and Jennifer Hauser contributed to this report.