After a string After several courts failed to intervene and the state’s governor refused to grant a pardon, Missouri prison officials executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday night for a 1998 murder he said he did not commit.

The state-sanctioned killing was not supported by the family of the victim, former newspaper reporter Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, who was stabbed to death in her suburban St. Louis home. In August, Picus’ husband, Dan, told court officials and representatives from Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office that while he believed Williams was guilty, he did not want Williams executed.

It was Bailey’s actions that paved the way for Williams’ execution. In mid-August, a St. Louis County Circuit Court judge approved a deal between Williams and county prosecutor Wesley Bell that would have resentenced Williams to life in prison. Bailey laughed at the deal and intervened to stop it.

On Monday night, Governor Mike Parson refused to pardon Williams, and on Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, despite the dissent of the court’s three more liberal justices..

Williams’ execution in Missouri brings the U.S. one step closer to a grim milestone: With four states scheduled to carry out four executions by the end of this week, the country will soon reach its 1,600th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. As public support for the death penalty continues to wane and juries vote far less frequently to impose the death penalty, officials in states like Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma continue to schedule executions — including in cases like Williams’, where questions remain about the underlying sentencing and its fairness — as Democrats ditched their long-held goal of removing the death penalty from their platform this year. So far, 200 people on death row have been exonerated, a rate of 1 acquittal for every 8 executions carried out.

In the days leading up to Williams’ execution, more than 1 million people contacted Parsons’ office asking that Williams’ life be spared, and billionaire abolitionist Richard Branson took out a full-page ad in the Kansas City Star readers to do the same. In refusing to grant a pardon, Parson criticized the media as biased and said that none of the “real facts” of the case led him to believe Williams was innocent.

Anger over the execution bubbled up online Tuesday night, with Williams’ final statement and pieces of his poetry going viral after he was killed. “Allah be praised in every situation!!!” Williams wrote.

Missouri killed Williams despite persistent questions about the fairness of his 2001 trial. In January, Bell filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction, saying the lack of evidence against Williams had cast “irreproachable doubt” on the case.

One of the problems Bell cited was the prosecutor handling the murder weapon without protective gloves, which contaminated the evidence and made it impossible to extract any DNA left behind by the killer. None of the evidence from the crime scene linked Williams to the murder. The prosecutor’s contamination of the evidence unconstitutionally deprived Williams of a fair trial, Bell argued.

During an evidentiary hearing in August, now-retired prosecutor Keith Larner admitted that he had handled the gun with his bare hands at least five times before the trial, which he said was his normal practice. Larner said he felt it was acceptable to do so because he had concluded, based on an investigator’s assertion, that the person who killed Picus had been wearing gloves during the attack. There is no evidence in the case to support that suspicion.

Bell also pointed out that Larner struck out potential jurors at least in part because they were black. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said that using race as a basis for striking out jurors is unconstitutional. Court records show that Larner struck out six of seven potential black jurors. In explaining his decision to strike out one of them, Larner testified last month that he did so because the man and Williams “looked like brothers, like family brothers, not like black people.”

Bailey has intervened at every turn to argue that the conviction was right, that Larner had done nothing wrong, and that Williams should be executed. Williams’ ordeal is just the latest in a series of cases in which Bailey has used the power of his office to refute claims of wrongful convictions and even to keep people who were acquitted by the courts in prison.

Despite Bell’s admission that a constitutional error had made Williams’ conviction unreliable, and despite Dan Picus’s wish that the state not proceed with his plans, Bailey has maintained that his actions represent justice and that Williams and his attorneys have been on a crusade to deceive the public and free a murderer. “The public has been deceived every step of the way,” the attorney general said in an August press release. “That is why the truth about this case must come out.”

On September 12, District Court Judge Bruce Hilton ruled that there was no legal reason to overturn Williams’ conviction.

In a flurry of legal proceedings, lawyers for the Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, along with attorneys representing Bell, attempted to seek redress in a number of other courts, including the federal district court, the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals and the Missouri Supreme Court, but to no avail.

Although the federal appeals court rejected Williams’ attempts to appeal a lower court decision based on procedural rules, Judge Jane Kelly wrote a dissenting opinion, expressing concern that the underlying issues in the case “call into question the fundamental fairness of Williams’ proceedings.”

In a statement after Williams’ execution, attorney Larry Komp of the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Kansas City, which also represented Williams, emphasized how the system failed to address the serious problems presented in his case.

“It’s hard to explain how recognized racial discrimination is ignored and never meaningfully addressed. It’s hard to explain how a prosecutor can admit to contaminating evidence his entire legal career … and nothing is done about it,” Komp said. “The hardest thing to explain, and the thing we can’t understand, is how the routine application of process to protect finality is trumped by the pursuit of truth and fairness.”