Marcellus Williams’ execution is scheduled to take place as planned on Tuesday after both the Missouri Supreme Court and the state’s governor rejected requests to stay the proceedings.

A lawyer for Williams argued Monday The state Supreme Court should stay the lethal injection because a lawyer in the trial prevented a black man who he said looked like the defendant from serving as a juror. The court, however, rejected this argument.

“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,” the court said in its decision.

Williams is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday at 6 p.m. The defendant is responsible for the 1998 stabbing attack on Lisha Gayle in the St. Louis suburb of University City.

Williams, 55, has maintained his innocence, but his lawyer did not pursue that claim in state Supreme Court on Monday, instead focusing on alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged improper handling of the murder weapon.

The state Supreme Court must “right a wrong” by either finding that a prosecutor wrongly excluded a potential juror on racial grounds or by sending the case back to a lower court to resolve the issue, attorney Jonathan Potts argued on behalf of Williams.

The office of Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey argued for the execution to go ahead. The prosecutor denied that he had racial motives in rejecting potential jurors and did nothing improper – given the procedures at the time – by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it had already been examined by a crime lab, Assistant Attorney General Michael Spillane said in his arguments before the state Supreme Court.

Williams’ lawyers have also filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Williams had also asked Republican Governor Mike Parson for clemency, with the main issue being whether Gayle’s relatives wanted the sentence commuted to life without parole. However, Parson said on Monday that the execution would be carried out in accordance with the state Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Death penalties are among the most difficult issues we must address in the Governor’s office, but when push comes to shove, I abide by the law and trust in the integrity of our justice system,” Parson said in a statement Monday. “Mr. Williams has exhausted every legal avenue, including over 15 hearings attempting to prove his innocence and overturn his conviction. No jury or court, at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, has ever found Mr. Williams’ claims of innocence to be justified. Ultimately, his guilty verdict and death sentence were affirmed. None of the actual facts of this case led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence, so Mr. Williams’ punishment will be carried out as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

Parson, a former sheriff, served 11 times in office and never granted clemency. The NAACP had also called on Parson to stop the executions.

It would be the third execution in Missouri this year and the 100th since the state resumed executions in 1989.

In January 2015, Williams’ execution was scheduled to last less than a week until the state Supreme Court canceled the execution and gave his lawyers time to conduct additional DNA testing.

In August 2017, he was just hours away from being executed when then-Republican Governor Eric Greitens granted a stay after reviewing DNA evidence. There was no trace of Williams’ DNA on the knife used in the killing. Greitens convened a panel of retired judges to investigate the case. However, the governor resigned over another scandal and the panel never reached a conclusion.

Questions about DNA evidence prompted Democratic St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell to request a hearing to challenge Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new tests showed that the DNA evidence was tainted because prosecutors’ staff had handled the knife without gloves before the original trial.

The state Supreme Court wrote in its decision Monday that the DNA tests actually “undermined the prosecution’s claim of actual innocence and fully supports the district court’s finding that this evidence neither establishes the existence of another perpetrator nor excludes Williams as the killer.”

In the absence of DNA evidence, attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project reached a compromise with prosecutors: in exchange for a new life sentence without parole, Williams would enter a new plea of ​​first-degree murder.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed the agreement, as did Gayle’s family. But at Bailey’s urging, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled: blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to appear at an evidentiary hearing, which took place on August 28.

Hilton ruled on September 12 that the first degree Murder conviction and death penalty would remainand pointed out that all his arguments had previously been rejected.

“There is no basis for a court to find Williams innocent, and no court has made such a finding,” Hilton wrote.

On Tuesday, Williams’ attorney argued that the circumstances were different because the prosecutor had not previously been questioned by Williams’ attorney in court about the reasons for rejecting a particular juror.

The prosecutor in the 2001 first-degree murder trial, Keith Larner, testified at the August hearing that the jury was fair despite having only one black member on the panel. Larner said he rejected a potential black juror in part because he looked too much like Williams. He did not explain why he thought that was important.

In a statement emailed to CBS affiliate KOMO-TV last week, Larner said his “rejection of all black jurors in the trial was unanimously upheld as racially neutral and lawful by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2003 by a vote of 7-0. Bell/Innocence Project’s claims that jury selection was improper are false.”

Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project and Williams’ attorney, told KOMO before Monday’s decision that the August hearing was “the very first time the prosecutor had to testify under oath about his practices.”

“He admitted that race was at least a partial reason for rejecting jurors,” Bushnell said. “No court has ever heard that, and the federal court, which previously considered the racial discrimination charge, should have that information when it makes that decision. The reasoning previously given for rejecting that charge is now absolutely refuted by these admissions by the prosecutor himself.”

However, the state Supreme Court said Monday that the prosecutor’s response to Larner’s “specific question about whether one reason for his rejection of Juror No. 64 was that he is black was, ‘No. Absolutely not,'” and that Williams’ attorney’s argument “cherry-picks from the record, ignores the district court’s factual findings, and offers no compelling justification for overturning this court’s prior substantive decision on this action.”

Prosecutors in Williams’ original case said he broke into Gayle’s home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard water running in the shower and found a large butcher knife. Gayle, a social worker and former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was stabbed 43 times as she came down the stairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to hide blood on his shirt. Williams’ girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. The girlfriend said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later. The police said They found items belonging to Gayle in Williams’ car.

Prosecutors also relied on testimony from Henry Cole, who was in a cell with Williams in 1999 when Williams was incarcerated on other charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the murder and provided details about it.

Williams’ lawyers responded that both the girlfriend and Cole had been convicted of serious crimes and were seeking a $10,000 reward. Parson said in a statement Monday that the girlfriend “never asked for the reward for information.”