For over 24 years, Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams has suffered on Missouri’s death row for a crime he did not commit. No evidence has linked him to the victim or crime scene. The two “incentivized informants” who testified against him were promised reward money and leniency in their own pending cases.
In 2015, Marcellus requested a DNA test, which exonerated him and pointed to another individual as the perpetrator. This year, St. Louis County Prosecution determined he is an innocent man. Despite all this, Missouri plans to execute him in less than 80 days.
A Poet and Leader: Marcellus Williams’ Life and Influence
Marcellus Williams is a lifelong poet and has become the imam (Islamic leadership position) for his community at the Potosi Correctional Center.
“I don’t have to write. In fact, there have been long periods of time that I didn’t write a piece at all,” he told the Innocence Project. “But it’s a way for me to express myself and communicate and be understood.” The Innocence Project has also published a handful of his poems.
Though he writes through many different topics and lenses, Williams has used poetry to connect with others enmeshed in the same horrifying, confusing legal system.
“If I felt that a poem would aid someone in looking at a traumatic, stressful or difficult situation in a different light from another perspective that could possibly be a step upon the path of healing, then I would write a poem for that person,” Williams also told the Innocence Project. He has written many poems for the friends and family he has inside.
The Fight for Marcellus Williams’ Life
While organizers work tirelessly to end policing violences here and across the state of Missouri, those already held hostage in the court system require a different kind of advocacy.
Negotiating confusing and predatory legal proceedings, Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty (MADP) have been mobilizing around clemency and innocence cases since 2005. As the only organization doing death penalty work here statewide, MADP navigates the third highest (per capita) execution rate in the country.
Missouri is one of 5 states with an active death penalty, and it is set to murder Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams in September unless the public can intervene.
Michelle Smith joined MADP as the Racial Justice Coordinator in 2021; this was a first and crucial step in establishing Black leadership in the organization. Smith now serves as the organization’s Co-Director. She told us, “Historically in the death penalty movement, Black folks have not been included. Religious white folks and attorneys are the most visible.”
As organizations like MADP teach, the death penalty finds a historical precedent in state-sanctioned killings like lynchings and the mass genocide of Indigenous people. Movement leadership from Black people, people of color, and formerly incarcerated individuals is incredibly vital.
As a potential ruling in dozens of different crimes that change in each state, the death penalty is an extremely subjective sentence. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, while Black people make up 14.4% of the population, they are 33.9% of people sentenced in death penalty cases.
Studies from Santa Clara Law Review and the University of North Carolina both found that death sentences were at least 3 times more likely when the victim was white. Altogether, 3 in 4 cases that resulted in a death penalty charge had white victims. Death penalty rulings operate with the same racist bias that is baked into the entire legal system.
Smith elaborated further on the deadly conditions that threaten all people experiencing incarceration: “There’s so much injustice going on in Missouri prisons: murder, torture, truly horrifying things. We exist to educate folks. A lot of people in Missouri don’t even know we have the death penalty. We killed four people last year, and two already this year.” As the Defender reported on in a recent story about Othel Moore Jr., 13 people a month die in Missouri prisons.
Deaths—even those like the torture-murder of Moore Jr.—are considered by presiding officials to be “natural” byproducts of incarceration, many never receiving state attention or trials. Education on the death penalty is not just about immediate cases of clemency but creating broader awareness about the deeply violent mindset of our legal system. Prisons do not and cannot provide rehabilitation—they cannot even guarantee safe or habitable living conditions.
News outlets too often present state murders as inevitable, objective, and just. Readers are acclimated to stories of police murdering unarmed, non-threatening people and presenting these killings as the only reasonable outcomes for public safety.
Death penalty murders are no exception; there is nothing inescapable about a well planned, government-funded killing that takes place only after someone has sat awaiting death for—on average—a decade. It is a waste of human life that becomes even more sickening when one considers how the government prioritizes murders like these over its own basic social services.
Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams’s case is a startling example of how far the court system will go to delay and ignore evidence that their ruling was hasty, incorrect, and deeply biased.
As the Innocence Project recounts, Williams’s case was decided through the testimony of two purported witnesses who were offered both reward money and leniency in their own pending cases. Neither witness was able to provide new information about the case, let alone anything verifiable or consistent with what was already known.
Many years later, in 2015, Missouri’s Supreme Court stayed Williams’s execution to review significant DNA evidence. Testing of the substantial evidence left both on the murder weapon and at the scene of the crime revealed that Williams was not involved in the killing.
Through deep court mismanagement, Williams’s case was sent back to the Supreme Court without any of this new evidence being officially brought into record. In 2017, the case was once again stayed by then-Governor Eric Grietens. In June 2023, Governor Mike Parson disbanded the board of inquiry that was supposed to review the case; he gave neither warning nor explanation.
In turn, Williams sued Mike Parson for violating both the law and his constitutional rights, and Parson then asked the Missouri Supreme Court to intervene. The Court dismissed the lawsuit in June 2024 and scheduled the execution of Williams for Sept. 24, 2024.
Earlier in 2024, the St Louis County prosecutor office’s Conviction & Incident Review Unit reviewed the evidence in Williams’s case; working with three different DNA experts, the prosecutor determined that Williams could not have committed the crime and filed a motion to vacate his conviction. Still, Williams awaits his death.
On average, four people on death row are exonerated each year. Much like in the case of Williams, almost half of these cases involved incentivized informants. Wrong convictions are rampant, and even with evidence, many lack the means for legal representation amidst a long uphill battle with the state.
The court system’s deep inefficiencies and convoluted rules actively torture those caught inside its proceedings; while a board deliberates unsuccessfully for six years on a very clear-cut matter, a human being experiences daily torment about their livelihood while held hostage in unsanitary, unsafe, and fully inhumane conditions.
Mobilizing for Justice: How You Can Help Free Marcellus Williams
This week, MADP launched a full campaign and toolkit to #FreeKhaliifah. We join MADP in this call. Organizers can complete the MADP partnership form, and anyone in the community can sign and share the #FreeKhaliifah petition or pick up fliers, posters, and yard signs from MADP.
A rally will be held outside the St. Louis County Courthouse on August 21 for Williams’s evidentiary hearing. There is a deep need for solidarity organizing around the death penalty—for organizers to see the ways that every single social issue is exacerbated by the judicial comfort with state-sanctioned murder. Every Missourian needs to understand not only that their government is openly funding and plotting murder, but that prisons are built to waste and end life.
“Capital punishment is an egregious, arbitrary and inhumane systemic response to societal failures,” Smith said. “When an innocent person is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, the egregiousness and inhumanity surpasses all rationale for such a system.”
Community organizing is the most vital tool in combating a legal system and predatory government that consistently changes its own terms.
“We have seen that in response, the greater the community outcry in the face of such injustice sends a clear message to those in power,” Smith said. “I believe this amplified message will aid in saving the life of Marcellus ‘Khaliifah’ Williams as well as further push toward abolition of the death penalty.”
