The execution of a Missouri man convicted of murdering a social worker in 1998 is scheduled to go ahead as planned Tuesday after the Supreme Court and the state’s governor rejected repeated calls to end lethal injection.

Marcellus Williams, 55, will be killed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday. He stabbed social worker and former newspaper reporter Lisha Gayle to death during a break-in at her St. Louis home in 1998.

Missouri Republican Governor Mike Parson, a former sheriff who has never granted clemency in a death penalty case, rejected Williams’ request to spare him and commute his sentence to life in prison.

“None of the actual facts of this case led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence,” Parson said in a statement.

“Therefore, Mr Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

The Missouri Supreme Court also rejected a request to overturn the execution entirely to give a lower court time to make a new decision on whether a prosecutor had excluded a potential black juror on racial grounds at Williams’s 2001 conviction.

“Despite nearly a quarter century of litigation in state and federal courts, there is no credible evidence of actual innocence or proof of constitutional error that undermines confidence in the original verdict,” Justice Zel Fischer wrote in the state Supreme Court decision.

The prosecutor in the original case said at an evidentiary hearing on August 28 that he rejected a potential black juror from the group in part because he thought the man looked too similar to Williams, which Williams’ lawyers say shows an allegation of racial bias.

Williams has maintained his innocence, but his lawyers did not attempt to prove his case in state Supreme Court on Monday. Instead, they focused on the exclusion from jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged improper handling of the murder weapon, a large butcher knife.

His lawyers, along with organizations like the Midwest Innocence Project, have fought for his pardon several times. His two previous execution dates, one in January 2015 and one in August 2017, were canceled by the state Supreme Court and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, respectively.

St. Louis County Attorney Wesley Bell plans to appeal the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, spokesman Chris King said.

“Even for those who oppose the death penalty, irreversible execution should not be an option when there is even the slightest doubt about a defendant’s guilt,” Bell said in a statement.

Previous questions about DNA evidence prompted Williams’ defense to seek further testing, leading to a panel of retired judges re-examining the case in 2017 and a hearing in 2024 challenging Williams’ alleged guilt.

The panel did not reach a clear conclusion, and the hearing was cancelled after new tests on the murder weapon revealed the DNA of a member of the prosecution service who had handled the butcher knife without gloves.

Attorneys for the Midwest Innocence Project then reached a non-contrary plea with prosecutors to the charge of first-degree murder, allowing Williams to receive a new, non-death sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Judge Bruce Hilton and Gayle’s family agreed, but the Missouri Supreme Court nevertheless blocked the compromise at the behest of Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

Gayle was stabbed 43 times with a butcher knife on August 11, 1998, when someone broke into her home and stole her purse and her husband’s laptop. Authorities said that Williams’ girlfriend saw the missing purse and laptop in his car and that he sold the computer a few days later.

Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams when he was in prison on other charges in 1999, told prosecutors that his cellmate confessed to the murder in detail.

With post wires