As the clock ticks down toward Marcellus Williams' scheduled execution, a prominent Missouri civil rights leader is making a last-ditch plea to halt what he calls "an incredible miscarriage of justice," joining a half-million voices urging the state to reconsider the fate of a man many believe to be innocent.
Missouri's NAACP President Nimrod Chapel Jr. is not alone, as over a half-million other people are advocating for the exoneration of Marcellus Williams, whom they believe is innocent.
Williams is current set to be executed on Tuesday of this week.
"Killing Williams would be an incredible miscarriage of justice," Chapel told the Missourinet.
"The reason that he cannot produce any more evidence to exonerate himself is because the prosecutor and the police officers destroyed it," Chapel said.
"They touched it in such a way that you cannot even get DNA off of it to be able to determine who was or was not on the murder weapon."
Chapel added that the death penalty is "unfair," while he highlighted the disproportionate sentences based on skin color.
"For a black man to be accused of committing a crime against a white woman where there was a murder involved and he's poor and without power, you can have a better expectation that he's going to end up on death row than anybody else," he explained.
"All the inequities of the system, plus the fact that he didn't do it."
The death row inmate was originally scheduled to die by lethal injection in August of 2017, and his new date with the executioner is this Tuesday.
Williams was convicted in the 1998 stabbing death of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle.
