Missouri Governor Mark Parson Just Lynched a Black Man

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams has been executed in Missouri, despite requests from prosecutors and the family that he was innocent.

The Governor, as well as state AG Andrew Bailey, did not care.  They know that their political base likes lynching, and so they gave them a lynching:

Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday, despite objections from prosecutors who sought to have his conviction overturned and have supported his claims of innocence.

Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, was killed by lethal injection, ending a legal battle that has sparked widespread outrage as the office that originally tried the case suggested he was wrongfully convicted.

In an extraordinary move condemned by civil rights advocates and lawmakers across the US, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, pushed forward with the execution against the wishes of the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office.

Williams was convicted of the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, a social worker and former St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. He was accused of breaking into Gayle’s home, stabbing her to death and stealing several of her belongings.

But no forensic evidence linked Williams to the murder weapon or crime scene, and as local prosecutors have renounced his conviction, the victim’s family and several trial jurors also said they opposed his execution.

………

Williams, who served as the imam in his prison and dedicated his time to poetry, twice had his execution halted at the last minute. He was days away from execution in January 2015 when the Missouri state supreme court granted his attorneys more time for DNA testing. In August 2017, Eric Greitens, the Republican governor at the time, granted a reprieve hours before the scheduled execution, citing DNA testing on the knife, which showed no trace of Williams’s DNA.

Greitens set up a panel to review the case but when Mike Parson, the current Republican governor, took over, he disbanded that board and pushed for the execution to proceed.

Just a note here, if your behavior looks callous and stupid when compared to the actions of rapist former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, you are wrong.

There is a special place in hell for these folks.