Missouri is set to sentence a man to death on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who say he was wrongly convicted.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, will likely be killed by lethal injection even after the St. Louis County district attorney’s office, which originally convicted him, tried to have his case thrown out. Prosecutors have raised concerns about the lack of DNA evidence linking Williams to the 1998 murder of Lisha Gayle and have said Williams did not receive a fair trial.

Although prosecutors and the victim’s family supported a deal to spare Williams the death penalty, Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has pushed hard to allow the execution to go forward.

“The public does not want this execution to go ahead. The victim’s family does not want this execution to go ahead and the St. Louis County Attorney’s Office does not want this execution to go ahead,” Jonathan Potts, one of Williams’ attorneys, said in an interview Monday. “The attorney general’s office, which had nothing to do with this, is the one trying to lead him to the execution chamber. It’s quite shocking and extraordinary.”

Williams, who has long maintained his innocence, was convicted of the first-degree murder of Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Williams was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing some of her belongings, but no forensic evidence linked Williams to the knife or the crime scene.

Williams, who serves as an imam at his prison and has devoted his time to poetry, has seen his execution twice postponed at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri Supreme Court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, then the Republican governor, granted a stay just hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA tests on the knife that found no trace of Williams’ DNA.

Greitens appointed a panel to investigate the matter, but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded the panel and insisted that the execution go ahead.

In January, Wesley Bell, the Democratic prosecutor in St. Louis who has advocated criminal justice reform, filed a motion to overturn Williams’ conviction. Bell cited repeated DNA testing showing that Williams’ fingerprints were not on the knife.

“Ms. Gayle’s killer left behind substantial physical evidence. None of that physical evidence can be linked to Mr. Williams,” his office wrote, adding that “new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is in fact innocent.” He also alleged that Williams’ defense attorney at the time was ineffective and that his predecessors at the St. Louis District Attorney’s Office wrongly removed black jurors from the trial.

However, additional tests on the knife showed that employees of the district attorney’s office had mishandled the weapon after the killing — touching it without gloves before the trial, Bell’s office said. A forensic expert testified that the mishandling of the weapon made it impossible to determine whether Williams’ fingerprints could have been on the knife earlier.

In August, Williams and prosecutors reached a deal to halt his execution: He would plead no contest to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. His attorneys said the agreement was not an admission of guilt and was intended to preserve his life while he sought new evidence to prove his innocence. A judge signed the agreement, as did the victim’s family, but the attorney general challenged the deal and the state Supreme Court blocked it.

“He hasn’t given up hope”

On Monday, Williams’ attorneys moved to halt the execution, arguing that the prosecution in the 2001 case excluded a black juror because he resembled Williams. But the state Supreme Court denied that request. The governor also rejected a request for clemency that highlighted the victim’s family’s opposition to the execution.

The attorney general argued in court that the prosecutor at the time denied there was a racial motive for removing black jurors and that there was nothing improper about touching the murder weapon without gloves.

Bailey’s office has also suggested that other evidence points to Williams’ guilt, including testimony from a man who shared a cell with Williams and said he confessed, and testimony from a friend who claimed to have seen stolen items in Williams’ car. Williams’ attorneys, however, argued that both witnesses were unreliable, saying they had been convicted of crimes and were motivated to testify by a $10,000 reward offer.

Parson defended the execution in a statement on Monday, saying that Williams’ attorneys “chose to muddy the waters on DNA evidence, claims the courts have repeatedly rejected.” He said Williams had “exhausted due process and all legal remedies,” adding: “The facts are that Mr. Williams was found guilty, not by the Governor’s office, but by a jury of his peers, and the courts have affirmed that.”

Bell said in a statement Monday night that the St. Louis District Attorney’s Office “will continue to do everything in our power to save his life.” He added: “Even for those who disagree with the death penalty, when there is even a shadow of doubt about a defendant’s guilt, the irreversible penalty of execution should not be an option.”

Potts, Williams’ attorney, said the case would create even more distrust in criminal justice: “The only way to create public confidence in the justice system is for the system to be willing to admit its own mistakes … The public is seeing the justice system at its most dysfunctional here.”

Williams, Potts added, is “someone who never gave up hope.”

“The few times he’s had the opportunity to show the courts evidence of his innocence and how his rights have been violated, I’ve seen him most encouraged … He’s trying to come to terms and come to his own personal peace with what could happen in the next 24 hours. But he hasn’t given up hope,” Potts said.

Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she has worked with Williams since 2021 and considers him a mentor. She spoke with him recently after he was transferred to the execution chamber facility: “He’s always cheerful. He’s very spiritual and grounded in his faith. And he’s always checking in on other people. He wanted to know how I was doing, because that’s just who he is.”

Smith added: “He means so much to so many people. He’s a friend, a father, a grandfather, a son. He’s a teacher. He’s a spiritual advisor to so many other young men. His absence would be a great harm to so many people.”

Smith said she hoped his case would help the public understand that “the death penalty doesn’t work.”

“I know people who say, ‘We shouldn’t kill innocent people, but otherwise I believe in the death penalty.’ But if you believe in the system at all, that means you’re okay with innocent people being killed, because the system is not perfect. It’s going to kill innocent people.”

Williams’ execution is one of five scheduled to take place in the U.S. in a week. South Carolina executed a man on Friday, days after the state’s key witness recanted his testimony.

The Associated Press contributed to the reporting